Death Rattle

15

“Just like you said for me to do, I gone west, down the Ohio,” Hezekiah Christmas explained. “But that country didn’t suit me so much. Folks there … they didn’t take to no freedman so good.”

“What’d you do?” Scratch asked. “Where’d you go when you found things weren’t so hospitable for you west of Owensboro?”

Hezekiah told how he crossed the Ohio, turning his nose east, pushing farther and farther north. He made a few pennies when and where people would pay him for his work. And when he no longer had any money to pay for his keep, or no white man would offer him his keep in exchange for a little work, Hezekiah slept out in the forest, or here and there stole a chicken and other victuals to fill his gnawing belly as he kept on searching for that place where folks would no longer regard him as nothing more than an ex-slave, not even so much as a freedman … a land where they would regard him only as a man.

“Never heard of New London,” Bass said after Hezekiah had explained how he made his way all the way to that seaside town in Connecticut. “What’s a man with a strong back like yours to do in such a place?”

“I went to sea,” Christmas said with a chest-swelling pride. “Cap’n Philbert. A good man, that one.”

On the Lady Jane, Philbert’s sleek, low-slung coastal packet, the crew made swift runs up and down the Atlantic seaboard. With their hold crammed full of goods from New England, they plied the coastal waters to those southern ports where they off-loaded, then filled up the belly of the Lady Jane once more with bales of cotton, tobacco, and even rum from the West Indies.

“For six years I learned every bump and dimple on the seaboard,” Hezekiah stated. “Then Cap’n Philbert, he was give the chance to sail a big, big ship out on the ocean.”

Philbert was offered more pay to command a massive, three-masted schooner that would make regular runs around the Cape Horn to California, beginning with that first season of 1819.

Titus watched the way a wistful look came over Hezekiah’s face as he talked about that maiden voyage of the Yankee Pride, plying the coast of South America and eventually tacking into the bay at San Diego, then sailing north to their next port where they put in at Pueblo de los Angeles. It was in that coastal village that Hezekiah fell in love with the Spanish ladies, and they with him.

“Valgame Dios! Way them wimmens stared at me with their big eyes, why—I don’t figger any of ’em ever see’d a Neegra afore!” Hezekiah confessed with a grin. “Truth be, I had eyes for one of them ladies my own self. But she was the wife of a soldier. He bought her fancy clothes and drove her around in a big carriage all the time. I’m sure he didn’t think much of his wife making eyes at no poor seafarin’ Neegra from America faraway. Malditos Americanos.”

He had decided California had to be the land of milk and honey—brimming with women, wine, and all manner of earthly pleasures. The freedman set his sights on putting down roots in California.

“I asked Cap’n Philbert for my leave—an’ he let me stay behind when the Yankee Pride turned south for the Cape and her home port. Even spoke for me at the Mission San Gabriel where one of them padres spoke a little American talk. They was to give me a home there, an’ a place to work for my keep too. The good father tol’t me how I’d have to work in the fields with the Injuns, sleep with ’em too. None of us got much food neither.”

Less than a year later, life in Spanish California changed forever. No longer were they a colony. Now they were part of an independent country. And nothing in Mexico would ever be the same again.

“After ’while, things wasn’t so good no more. I didn’t know where to turn for help,” Hezekiah continued. “A stranger in that land—no better off’n I was back in the South.”

The new Mexican governor heard of this strange black American and came to visit Christmas at the mission. From the very start it was plain that the governor was suspicious of the stranger. Here in the first days following their revolution, the Mexicans were afraid of their own shadows.

“But he said I could stay on at the mission for one year with the mansitos.”

“Mansitos?” “These here.” And Hezekiah gestured at the young men around him. “It’s what the Mexicans called the tame Indians.”

“After the year, what were you s’pose to do?”

Christmas wagged his head. “I was s’posed to be gone on a ship to America afore my year was up.”

