“These crackers ain’t no sharp boys,” said Caleb. “Dumb is what they is. Dumb, and soon to be dead. Ain’t that right, Balum?”
Balum set the Spencer over the saddle and looked down the barrel. Any of the brothers came outside to fetch their horses up, and they’d catch lead. The distance wasn’t more than two-hundred yards. “We’ve got them pinned,” he said. “Come evening they’ll try to get those horses and sneak out.”
“You thinking you gonna shoot them horses?” said Caleb.
Balum eased the barrel over and put the sight on one of the horse’s necks. He took a breath, then eased it away. “No. It’s not in me to kill good animals. Even if they do carry bad men.”
“I’ll take care of the horses,” said Joe.
Balum raised an eyebrow.
“I stole my first horse at ten years old. Followed a war party out on a Comanche raid and rode back into camp that night bareback on a white gelding. Not much earns the respect of an Apache like a good horse thief.”
“You ever steal five at once?” asked Balum.
Joe smiled. “Not yet.”
Before dark settled in, Balum circled around to the ranch house and knocked at the door. A square-faced man with a shock of blond hair and silver eyes opened the door with a shotgun pointed at Balum’s chest.
“I’m not the one needs shooting,” said Balum. “There’s five men in your barn right now that do.”
“I see dem,” the blond man replied in an accent nearly incomprehensible. “I vait wid de gun.” Behind him ran six towheaded children all under the age of ten.
“You wait with your gun,” said Balum, “but don’t go hunting them. You leave that to me. I‘m a U.S. Deputy Marshal. Anyone knocks at your door or tries to sneak in through a window, shoot them. Don’t even bother to ask questions.”
A woman Balum guessed to be the man’s wife appeared behind him holding an infant at her breast. She looked like a viking dressed in homespun, and when she spoke it was with guttural syllables that straightened her man’s back like a soldier responding to drill call. He gave Balum a nod and eased the door closed.
Before night fell, Balum passed the Spencer to Caleb. Joe walked a wide loop around the barn and posted up where he could watch the back entrance. While the colors of earth faded into night, Balum and Caleb spat tobacco and listened to geese honking just below the clouds.
Before visibility disintegrated completely, Caleb spat and said to Balum, “You ain’t gonna be able to see a damn thing once you go down there. How you be sure you and Joe don’t shoot each other?”
Balum slid the loop from the scabbard of his bowie knife. He drew the blade and turned it in the air.
“Okay,” said Caleb. “You won’t shoot each other. But how you gonna keep them Bell brothers from shooting your ass?”
“By being quiet.”
“Shit,” Caleb spat and sighted down the barrel of the Spencer. “That ain’t no plan.”
“I figure it’s pretty solid.”
“How’s that?”
“Those boys down there are no woodsmen. We know that-- we’ve fought them enough times in the woods at night. They’re just average men who reckon they can make an easy living by stealing from weaker folks or dry-gulching a man from a distance. This situation here though is different. It’s one Joe and I have seen plenty of times. Close quarters, blind in the darkness. If you aren’t used to it, every bone in your body tells you to move, to do something. Your mind starts screaming at you to get up, to run. Pretty soon you end up listening to it. That’s where mistakes happen. Joe and I are going to sit real quiet, and when they move we’ll strike.”
“I don’t know, Balum. It’ll be five against two. If Buford’s got them chains off it’ll make it six. I think maybe you done lost your mind.”
“That’s what you said about the slop ditch. And here we are.” Even as Balum said it he recalled the smell of human waste thick like an April fog in his nose. He remembered gasping for air through a metal pole and traveling for days through subzero temperatures while shit froze on their prison uniforms. He knew Caleb was remembering these same things as well.
“Sometimes I still smell it,” said Caleb.
“Smells like freedom.”
Caleb laughed. “Every time I hit the privy I say thank you Lord for giving me my freedom.”
At the sound of pounding hooves, Balum raised a finger. “Look there,” he pointed at the barn. In the gray of twilight Joe had snuck up to the grazing horses and tied their reins together into one big knot. He slipped onto one of the saddles, his body flat over the horse’s back, and together in a mass of hooves the five horses went running across the valley into darkness.
