Wind Walker

EIGHTEEN

He had helped Roman lay that little body in its coffin cobbled together from those wooden crates, just wide enough for the lad’s narrow shoulders. Long enough for those two legs: one thin and gangly, the other black and bloated with a serpent’s poison. A spare and bony body that so reminded Titus of the skinny tyke he himself had been at that age.

At the moment Lucas had breathed his last, Titus pulled a large flap of that old quilt over the boy’s disfigured leg. No one would ever have to look at the awful wounds again. Amanda made sure of that. She kept the boy wrapped from his chin on down, holding him in her lap there beneath the awning as the thin sliver of new moon rose, rocked across the horizon, then set in preparation for the coming of a gray dawn. Not until then did she wash his face, and only his face, with a scrap of burlap, then held Lucas against her breast so steadfastly Titus doubted they would be able to pry the body loose from her arms when it came time to consign the boy to the ground.

But she had given him up to Roman. With her face screwed up into an ugly picture of pure agony, she had bottled up the wail behind clenched teeth and allowed Roman to take the quilt-wrapped bundle from her … only that deathly pale face poking from one end of the blanket a mother-to-be had stitched for her youngest. On the far side of the wagon the friends had laid the box, its cover propped against a wagon wheel in the charcoal-hued light of that cold morning before the summer sun came to rewarm this high desert. Once her arms were empty, that’s when the women moved in—white women from the train, all of whom had stayed up through that long and sleepless night with Amanda—for this manner of grieving was something new to Waits and Toote. They stood back as the others swooped in to lay their hands on her, murmuring their prayers and wishes and condolences, brushing the matted hair back out of her face, bringing warm water in a china bowl to wash away the dust from her cheeks and the blood smeared on her hands, clean off that arm where her boy had spewed anything put into his belly.

From the bottom of a humpbacked sea chest, one of them brought out a black dress she had, not a formal mourning gown, but something that spoke a much simpler grief. It would do, most all of them assured her as they gathered round the grieving mother for cover and two of their number loosened every last tiny button from her bloodstained dress, slowly pulled it from her, then draped the black dress around her. They brushed and fixed her hair as they all listened to the dull, unanswered thud of that hammer driving one nail after another into the lid of that long, thin box they had cobbled together from the hard-biscuit crates.

Scratch looked around at the others, then handed the hammer to the one called Ryder with a nod of thanks. He found Roman still staring down at the box in that way of disbelief.

“You made him real comfortable, son,” Titus reassured. He swallowed hard and fought the quiver of his chin. Knowing his voice was about to crack, nonetheless he said, “The look on his face … Lucas was at peace, son. His hurtin’s over now.”

“You ready, Roman?” Iverson said as he stepped up, his old, scuffed Bible held in both hands at the center of his belly, as if protecting the buckle of a belt that wasn’t there.

Burwell nodded again, his eyes never rising from the lid of that long, narrow box.

Three of the others immediately stepped around Iverson and knelt beside the coffin, but before they barely had their arms around it, Titus and Shadrach tapped on those emigrants’ shoulders and shooed them away. Together, without a word spoken, the two of them gently lifted the box and positioned it on their shoulders, on Scratch’s right as he stepped away in the front, and on Sweete’s left shoulder as he made his strides shorter, more deliberate—that much taller was he than Titus Bass.

“Bring them two coils of rope,” Scratch whispered to Bingham as he shuffled past.

A long gauntlet of men, children, and now the women too was forming on either side of the path the two old trappers were taking through the gray of first light to that deep, deep hole Titus had wanted to be half again as deep as he was tall. In the end, so deep that Shadrach had been the only one who could pull Burwell from the grave after Roman had passed up the shovel to them, then that empty bucket on the end of a one-inch line they used to drag out the dirt the grieving father tore up from the bottom of what would forever be Lucas’s resting place.

On his right just past the wagon tongue the crowd parted with a murmur, and through that gap stepped Roman, his right arm around Amanda’s shoulders, his left hand gripping her arm across her body, holding her up, making her move with him, slowly, taking small steps as they fell in behind the coffin. Behind them came Lemuel, Leah, and young Annie—the baby of the family now that Lucas was gone. Up ahead in the graying light, Bass saw the faces of his children appear at the side of the gauntlet of white folks, saw how they poked their heads out to watch.

“Popo,” Magpie whispered as he came near, one small step at a time, carrying the front of that coffin, “all right we come with you too?” Her words were respectful, filled with awe and a pain that hadn’t subsided since yesterday when she discovered the boy not long after the snake struck. She had one arm laid over Flea’s shoulder, her other arm holding up her smallest brother.