Until the next ship arrived in the bay, the governor and the Franciscan friars declared the American would have to find gainful employment in the mission fields and vineyards with the rest of the poor mansos. But that ultimately meant he was slaving from dawn till dusk for two meager meals each day and a roof over his head in the Indian quarters every night.

“They was bound to do their best to turn me into a slave again,” he declared with a fury boiling just beneath the surface. “Un Americano, pero de mas cristiano de la santa fe católica. I was American, but they was gonna do all they could to make me a good Catholic, like they was making all the mansitos into good Christians too.”

Then the first of the slaves decided to run off.

“But they was brung back the next day,” Christmas said. “And beat to an inch of their lives for it.”

The cruel whippings delivered by the army officers in collusion with the padres did not deter those Indians brave enough to attempt escape again.

“That second time they paid with their lives, and most of the rest got a bad beating just to show ’em who was the boss.”

Christmas tried his best to explain how he was coming to see these short, brown-skinned Indians as no different than his own people back in America. How the sadistic Mexican officers and those self-righteous Catholic friars were no different than the brutal slave masters back in the southern states. A bond had been formed.

Over time, Hezekiah helped one after another of the slaves escape for the hills. Some were caught and brought back alive. Others were returned to the mission tied over the back of a horse.

“The dead ones was hung up on posts to rot, have the birds peck at their eyes—to be a lesson for the rest of ’em,” Hezekiah explained.

Ultimately, a very cruel priest and an ambitious army officer formed a powerful alliance, and the beatings at the mission increased. Still, when he could in the weeks that followed, Christmas did what he could to help the Indian slaves escape … until one night he was rousted from his bed and dragged from the cramped room where he slept with more than two dozen Indian men, carried off to confront the padre and the colonel. There in the friar’s office a pair of soldiers emerged from the shadows, a severely beaten Indian slung unconscious between them.

“The Injun was one you helped run off?”

Christmas nodded. “Válgame purísima María—dear Virgin Mary … I didn’t blame the fella for telling ’em who it was helped him and others get away.”

Now the priests and the Mexican soldiers knew who was to blame for inciting their peace-loving slaves into revolt. Come morning, he would be tied to a post in front of the mission’s Indian population and beaten, not only until he bled—but, explained the friar, until he died. A lesson to cower all the Indians at Mission San Gabriel.

“How’d you come to get away, Hezekiah?”

The freedman told how he had immediately flung his handlers from him, seizing a knife from a soldier’s belt, then grabbing the closest man—the friar himself. With his sacred hostage, Christmas backed from the mission, making for the soldiers’ horses they had tied outside the walls. It was there a scuffle took place, with the Mexican colonel giving his soldiers orders to shoot at Hezekiah despite his clutching the priest against him.

“Dios mio! More’n one bullet hit that mean ol’ padre,” Christmas admitted. “Many’s the time I thort about it since, but I figger that soldier chief meant to kill the padre. Malditos sean! Curse them.”

Hezekiah wheeled and leaped atop one of the horses, dragging away a second one to ride when the first grew too tired to push on into the mountains.

Three days later, he encountered a handful of runaways he helped to survive on nuts and rabbit meat until they could begin hunting larger game. And ever since Hezekiah had been in the mountains—getting word to the California missions that if the slaves would only try to escape, most could make it to freedom. Up here, far from the soldiers, he and the others had provided a refuge for runaway slaves, living out what he felt were the finest years of his life with his Indian wife and their children.

“Time to time, we watched white men come out of the east, climb out of the desert and cross over to the California missions—y caballos quieren, por es vienen tan legitos—for the horses they wanted they come all this way,” Hezekiah explained. “Later on it was when one of the runaways told us these was Americans, come to steal Mexican horses and mules, take them Mexican animals—quizas muchas—many horses, back toward the States.”

But Hezekiah Christmas never had any desire to make himself known to the Americans. No urge to return east himself. As he explained it to Titus, he did not see himself as an American. Back there in the States, he would either be a slave in the South, or nothing more than a poor, second-class citizen in the North.