The sound brought two Bell brothers running out the barn and into the gloom of dusk. Caleb squeezed off a shot that smacked into the wood siding, and the two swiveled on their heels and ran back inside with their hands clutching their hats.
Balum took a step toward the barn, then stopped. “Joe and I won’t shoot each other, and I don’t aim to get shot by one of Buford’s brothers. That leaves you.”
“I ain’t gonna shoot you, Balum. Just don’t come running at me in the dark like a damn fool.”
24
Connor spun back through the door frame and into the dark cover of the barn. The shot had nearly taken his face off. Five inches closer and it would have caught him.
“What the hell is going on out there?” bellowed Buford.
“They stole the horses!” said Donny.
Connor looked away when Buford tapped the end of the hacksaw in the dirt and glowered at him. The manacles on his brother’s wrists were sawed through, but the leg irons were thicker. The saw teeth were worn down nearly to the sharpness of a butter knife, and everyone’s shoulders were worn out.
Buford had taken the hacksaw up and was sawing at the irons between his ankles. “They’ve got us pinned down,” he said. “There’s no getting away in daylight. Not with that Spencer covering us.”
“Keep sawing on them irons,” said Connor. “We’ll get out while it’s dark.”
Buford looked at him across the strewn hay, then placed the saw back into the groove and resumed the familiar grind of metal against metal.
“Soon as them irons is off him,” Connor said to the rest, “we’ll make a run for it.”
“You don’t think they’ll come for us in here, do you?” said John Boy.
Connor swallowed. The idea hadn’t occurred to him. He thought back to the firefights in the woods and how he’d felt like a toy duck in a shooting gallery. “No,” he said. “But let’s spread out just in case.” He took a position on a bale of hay, away from the door and away from where Buford sat sawing away at his irons.
When night came it came wholeheartedly; black as a swamp leech and raging with the usual orchestra of bugs and beetles and bats and things. Connor bent his ear to the sound. It overtook Buford’s sawing, overtook his own breath. A coolness came with it, the smell of wet mud, fresh green grass straining up from the earth. He had no sense of time. He held his gun and felt no safety in the weight of it. The night sounds built so loudly and so fully that the backdrop of noise blended into the world like oil on canvas. Eventually he didn’t even notice it.
Until it stopped.
The screeching cacophony of insects ended in a wave of silence, replaced with nothing but the rhythmic twang of the hacksaw. Then even that stopped.
In the void of silence Connor’s mind reeled. Someone was out there. Outside. Moving. They were silent, they were invisible, and they’d come to kill. He knew his brothers knew it also.
A cold that was beyond the chill of night crept over him. His breath came harder and he fought to quiet it. He closed his mouth and breathed through his nose, but the air seemed to whistle. He parted his lips again and took in nervous inhalations.
One by one the crickets started up again. Like a coterie of broken violins, they filled the silence. Connor listened for the hum of the saw, but Buford knew
better; he’d stilled the blade.
Suddenly John Boy’s voice wavered out over the hay. “Hey guys?” His question bounced from wall to wall in the narrow corridor of the barn. “Hey why you think them crickets stopped like that?”
Connor didn’t answer. Nor did anyone else.
“Hey you guys gonna say something?”
An ache pierced Connor’s chest. He wanted to tell John Boy to shut up, to not be a fool. Close your mouth! Keep quiet! Don’t give away your position! But he knew that to move would invite death, and instead he remained frozen while John Boy muttered to himself across the barn.
The youngest of the Bell brothers stood up, the sound of the motion brutally loud in Connor’s ears. He winced silently when he heard John Boy draw the hammer back on his gun, and shook his head when he heard his brother mumble a random threat out loud.
It was in the middle of that murmur that John Boy’s voice ended with a jerk. Replacing it was the sound of struggle in the hay, cloth rubbing against cloth, and suddenly a strange wet gurgling like a post hole digger thrust into mud.