Jackrabbit looked frightened, confused, downright scared. Bass’s eyes softened as he quickly peered at the boy. “You come with me.”

They tore themselves away from the gauntlet as the coffin moved past, stepping into line at the end of the procession to join Annie, Leah, and Lemuel behind the sobbing parents.

And finally Iverson reached the hole where Titus had dug it, aways back from the trees and brush, in the open, where the trail from the east rolled through to this camping ground. In the open. Where a soul should be buried, he thought again. Not closed in by trees and rocks. And if it couldn’t be at the top of a hill, then … in the open.

Bingham and Goodell shuffled ahead of the trappers, getting to the grave right behind Iverson to quickly lay out just enough length from the two ropes on one side of the hole so the coffin could rest on top of the ropes for these last few minutes before the box would disappear from sight. As Scratch and Shadrach knelt and worked the narrow crate from their shoulders, Iverson began motioning to the more than two hundred who were crowding up, silently forming them around the site more than ten to a dozen deep. From the quiet throng, Carter emerged carrying a large cast-iron oven, the sort the women used to bake their breads, cakes, and biscuits in, when shoved beneath the ashes of a fire. As soon as the emigrant set it down, Scratch saw it was without its lid, filled with what he took to be ashes.

Waits-by-the-Water stepped through a knot of women and came to him silently, reaching his side to grip his hand and put her arm around him as they stood across the narrow hole from the grieving parents. Titus sensed just how lucky he was to have a good woman at his side through everything life could throw at a man.

Iverson held up that Bible much stained with sweat and grime, asking for quiet as Titus and Scratch stepped aside, allowing the family to approach the box. When the parents stopped, looking down at the coffin, Amanda drew herself up there in Roman’s arms. Then took a long, ragged sigh, and no longer sobbed or whimpered, but instead motioned with her free arm to the children, not just the three left her, but to her brothers and sister too: Magpie, Flea, and Jackrabbit.

“The rest of you children,” she said quietly an instant before Iverson started to speak, which compelled the man to stand there with his mouth in an O as her small voice made its presence felt on them all, “all you children who played with Lucas every night on the trail … I want you to come up to stand around his grave with us now.”

He must be the closest thing this band of sojourners had for a preacher, Titus thought as Iverson finally began a reading of this Scripture, then another, and still another. And when he finally closed that worn, brown-skinned Bible, Iverson held it against his chest and began speaking from his heart.

“Not one of us knows the why of the ways of the Lord,” he reminded them. “On our journey we’ve lost babes, and we’ve lost old ones too. It is the work and wonder of the Lord, so we are left to doubt or to believe. I … choose to believe.”

There was some quiet muttering from some of the women and a handful of the men as the heat of the coming day began to tell.

Iverson pitched in again. “Last night I heard the talk of people scared of what they had done in running from homes and family to find themselves in this wilderness where the innocent can be taken from us. So let me remind those of you who were gnashing your teeth—crying that this must be a curse because we chose to chance a journey to God’s garden. What took young Lucas was not the devil, or his evil serpent. It was only one of many dangers man finds in this wilderness. Do not despair—we will get through to our Garden of Eden!”

With that last word pronounced in a louder volume, Iverson held everyone’s rapt attention. Even the old trapper’s.

“Yea, last night in the darkest of hours there were those doubters who professed to know that our Oregon company had been cursed—cursed by Hargrove and his men; cursed by young Lucas’s terrible death. But, I tell you nay! Why—don’t you remember that we have lost some of our number all along the way?”

There arose a quiet, begrudging agreement from the many.

“No,” Iverson hammered on, “I will not go along with those of you who say that these deaths are because we left the Garden of Eden behind us. No, my friends—our garden lies before us, pulling us on.”

Titus had to admit, the man did have a gift for preachifying, the way he used an alternate rhythm or different tone to hold this crowd’s attention from one moment to the next.

“Oregon awaits us, my friends. This wilderness infested with serpents and bad water is only what we must endure to reach the land where the Lord is drawing us nigh. Do not let the devil convince your hearts that young Lucas paid a blood atonement … as some of you were saying in the dark. No. I want you to look now—yes … look and see how first light is coming!”

They turned almost as one and peered east along their back trail, from whence they had come, leaving most everything behind to go west.

“This is a new day for the Lord. We must complete God’s work and bury young Lucas, for his family, for us all. Then we must be on to Oregon.”

“Can we sing a song?” a woman asked from the crowd, plaintively.

“Yes,” Iverson answered, then immediately closed his eyes and launched into a song Titus could not remember ever hearing.

Some of the crowd knew the song too, and they joined in self-consciously by the middle of the first verse. But because the entire group had not added their voices, Iverson ended after the second verse.