“An’ back there to the west,” Hezekiah said as he pointed over their shoulders at Mexican California, “I’d be no better off than the rest of these here poor mansos the Mexicans made their slaves.”

“You been up here a long, long time,” Bass said, “and never wanted to go back east?”

With a shrug, Christmas said, “I can’t ’spect you to unnerstand.”

“You’re wrong, Hezekiah. I figger I know just how you feel.”

“Y-you do unnerstand why I won’t ever go back?” the Negro asked.

“Maybe I know ’cause I got me the same feelings as you at times.” And Titus nodded. “Better you stay a man in between, here in this no-man’s-land between California and them proper white folks in the states of America. Right here you’re as free a man as any fella ever there was. Able to look any man in the eye.”

“Qui milagro es este! What a miracle this is!” and Hezekiah grinned. “You unnerstand—just like you unnerstood when you busted me out’n that cage on the Mississap.”

“Si, my friend. Man finds himself a place his heart’s at peace, like you done,” Bass finally admitted softly, “that man best be about putting down some roots.”

“We watched your bunch ride through the pass for to steal the horses,” Hezekiah declared late the next night when Williams and Smith finally stopped the herd to give them and the men a few hours of rest. “An’ we watched you coming back again with all them horses. Figgered we might as well pick off a few of those Mexican horses from you ourselves.”

“You and your red niggers was gonna steal some of our horses?” demanded Henry Daws.

The white men gathered at the two fires fell quiet while the Negro slowly turned toward Philip Thompson’s group.

“Ain’t that just like a Neegra!” Thompson himself cawed, made bold in the company of so many friends. “Go an’ steal what another man’s got by his own sweat!”

The others cackled with Thompson.

“You had plenty ’nough,” Christmas said, easing round to the fire once more.

“Don’t turn your back on me, you wuthless black son of a bitch!” Thompson growled. “I’ll teach you to—”

“Stay where you are,” Bass warned as he lunged to his feet, swallowed hard, and inched his hand toward the butt of that pistol stuffed in his belt.

“What? The ol’ man’s gonna stick up for this black-assed bastard!” Thompson roared, half bent with laughter.

“No, he ain’t,” Christmas claimed, his back still turned on Thompson. “No man’s gotta stick up for me.”

That dashed cold water on Thompson’s raw laughter. “What’d you say to me, you black bastard?”

Now Hezekiah turned to peer over his shoulder. “Afore I come to California—I run onto lots of stupid white men like you. Whorin’ and drinkin’ up an’ down the Mississap.”

Bass watched how the firelight played off the growing red of Thompson’s face.

“Black nigger or red nigger,” Thompson growled, his hand tightening around the handle of his knife. “Neither one wuth the trouble it takes to kill ’em.”

Titus turned toward the man, his pistol in plain view now, warning, “You aim to get to Hezekiah, gonna have to come through me first.”

Easing his knife out of its rawhide scabbard, Thompson said to the men on either side of him, “If Bass yanks on that belt gun, you fellas shoot ’im dead.”

John Bowers and Samuel Gibbon both grinned, leveling their rifles at Scratch. Bowers said, “Be glad to ’blige him, Phil. Be glad to.”

With that crooked smile widening, Thompson took another step toward Hezekiah—

“You gonna get yourself killed,” Bill Williams warned him as he stood suddenly at the edge of the fire.

Tom Smith put his hand on Williams’s arm. “You damn well better stay out of it, Bill. Phil’s been wanting to cut his way into Bass for some time now.”

“Ever since Bass stole back them horses from us at Robidoux’s fort,” Thompson confessed.

Williams protested, “I recollect there was a hull bunch of others took ’em back from us ’sides Bass—”

“But none of them bastards ever been standing so close to me as Titus Bass is right now.”