John Boy’s gun went off. A flash came with it, a small bright aura in which Connor saw, or thought he saw, the image of his brother’s head clutched in the arm of an Apache, a knife across the young man’s throat and blood streaming down his chest. The shot was aimed at nothing; a bullet in the dirt.
The crickets stopped again. John Boy’s body hit the ground in a dull thump. Connor clenched his teeth. He had the urge to pee suddenly. His arms were shaking, his right knee vibrating like a tuning fork. He squeezed his fingers into his leg and closed his eyes. Over and over he told himself to be quiet, to remain still. He had no idea where the Apache was, where Balum was, if the black giant was there as well. How they could move so silently was beyond him. He’d witnessed it in the woods; their soundless movements, their seeming ability to see like bats in the dark. But in the woods he could turn and run. Here he was trapped.
Or was he? The doorless entrance to the barn was only a short run away. He could bolt for it, flee into the night.
No. Get it together, he told himself. Sit still and wait.
Seated on the bale of hay like he was, his legs began to cramp. He dared not move. In his hand he held a gun but he’d not cocked it. It felt useless and heavy in his fingers.
Time passed. Time he had no way of counting. There was no moon, no stars, nothing to mark night’s passage. It felt like hours he’d been waiting. He still had to pee, the sensation hadn’t left him. He felt like crying, felt like screaming in rage all at once. He felt helpless.
Suddenly someone moved. He raised the gun in reflex, but still the hammer was up. He couldn’t risk a shot in the dark anyway, he had no way of knowing who he was shooting at. The movement stopped, but Connor stared in its direction anyway as if he might see something through the darkness. He saw nothing, but his ears picked up the stomp of a boot, a swish, and the sickening plunge of a knife into meat. He’d heard the sound a hundred times before. Every deer, every cow, the possums and squirrels and coons, each time he’d dressed out a carcass he’d heard that sound-- the sound of a knife ripping through hide, slicing meat. Only this time the carcass was one of his brothers. It didn’t even cross his mind that it might be the other way around.
Two down. John Boy and someone else. He hated sitting there in ignorance not knowing which of them had just died. He hated more knowing that soon it would be him. The acid in his gut burned. He swallowed and fought it back. The plan, he told himself, was to sit still and wait. But wait for what? For morning? And get picked off one by one?
He strained his ears for sound. Nothing but crickets and katydids and bats swooping in and out of the rafters. Suddenly the notion took hold of him that his brothers had escaped. Why would they sit there waiting to die? Buford hadn’t left; the rattle of his chains would have given him away. Yet they wouldn’t kill Buford-- they needed to turn him in alive.
But the others… where were they? Were they really sitting still as statues, unmoving even after hearing two of their brothers die by the blade? Impossible. The sensation came over him, abundantly clear, that it was only himself and Buford that remained. When the sky lightened he would be sitting there on that bale of hay like a fool.
Or would it even be that long? Had he made a sound? He thought back over the last several hours. Had he moved when John Boy got killed? He couldn’t remember. What if he had? Was Balum or the Apache slowly crawling across the floor, closing the distance, a knife in hand?
Stomach acid backed up into his throat. His bladder was a ball of pain. No way in hell was he going to make it until morning. His brothers had escaped, he was sure of it now. His knee was twitching again, he couldn't’ stop it. It made a noise he couldn’t hear but that he was certain the Apache could.
In an explosion of adrenaline he came off the hay bale. A scream gurgled from his throat, he hadn’t known it was coming, and he ran full-bore across the barn and through the door and out into the night. He tripped and fell and bounded up again, hurling himself forward through the mud in a frantic blind run. He heard his name shouted behind him. Delmar’s voice. Without stopping, he shouted back, but his answer was lost in the boom of a Spencer rifle. He heard Delmar squeal, but Connor didn’t stop. He kept running, tripping and stumbling, desperate as a rabbit with a coyote on its tail.
25
Balum didn’t give chase. He remained right where he was, near the rear entrance, only a few feet from the man he’d killed. Which one it was, he wasn’t sure. It wasn’t Connor; he’d heard the man’s name shouted when the three brothers had fled the barn. He wondered if the rifle blast had caught one of them. It was doubtful; Caleb would have been shooting at nothing more than sound.