“Friends, it is time to consign young Lucas Burwell to the ground.”

Roman caught Amanda as her knees turned to water. Steadying her against him, they watched four men step from the throng and pick up an end of the two ropes. Carefully they raised the coffin off the ground, then swung it over the hole and began to slowly lower it to the bottom. When it rested securely, two of the men pulled the ropes from the grave.

In the coming of day Iverson bent and scooped up a handful of the dry, dark earth piled next to that hole and tossed it down upon the top of that wooden box with a muffled clatter. “Dust to dust …”

Kneeling beside the cast-iron oven, Iverson seized a handful of the cold ashes he had asked be brought here. He opened his hand, allowing the flakes and dust to fall, most of them drifting into the hole.

“And ashes to ashes,” he reminded them. “From dust we come. To dust we all will go.”

Rubbing his palm against the leg of his pants, Iverson stepped back and made a quick gesture to Roman. Mr. and Mrs. Burwell knelt at the edge of the grave, where they each tossed in some dirt clods, landing hollow on the top of that crude coffin, then reached over to toss in some ashes. Roman got to his feet first, helping Amanda as they moved aside, and Lemuel brought his two sisters forward. At the side of the grave, Lemuel turned, signaling Magpie and her brothers to join them. All bent and made their offerings to the grave.

And as the children inched back, Iverson said, “Anyone who wants to come to the graveside, offer a prayer by throwing in some dirt or ashes—now is the time.”

They shuffled around the small hole, long lines of silent folk coming from two directions. As they finished, then passed by, most every one of these emigrants reached out to touch Amanda’s hand, or shake with Roman—offering in that quiet, unspoken way something of their own grief, and hope too. Titus stood there with his arm around Waits, watching this long procession, realizing just how many friends the Burwell family had made on this unfinished journey to Oregon. Friends these were. Friends who had stood watch, knowing nothing else to do. Friends who had offered to help dig, knowing nothing else to do. Friends who brought food and drink all through the night, not knowing what else they could do. But here they stood as the words and prayers and songs were said over this deep, deep hole dug for a tiny child … because it was what they could do.

It was what they would want others to do for them if tragedy had struck their family instead of the Burwells’.

But in the end, only the Burwells stood beside that hole with the two trapper families. The others had moved off, busy with breakfast, bringing in the stock, hitching up the oxen and mules, saddling the horses, rolling up the bedding, and dousing the fires once the trumpet sounded—high and brassy on the motionless air. It was still so cool, Titus thought. But soon the earth would begin to heat up and the breeze would stir. Restless wind. It would be restless all day long and into the evening as the earth cooled once more. Wind every bit as restless as was he.

“You take your family back to the wagon now,” Titus said as he and Shad moved up after the last of the emigrants were gone. “Time to get your stock hitched up for moving out.”

Roman gazed down at his wife, then nodded and turned without a word. The children started back with him, joined by Waits and Toote.

Scratch moved up and laid his arm across his daughter’s shoulder. “Sure you wanna watch us finish this?”

She nodded once. And Sweete reached out to grab the handle.

“I can do this,” Titus said.

“Let me,” Shad offered quietly, his big sad eyes imploring. “You stay with your daughter.”

They watched the big man scrape and scrape and scrape the soil back in on that tiny box at the bottom of such a deep hole, deep enough, Titus thought, that no wolf would do anything but give up, even if it was able to smell something on this tiny patch of ground. When he had the hole completely filled in, Shad began stamping around on the new soil, compressing it, before he tossed on some more of the dirt and compressed again with his big feet.

“I’ll carry the rest away from here,” Sweete explained as he took the first shovelful of the excess dirt and started toward a copse of trees fifteen yards away.

“Gonna stay behind awhile, Amanda,” he said softly to her while Shad was coming and going. “Build me a fire over the spot. Make sure no critter can smell a thing and try digging it up. Too far down, made sure of that. But I don’t even wanna think ’bout some wolf tryin’—”

He saw she was crying again.

“I can’t go, Pa.”

“Can’t go?”

She wagged her head. “I gotta stay here. Not ready to go on. Not … just yet.”

“Awright, Amanda. You want to, you can stay here with me. You can take your time for grievin’, all you need.”

Minutes later as Roman pulled the four-hitch team of oxen around in a circle nearby and halted, Titus announced to Burwell, “Come see her afore you go, son.” Then he explained that she would be staying there with him to see to the grave.

“You gonna be all right, Amanda?” Roman asked, lines of concern deep in his brow. “You … you’ll be coming, right?”

“Yes, Roman. I’ll come along soon. I just need a little more time here,” she confessed. “Not ready to let him go just yet.”