Scratch asked, “That’s et on you ever since, ain’t it? What me and Meek and Joe Walker all done to you,”

“Too damn long.” Thompson’s crooked smile grew cruel. “So I’ll cut this black bastard’s throat … then I’ll open you up like a gutted hog.”

“The man’s good with a knife,” Williams warned out of the corner of his mouth. “Damn, damn good, Scratch.”

For a moment, Bass glanced at the eyes of the others as they pointed their rifles his way. Then he stared at Thompson while he told Williams, “I ain’t never been partial to knives myself, Bill. But I allays hold my own in a fight. The rest of you,”—and he waved both arms to the other white men who were still gathered close—“just back off now. Give us some room for this li’l fandango Thompson wants to dance with me.”

“Watch that Neegra!” Felix Warren bawled as Hezekiah rose to his feet.

“I’ll kill the black nigger myself, Phil,” Pete Harris offered.

“Just keep Bass out of it till I’ve cut this black-assed bastard into li’l red pieces.”

As he slowly withdrew his own knife from his belt, Christmas asked, “He really good with a knife, Titus Bass?”

“Dunno, Hezekiah. Never see’d much fight in the man,” Bass goaded, hoping his words might well prod Thompson into a blind lather. “He’s always give up when it’s come down to real fighting.”

“G-give up?” Thompson squealed like a stuck pig, twisting his big knife this way and that in the firelight.

“Always let others do your fighting for you, ain’cha, Thompson!” Titus needled.

“Gonna kill you my own self here an’ now—”

As the tall white man started toward Bass standing at the left side of the fire pit, Christmas surprised everyone by suddenly shoving Titus aside. That muscular heave sent Scratch sprawling into the legs of some bystanders as Hezekiah sprang into what open ground lay between the two white men—landing in a crouch, his skinning knife out before him. A weapon only half the size of Thompson’s huge butcher’s blade.

The trapper stopped, then a wicked smile slowly came across his face as he lumbered forward, feinting first this way, then that, side to side as he slowly advanced.

“Hezekiah—no!” Bass cried out in desperation as more of the California Indians appeared at the edge of the light.

Dick Owens bellowed, “Kill ’im, Phil!”

With a wild lunge, Thompson made a wide swipe with the butcher knife. Christmas vaulted backward as the white man’s arm shot past in a blur, angling up the tip of his smaller knife so that it raked the underside of Thompson’s forearm. With an anguished gasp, the trapper turned the wound over to inspect it there by the firelight, his eyes narrowing less in pain than in growing fury.

“Awright, you black sack of assholes,” he grumbled. “You want me kill you first so bad—”

But Thompson was interrupted and kept from moving from that spot when Bill Williams bolted forward, pistol in hand. The instant the muzzle was jammed against Thompson’s ribs, the trapper’s mouth stopped moving. Nothing more than a round, wide hole in Thompson’s face as his eyes glared down at the pistol and the hand that held that weapon.

“Leave ’im go, Solitaire!” Smith demanded. “This ain’t none of our goddamn business.”

“Drop the knife, Phil,” Williams ordered, ignoring his partner.

Smith stepped closer in the next heartbeat. With his hand on his own pistol and a harsh edge to his voice, he said, “Maybeso I didn’t make it so clear, Bill. I said this weren’t none of our business.”

That’s when Williams finally turned to glare at Smith. “I’m making it my business, Peg-Leg. You got a problem with that, then you can take it up with me soon as I blow a goddamn hole in Thompson’s lights.”

“Y-you taking sides in something ain’t your affair,” Thompson hissed at Williams.

“He’s right, Solitaire,” Smith warned. “You’re coming down on the wrong side of things here. I ain’t gonna let you take the Neegra’s side on this.”

Pulling a pistol from his belt, Scratch declared, “Peg-Leg, it’s Thompson on the wrong side all the way ’round. I won’t stand for no man—Thompson or you—bringing harm to the fella what pulled our hash out of the fire yesterday morning.”