Only Buford was left. Balum heard the sawing when he’d first crawled up on the barn entrance with Joe. It meant the chains were still on.
He wondered if they’d left Buford with a gun. If they had, it’d be a risky thing to wait until sunup inside the barn. Another hour of darkness remained. Balum stretched one hand out in front of him and gently placed it in the dirt. To move silently meant moving slowly. Before placing weight on a hand or foot, he’d test the ground, making sure nothing would crack or snap or rustle beneath him. In such a manner, he eased himself over the strewn hay and out the rear entrance. With his back resting against the barn frame, he sheathed the knife and unholstered the Dragoon.
As he waited, the sawing started up again. Like a wet finger on the rim of a crystal chalice, it sang out in the darkness. Balum wondered how much further Buford had to go. The man knew his brothers had fled. He also knew he was at no risk of being shot. If he could free himself before sunup, he had a chance at escape.
Balum crossed his legs and waited. He wished he’d thought to bring a chaw of tobacco with him. For an hour he sat listening to Buford’s sawing, the chirping of the morning birds. The eastern sky began to lighten. Shadows gave way to hills and far off trees. The ranch house sat in silence.
The sawing stopped suddenly. The sun had not broken the horizon, yet its light illuminated the atmosphere. It crept faintly into the barn entrance, and though Balum would have wished to give it another quarter of an hour, the time was now. He spun through the entryway, Dragoon extended from his arm.
Buford was rising. His wrist manacles were sawed down the middle, leaving the chains to dangle from his wrists. The leg irons had been cut in the same fashion; right through the middle link. He saw Balum just as he gained his feet, and bolted for the opposite doorway.
Halfway across the barn he reared to a halt. Joe stood in the entryway. Buford turned back to Balum, then back to Joe. He crouched and backed up to the barn wall, keeping both men in his sight.
“You aren’t getting me back on that stage,” he said. His eyes fell on the shapes of his two dead brothers. They had bled out in the hay, and the puddles of blood glistened like oil spills in the poor morning light.
A shadow appeared in the doorway. Caleb’s massive physique.
He stepped through, took a look around, his eyes adjusting to the darkness. He looked at the two dead bodies, then at Buford backed against the wall. “Come on now Buford,” he said. “I been up all night and I ain’t in a mood to play no games. There’s rope on the wall there, we’ll tie you up and take you back.”
The severed chains hanging from Buford’s wrists rattled when he raised them. “I’ll knock your big dumb nigger head off if you try it.”
“You know you ain’t gonna do no such thing. Just look at you. Your brothers didn’t even think to give you a gun. They done run off without you.” Caleb looked at the two dead men in the hay. “The ones that’s left anyway.”
“I’ll kill you before you get me in that stage.”
Caleb raised a hand as one would to a rebellious child. “I told you I ain’t in no mood. Let’s go.”
Buford didn’t move. He stood with his fists raised like a prizefighter, chains swaying.
“Alright,” said Caleb. “You been asking for it. I’ll give it to you.”
Enough daylight had crept into the barn to give Balum and Joe a clear viewing. They backed off from the two men and took seats on hay bales. The thought crossed Balum’s mind again that he’d like to have a solid plug of tobacco sitting in his lip. He was still enjoying the immense relief of recovering Buford, and now he had a front row seat to a fight that he’d watched brewing for weeks.
The two closed, circling. Caleb towered over Buford. His shoulders were packed in muscle, his neck thick and wide. He lifted his fists. They hovered in the air like two black mallet heads, waiting to crush whatever they struck.
Buford, though nowhere near the size of his opponent, was not a small man either. Sinewy, perhaps, but big-boned. His joints were thick, Balum could see the fat knuckles poking out of his fists. He swung one of them suddenly. A right cross that narrowly missed Caleb’s chin. The speed of it surprised Balum. It surprised Caleb too, for he stepped back, suddenly wary.
Shotgun Riders Page 16
