Winter Kill

by Bill Brooks

  “I’d like to buy a horse off somebody, a good one that will ride two men to the next town.”

  He gauged Cole’s words. “Might be Mose would sell you that big bay o’ his. He’s talked about selling it ’cause he can’t get it broke to a plow.”

  “Tell him I’ll pay twenty dollars and throw in a good pistol to boot.”

  Israel weighed that, then said: “That bay ain’t worth twenty and a good gun.”

  “Today it is.”

  Israel went off, toward where the other men had gathered, watching Rufus Buck and his gang eating up a good share of their buffalo meat and beans. These men were obviously not much more comfortable with the presence of Rufus Buck than was Israel. Cole saw Israel speak to the one of the men, a stump of a fellow with a straw sombrero. They palavered for a moment, then the man walked in Cole’s direction, Israel following.

  “Israel said you’d give me twenty dollars for my bay horse and throw in a pistol to boot. That it?” he said, looking at the self-cocker on Cole’s left hip.

  “Twenty and this pistol, that’s the deal,” Cole said, handing it to him.

  “Done,” he said.

  “Time we parted company,” Cole said to Israel.

  “You sure?”

  “I’ve burned too much time as it is,” Cole said. “I’ve got something to do and I can’t get it done, lying around here. Kid, go get and put my saddle on that big bay in the corral.”

  “I can’t promise your safety once you’re out of the settlement,” Israel reminded.

  “I can’t promise I won’t kill your godchild, either. Let’s just hope they’ve got better things to do today.”

  “I’d feel mighty bad you was to kill him,” Israel said. “Those others is just trash. Rufus might be trash, too, from the stories I’ve heard about the depredations those boys have caused in Indian Territory. But he’s still my kin, still got my blood in his veins.”

  “Let’s hope he’s got some of your good sense, too.”

  “I sure enough hope it don’t come to trouble, Mistuh Cole.”

  “I do, too, Israel.” Cole offered his hand and he shook it.

  Joe returned with the horse saddled and said: “I’m ready … you?” Cole said in a low voice: “You see one of those yahoos make a move, don’t be slow in letting me know.”

  Cole grabbed the horn, and when he had swung, his ribs still bit into him, telling him he wasn’t whole just yet. Once in the saddle, he left a stirrup for Joe to swing up behind him, and then put the bay into a fast walk until they hit the south road.

  “I’m going to miss meeting Iris down by the creek,” the Kid said.

  “You’ll get over it.”

  “Glad we didn’t have to fight them fellers, Mister Cole.”

  “You might have to fight them yet, Kid. Best be on guard. Keep a check over your shoulder now and then.”

  They rode till the sky turned crimson and was banded by a long line of silver clouds.

  “You think we’re in Texas yet?” the Kid asked as they set up camp.

  “Texas, Oklahoma Territory, what’s the difference? We’ll get there when we get there.”

  “Just that I ain’t found nothing good about Oklahoma,” he said, “’Cept Iris, and her I didn’t have a Chinaman’s chance with.”

  “There’ll be plenty of others to strike your fancy. I’ll take first watch. You grab some sleep. I’ll wake you in four hours.”

  “’Cause of Rufus Buck?”

  “He’s one reason. There could be others.”

  He stared into the encroaching darkness.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  They came just past midnight.

  Shadows in the moonlight, seven riders strung out in single file scouting for their camp. Cole clamped a hand over the Kid’s mouth and shook him awake. “Don’t say anything, don’t cough, fart, or make a sound,” Cole whispered.

  There was a hunter’s moon and Cole figured even half an Indian could find them in that much light. He already had the Winchester at the ready. With just one weapon, he’d have to wait until they came close enough, and by that time it might be too late. Seven hardcases against a busted-up rannihan and an unarmed kid wouldn’t be too much of a fight—unless they weren’t as hard as they thought, or as ready. Cole could hear the Kid breathing rapidly through his nose.