“You think hard on that, Peg-Leg,” Williams advised. “You an’ Thompson ’bout to pull some soft-brained stunt. A damn fine way to thank the man what brung all these Injuns to help us throw back the greasers.”

“They even saved your miserable life, Thompson,” Bass growled.

“I wanna see your blood soaking into the dirt under my feet, Titus Bass,” the trapper growled, twisting his big knife this way and that in the air.

“G’won back to your fire,” Williams ordered.

“Now, dammit! I told you, Solitaire,” Smith snarled. “I’m leading this outfit too an’ I say Thompson don’t have to go nowhere—”

Ignoring his partner, Williams interrupted by saying, “Told you go back to your fire, Thompson. Now get!”

For a moment, Thompson glared down at the pistol pressed into his ribs, then into Williams’s face. Finally …“Awright.”

As he turned on his heel, Thompson roughly shoved Bill’s pistol aside, then slid the butcher knife back into its rawhide sheath.

Williams peered over at Smith. “Spit it on out, Peg-Leg. Like a mouthful of hornets—’pears you got some trouble with me.”

“Wasn’t none of yours to—”

“I made it mine.”

Titus took a step closer to Smith. “Sounds to me you don’t figger we owe our lives to Hezekiah Christmas?”

The one-legged trapper peered at the tall Negro with growing disdain. “Don’t owe nothing to none of these red niggers,” he grumbled. “ ‘Specially don’t owe a thing to no black-assed renegade run off to live in the blanket with these Digger Injuns.”

Bass watched Smith pivot away on his wooden pin. “Don’t understand you, Peg-Leg.” He waited until the redheaded trapper stopped and looked over his shoulder at him before he said, “We just come out of Californy with the biggest herd anyone ever stole … so we should be having us a hurraw right about now ’stead of fixin’ to kill a friend what came to—”

“That black son of a bitch ain’t no friend of mine!” Thompson roared from the nearby fire.

“Last I’ll say is that son of a bitch and his red niggers better be turning back where they come from afore first light when we push on,” Smith warned.

Just as Titus was opening his mouth to speak, Christmas beat him to it by saying, “We turning back, that’s for sure. That desert down there ain’t fit for the likes of man or horse, neither one. I ain’t gonna waste the life of one of my men to help your sorry white asses from here on out. Come morning—you won’t have to worry none ’bout Hezekiah Christmas and his mansos.”

Smith dragged the back of a hand beneath his nose in a gesture of real disdain. “Make sure you ain’t here come sunrise.” With that said, he returned to the other fire where he stood with his back to Williams and the rest.

“I go bed down out there with my men,” Christmas quietly told Titus.

“You’re welcome to sleep here with us—”

“No, we ain’t welcome here with any of you,” Hezekiah interrupted, beginning to step away.

Bass caught his bare, brown arm. “Promise me you won’t leave afore we said our farewells.”

Christmas’s eyes flicked aside to stare over Bass’s shoulder at the distant fire where Smith and Thompson stood among like-minded men. He finally gazed at Scratch. “Come morning, we’ll say our good-byes … one more time, Titus Bass.”

Scratch awoke with a start, twitching as the long arm locked around his neck. Sensing the pressure of the butcher’s knife’s sharp edge press against the bottom of his windpipe there just below the muscular arm that imprisoned his head.

“How’s it feel to know this gonna be the last breath you ever take on earth, Titus Bass?”

He stared up into the dimly lit face of Philip Thompson, watching the firelight and shadow flicker across the cheekbones, the cruel curve of the lips as the man gleefully sneered down at Bass.

“You’re a cockless woman, Thompson,” he cursed, raspy with the sharp pressure against his throat. “Sneaking up on a sleepin’ man so it can’t be no fair fight.”

“Gonna cut your throat,” Thompson promised. “Like shooting a mad wolf. Don’t have to be no fair fight to kill a mad wolf.”

When Scratch slowly started to raise his right hand, he felt Thompson shove down on his throat with the knife, sensed the sharp edge press into the skin.

“I’ll cut you afore you get that damned hand in the air,” Thompson vowed. “Just want you be lookin’ into my face when I split you open … so I can watch you die—”

A sudden gasp burst from Thompson’s lungs, his eyes grown as big as Mexican dollars. On instinct alone, Scratch instantly twisted into Thompson’s arm, raking the butcher knife across his throat as the big trapper went taut above him. A second, putty-wet slap made Thompson jerk a second time, his mouth dropping open as his eyes started to roll back in their sockets.

Shoving his elbow into Thompson’s ribs, Bass felt the man’s rigid muscles suddenly sag. He shoved himself out from under the trapper and rolled onto his hip, gasping for breath and putting his fingertips against the damp flesh wound gaping across his throat.

Two short arrows protruded from Thompson’s back, halfway above midline, both buried deep.

The trapper sank to the side as his eyes went white.

Bass glanced at the fingers he took away from his neck wound, finding his flesh smeared with blood. Then in disbelief he looked over his shoulder, finding Hezekiah standing at the edge of that corona of firelight, a third arrow nocked in the bowstring, held at ready. Behind him stood an arch of more than a dozen of his warriors, the strings of their bows pulled taut to their cheekbones.

He finally sucked in a deep breath of air, shocked at how good it felt. How could he have been so foolish to sleep so hard that Thompson got the jump on him? Was it that he believed he was among friends—safe enough here, far from Blackfoot country? With Thompson ready to make good on his threats, how could he have allowed himself to drop his guard?

For what seemed like a long, long time, the only sound besides his own ragged breathing was the crackle of the two fires, dry cedar popping sparks into the black of that desert night beneath a milky quarter-moon. Bass peered up at Hezekiah, the deepest of unspoken gratitude for the bowman in his eyes.

Then his attention was drawn away to the far side of their encampment—finding Felix Warren and Frank Curnutt standing stock still there at the edge of the flickering light. Warren had a pistol in his right hand, a tomahawk in his left. Curnutt held only his round-barreled smoothbore.

Titus swallowed hard, then growled, “You niggers keeping watch to make sure Thompson kill’t me?”

The two didn’t say a thing. Didn’t move a muscle either. Instead, they kept staring at Bass, looking to the Indians, and glaring at the big, baldheaded Negro.

“Speak up, fellas,” Bill Williams ordered as he emerged into the firelight. “Answer the man’s question.”

Curnutt started to wag his head, not as if he were denying a thing. Only a gesture of futility.

“You was in deep with Thompson, wasn’t you?” Titus demanded, clambering to his feet. “Fixing to murder me together.”

“N-no,” said Warren. “Only Thompson. We knowed he was gonna kill Bass but we was only—”

“But that Neegra kill’t Thompson!” Curnutt squealed with anguish. “Kill’t a white man!”

“Sounds to me like what Thompson was fixin’ to do was murder,” Williams growled, watching Smith hobble into the light. “How ’bout you, Peg-Leg?”

Smith wagged his head with reluctance. “Ain’t really murder when it’s atween two fellas, Bill.”

“Wasn’t no fair fight—that Neegra shootin’ Thompson!” Warren protested.

“You fellas almost had you a hand in this bastard killing me,” Bass grumbled as he started around the fire for Felix Warren.

Both Curnutt and Warren started to move, but immediately realized Williams had his two pistols pointed at them. They stared at the muzzles while Bill said, “When a nigger jumps a man in his sleep—’thout it being a fair fight … that’s a murder, any way you lay your sights, Peg-Leg.”

“Tell you what, you sonsabitches.” Bass stopped some twelve feet from Warren and Curnutt. “I’ll give you a better chance’n you and Thompson was gonna give me.”

“I’ll kill you, you come any closer,” Curnutt warned with a high, feral pitch in his voice.