  “Any I drop,” Cole said, “you run and take his weapon and shoot anyone but me.”

  Cole could almost hear the sweat dropping off the Kid’s brow. He did hear the snuffle of their ponies, the clink of iron bits, the creak of leather—sounds that grew louder as they closed the distance. Cole put a firm hand on the Kid’s shoulder, indicating for him not to move. They were a good fifty paces from them—still not close enough to suit Cole.

  “Fuckin’ white men,” Cole heard Rufus say. “We find them, we cut off their nuts.” Some of the others grunted, a few laughed.

  Cole waited as they walked their ponies through the sage, the shod hoofs snapping mesquite twigs. And waited.

  One of them said: “I think maybe they’d be over there by that wash, where there’s a little water. I think maybe I see something over there.”

  They turned their ponies, just fifteen paces away from where the Kid and Cole lay.

  “Hey, I see their horse,” one said.

  “Shut your mouth!” Rufus said. “You want them knowing we’re coming?”

  “Too late,” Cole said, and fired into them. Even with the moonlight, it was hard to tell which was which. Cole would have preferred to take out Rufus with his first shot. Maybe the rest would quail. He couldn’t tell which of them he shot first, which was second, but two flopped off their ponies and hit the ground hard.

  “Go get their weapons, Kid!”

  Flashes of gunfire spewed from the muzzles of guns, but the shots went wild as they were caught up in the excitement of sudden gunfire. The Kid duck-walked to the nearest body and snatched the pistol from his belt, but was having trouble firing it.

  “Shoot the god-damn thing!” Cole shouted as he fired two more rounds, one striking a rider but not unseating him, and the other missing its mark.

  “I’m trying!” the Kid yelled.

  Suddenly it was as though they’d figured it out, where the killing was coming from, and the ground around Cole exploded with their shots. Cole rolled behind a fallen blackjack tree and the lead from their pistols chewed up bark and whanged away at it. The Kid was fumbling with the bandit’s pistol when one of the riders closed ground on him, the horse striking him before he could bring up the pistol and get a shot off. Cole snapped off a quick shot, then the next round jammed in the breech.

  Cole broke open his Barlow knife and pried the shell loose and quickly jacked another round into the chamber. But not quickly enough. The rider had the hoofs of his pony thrashing the Kid, and, when Cole came up and drew a bead on him, he saw the man take aim and fire three quick shots into the Kid—three white flashes that lit up the Kid’s frozen features. It was just enough for Cole to see, too, the oily face of Rufus Buck. He took aim and pulled the trigger and watched Rufus pitch from his horse and fall next to the Kid.

  A flurry of rounds rained all around Cole. A splinter of wood stung his cheek and instantly he could taste blood. He rolled away, the lead from their guns chewing up ground. But the dance of their ponies threw off their aim enough for Cole to scramble to the Kid and the man who’d killed him. His rifle jammed again. He grabbed the pistol from Rufus Buck’s still-warm fingers and rapid-fired into the remaining four riders. One pitched from the saddle and the others turned tail. The whole fight had lasted less than five minutes, but it had exhausted Cole, and for a moment it seemed like he could barely move. He swiped more blood from his face and lips with the back of his sleeve. His mouth was parched and his ribs ached like a broken jaw, but those things didn’t seem to matter just th
en.

  There in the paleness of moon, he saw Joe lying, face up, his mouth open, his eyes partly so, a bloody wound to the throat, two more to his chest. Rufus Buck lay next to him, face down, unmoving, the two joined in death. Cole felt sorry for the Kid. He’d wanted to be an outlaw. Now he was never going to be anything. Maybe the Almighty knew the Kid wasn’t cut out for a criminal’s life: the loneliness of a prison cell or a hangman’s rope. Cole thought of a line he’d read in the Bible once: Death comes like a thief in the night.