Titus snorted with a raw gust of laughter, saying, “I ain’t gonna kill you like you niggers was gonna do me.”

“You want me take their guns?” asked Jake Corn as he stepped up.

Curnutt’s and Warren’s eyes flicked here and there around them as they watched the other Americans gather close, imploring Thompson’s other comrades.

“Maybeso we better, Jake,” Williams decided. “Don’t let us have no trouble outta you two.”

At first both men refused to let go of their weapons when Corn and. Coltrane hurried in to grab hold of the firearms and that tomahawk.

“I’d as soon kill you both right now my own self,” Williams warned.

Smith lunged into the compact group, shoving Jake and Roscoe away as he protested, “These two ain’t done nothing to Bass, nothing to any one of you!”

“Get outta the way, Peg-Leg,” Williams demanded. “They don’t drop them guns—you’re likely to get hurt too when I start shootin’.”

Peg-Leg whirled on Williams. “M-me? Y-you ’pear to be forgetting just who the hell’s the brains in this here outfit—”

“Shuddup, Peg-Leg. I ain’t got no more stomach for you,” Williams snapped. “Clear outta the way.”

Smith took a long moment to stare into the muzzles of those two pistols Williams held before him, then back into the old trapper’s face. “Got no more stomach for me? W-what’s that mean? Why, you’d been nothin’ weren’t it for me asking you to ride along to California with me!”

“That tears the blanket, Peg-Leg. You go your way and the rest of us go ours.”

“Go my own way? You’re talking crazy, Solitaire! You can’t mean … dammit, most of them horses belong to me!”

“Fair is fair, Bill,” Titus said as he came up to stand beside Williams. “Let him have his rightful share afore you send him off.”

“Send me off?” Smith’s eyes narrowed into slits. “Send me off, is it? You low-down back-stabbin’ Diggers! None of you have any of them horses weren’t for my hand in leadin’ you all to California!”

“Just be satisfied I don’t do to you what Thompson was gonna do to me or Hezekiah … all because you been covering his back ever’ step of the way,” Bass stated.

Silas Adair asked, “What you figger’s fair for the three of ’em, Bill?”

“These here two can go with Peg-Leg in the morning, I s’pose.”

Bass watched their shoulders sag with something akin to relief. “You figger to cut ’em loose short of fixin’s?”

“W-what’s that mean?” Felix Warren demanded.

“Take their guns from ’em,” Williams instructed. “We’ll give ’em back come morning. Leave you a dozen balls and enough powder for those shots. Give each of you something to ride, along with a ol’ horse or two for vittles to get across the desert.”

“What you fixin’ to do with me, Solitaire?” Peg-Leg demanded haughtily.

“You get the same,” Williams stated flatly. “No more. No less.”

“We’re partners, Bill!” Smith roared. “I led this hull bunch out to California—”

“You been doing your damnedest to get sideways with me near ever’ step of the way back, Peg-Leg. None of these fellas know much of what you been cookin’ up in your head,” Williams menacingly said to his longtime friend.

“These here are my friends, Bill!” Smith roared. “I can’t let you—”

“You can’t let me?” Williams interrupted quietly. “Tell you what you can do. You can take what horses I’ll give you, and it’s yours to decide if’n you take these two bastards along with you or not.” Williams glanced over at Warren and Curnutt, then returned his steady gaze to Smith. “If’n it were me, I’d leave these snake bellies to make things out on their own. Them an’ Thompson put you in a real fix, now didn’t they?”

Smith’s hands clenched into balls of fury in front of him. “Sounds like you’re stealing all my horses from me, Solitaire.”

Before Williams had a chance to utter a word, Bass stepped up and stuck his face right up close to Smith’s, saying, “Way I see it, Bill’s making it more’n fair to give you and these two back-killers a fighting chance at that desert out there. If’n I was you—come mornin’, I’d take him up on it … and get.”