  Cole tucked Rufus Buck’s pistol, a Colt Peacemaker, into his gun belt, grabbed his Deane Adams and Smith & Wesson, and then bladed out the jammed round from the breech of the Winchester. Then he used the rifle to help him to hobble to where he’d staked out the bay. By the time he’d gotten the saddle on him, he was too tired to take another step. Still, he pulled himself into leather. The remainder of Rufus Buck’s gang had scattered off toward the west. Cole doubted they would return for an encore. If they knew how defeated Cole felt right then, they might be tempted, but Cole thought those boys had had about all the fight they wanted for one night. He well knew he had.

  He would have liked to have buried the Kid, but he had no shovel and no time. What was done was done. And after all that, the rain came.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The rain hammered the land with a vengeance and hammered John Henry Cole along with it. It rained so hard the water seemed to boil up from the ground—a cold, slanting rain that lasted until dawn before it let up. And with the dawn Cole could see the roiling gray clouds scudding low over the broken red earth. He thought of the Kid, lying back there among the dead, the coyotes and the wolves that would surely find the corpses if they hadn’t already, and the circling vultures. There was nothing Cole could do for him; there was nothing anyone could do for him. Cole rode on, through the dull light to a destination unknown. His life, it seemed, had come full circle. Thirty years earlier, he’d ridden away from a farm in Indiana—from a widowed mother and three brothers—off to make his fortune, to find his glory, only to go bust in the gold fields and end up fighting in a war in such far-flung places as Cold Harbor and Gettysburg, where he saw lots of boys with the same frozen mask of death on their faces as that of young Joe McCarty. Just as with the Kid, Cole had been unable to do anything for those others, either, except leave them to the ages and the ravages of the land. At least with the boys on those battlefields, men would come later, scooping up their bones and skulls into wheelbarrows for burial in mass graves. No such honor would befall a restless young man who’d gone off wanting to be like his brother, an outlaw. Thinking this way, John Henry Cole was so certain about what he believed had happened, that it never once occurred to him that Joe McCarty, although severely wounded, seemingly dead, had in fact survived the attack and would be found by Israel and some of the others when they went in search of Rufus Buck and his gang, concerned about what might have happened to them as well as to Cole and Joe McCarty.

  * * * * *

  Cole must have dozed in the saddle, for when he awakened, his horse was standing still and a raven-haired woman stood in a yard before a small, whitewashed house with several children clinging to her skirts. She held a Sharps saddle gun in her hands.

  “You there,” she said, “better keep moving before my husband gets back.”

  Cole’s eyes felt like they had grit in them and every bone in his torso ached. He certainly looked disreputable, his clothes still wet, the brim of his hat battered down by the rain, his pony slathered with red mud.

  “I’m afraid you’re just going to have to shoot me,” he said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because I don’t believe either this pony or me can go another step without rest.”

  The children—three girls and a boy—all looked up at her, their eyes big with wonder.

  “Ma, you gonna shoot that feller?” the boy said.

  “I just might,” she said.

  They seemed to shrink back.

  “You’d be doing me a favor,” Cole said.

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing a change of dry clothes, some Arbuckle’s, and hot grub wouldn’t cure.”

  “You a thieving man?” she asked.

  “If I am, you can see I’m poor at it.”

  “Killer, maybe?”

  “Nobody who didn’t deserve it.”

  “How come you to land in this far-flung place?”

  “I didn’t, my horse did. I just came along for the ride.”

  She looked uncertain what to do about him. What, indeed, do you do with a man who’s shown up in your front yard looking like a bad version of death? That was the question behind her eyes. A rooster crowed, and one of the kids jumped.

  “We ain’t got nothing, if you came here to rob us,” she said. “Just these kids and that rooster, two, three laying hens.”

  “I didn’t come here to rob you or otherwise bring you harm,” Cole said. “You mind if I step down?”

  She motioned with the barrel of the Sharps and he eased himself out of leather and leaned against his pony to keep from falling.

  “You hurt?”

  “No, not really,” Cole said. “Just a little stove-up. Place I can water my horse?”

  Again she used the barrel of her rifle to indicate a water tank off to the side of the house. Cole led his mount there and let him drink his fill.

  “I reckon you could stand something yourself,” she said. “You wait out here. I’ll go fetch you something.”

  “Suits me down to my heels,” Cole said.

  He took a seat on a stump that looked like someone had tried unsuccessfully to pull from the ground, then tried burning it out, and finally gave up on doing anything with it. It made a tolerable chair. He reached for the makings and found the papers and tobacco wet.

  The children seemed fascinated by his presence. They stood around in a semicircle gawking at him. Cole said: “I’m not a circus elephant.”

  That made them laugh.

  “You look like a mud puppy,” the boy said, and that made them laugh again.

  Cole looked at his clothing and said: “You’re right, I must have gone to sleep and fallen off my horse.”

  There was more laughter.

  The woman returned, carrying a plate of biscuits and fatback and a cup of coffee.

  “It ain’t much,” she said apologetically.

  “It’ll do,” Cole said. “Thank you.”

  The lot of them stood and watched him eat but he didn’t mind. The biscuits were tasteless and the fatback greasy, but he licked his fingers when he’d finished and washed it down with the Arbuckle’s, and felt as if he might live until noon.

  “Much appreciated,” he said.

  “Your leg need mending?” she asked. “I saw you limping like a three-legged dog.”

  “Bum knee,” Cole said. “Had an accident.”

  “What sorta accident?” the boy asked. He was maybe ten years old, with a mop of corn-silk hair freshly cut in the shape of a bowl and gaping teeth.

  “Fell off my horse,” Cole said.

  “You fall offen your horse a lot,” the boy said, making his sisters giggle.

  “Good thing I came along,” Cole said, “or you young ’uns wouldn’t have anything to laugh about.”

  The girls giggled some more.

  “You kids go on and finish your chores,” the woman said, “and leave this feller be.”

  They scampered off, and Cole wondered what chores they could have, given the spare conditions of their existence. The roof on the house looked leaky and the front door was missing a hinge and a good, hard wind seemed like it might blow the whole shebang into the next county. It wasn’t Cole’s place to question, though. He was grateful to have a belly full of grub and a little coffee to ease the chill in his blood.

  “You w
ant,” she said, “I could wash and dry your duds.”

  “Thank you, but I’ve already put you and your family out enough.”

  “No trouble,” she said. “I’m fixing to do a wash now, anyway.”

  “How’d it look if your man come home and found you washing my duds?”

  She brushed a sprig of her hair away from her eyes where the wind had worked it loose from the tortoise-shell combs. “Truth is,” she said, “I don’t believe you have to worry none about my man coming home.”

  Cole thought about that a moment, looked up at the foreboding sky. It didn’t look like the sun would come out anytime soon. The thought of riding another fifty miles in wet clothes made his skin crawl.

  “If you’re sure it’s no trouble …” he ventured.

  “None. You can take ’em off inside. Wrap yourself in that old green quilt I got hanging on the wall.”

  Time passed slowly, the children came and went, laughing, acting as children do. With no schooling to occupy them, they spent a lot of time chasing each other around and around the house until they tired of that, then took out after the rooster, causing it to squawk and flap its short red wings and run a jagged course. The woman called to them to leave off on the rooster lest they frighten it to death, which only made them laugh all the harder until her voice grew stern. Then they slunk off like cats to an old shed, where Cole supposed there was something equally interesting to occupy their minds.

  She’d built a fire under a wash kettle and scrubbed the clothes with a bar of yellow soap, then rinsed and wrung them out by hand, and hung them on a single line of wire that ran from a nail in the side of the house out to a dying blackjack tree.

  “They’ll be forever drying without any sun,” Cole said when at last she’d finished and sat on the top step of the porch next to him.

  “Not with this wind,” she said. “If it don’t rain, those duds will be dry in less than an hour. One thing we got in this territory is lots of wind. It’s good for drying clothes, but not much else.”