The big farmer embraced her a long while, then kissed the top of her head and wiped the tears off her cheeks before he clambered back up the front wheel, squeaked onto the seat, and slapped the reins down on the backs of those oxen. Lemuel came up beside the lead ox and snapped it with a long whip, hollering at the animal to giddap as he turned to look back at his mother in farewell, wet streaks running down the young man’s cheeks.

When the wagon came around, the two girls were at the rear gate, there above the swinging buckets, waving back at their mother from the rear pucker hole, sobbing once more.

Toote and Waits stood with the children, those two shaggy dogs, and the extra stock until the wagon caught up; then they all fell in on the road to Oregon, the last in line for the day’s march. Shad swung into the saddle and waved his long .62 flintlock in the air before he wheeled around and heeled into the march, eventually disappearing with the rest.

“You wanna sit over there in the shade, Amanda?”

Scratch walked with her over to that copse of trees near some large boulders. “Stay here in the shade an’ don’t you go too near them rocks where the sn—”

He bit off the word too late.

So she looked up at him as she settled to the ground in the shade of that sunny new day. “Gonna always look out for snakes, here on out, Pa.”

“You sit yourself, daughter, and you do your grieving. It’s what a body’s s’posed to do when a big chunk been tored outta their heart.”

After a minute, while she sat staring at that patch of disturbed ground several yards away, he knelt before her and said, “I’m goin’ off now—fetch some firewood from what’s been left round the camp. Build me a fire on the grave.”

He stood up in that silence, her sigh the only sound, along with the slight tremble among the leaves brought by a first breeze stirring through the branches overhead.

A good place for a body to rest in peace, he thought as he started away to scratch up a heap of firewood. This silence made for a mighty fine place for a mortal body to rest for all time to come.

It had taken the better part of the morning to drag in what wood was left behind by the others, logs and limbs scattered across the camping ground. Then he built his fire, fed it with new timbers, and let it burn down to embers before he began working at the fire’s edges to turn the hot ashes and glowing embers over, mixing them with the dry, flaky soil, one shovelful at a time.

Hot work, what with the way the sun had come up mean and resentful in that cloudless sky, baking him from overhead while the rising heat from those embers scorched him from below. Both moccasins were permanently blackened now, along with the bottoms of his buckskin leggings and that fringe that trailed at his heels too. But fire was a good thing. Flames had a way of cleansing what they touched. Just the way he had rubbed that powder into Lucas’s snakebites and set them afire, now this ground had been cleansed of the smell of man, the stench of death.

A harsh purging for this unmarked grave, cleansed with the ancient, renewing power of fire. Just like a lightning storm started a whisper of smoke, burnt down a whole mountainside of timber, then from the fallow and black ground rose new life the following spring.

As he slowed his digging, straightened, and wiped the huge drops of sweat from his face with a sleeve, for the first time since the others had gone Titus began to sense the unalterable numbness of that hole eaten away inside him again, a hole he had filled with all the nonstop work of digging and hammering and filling and burning. But now the fire was out and the embers lay scattered, turned over and over and over with the soil that had grown as hot as the sun’s own scorchy breath. He stood there, leaning on the handle of that shovel, helpless to stop its pain from rising within him like the black, bubbling tar in those pits over on the Wind River, north from the mouth of the Popo Agie. Hot, thick, rising bubbles of pain that threatened to gag him with the bitter taste of clabbered gall.

Below him lay a child fresh and dewy at life, innocent of pain and evil, ignorant of betrayal … a child Titus was just coming to know. A grandson with a soul so beautiful—remembering how the boy held out his hand to shake with a grizzled stranger who wore beaded earbobs, or looked his grandfather squarely in the eye to ask a why to almost everything, or bounded upon the old man’s knee for a story of grizzly bears and Indian warriors and rendezvous glories too … it nearly chewed away a hole inside the old man there beside the child’s unmarked grave. A gaping void he didn’t know how he’d fill … or where … or with who.

Amanda had her head buried in her forearms looped across her knees, where they were tucked against her breast as he returned to the shade. She looked up as he approached.

“Oh … Pa,” she whimpered, her eyes still full as he dropped the shovel and collapsed in exhaustion beside her. “How am I ever going to remember where Lucas is buried?”

Enfolding her in his arms, he cradled her and said, “You will. You’ll remember the Soda Springs, and remember how we done ever’thing we could to keep him safe.”

Shaking her head, Amanda pushed back from him. “I shouldn’t have let them bury him. Roman and me—we should take him on with us. And bury him there—”

“No,” he interrupted her, again pulling his daughter against him gently, reassuringly. “Allays best to leave a body where he’s been took from the living. It’s the most fitting thing.”

“I can’t bear to leave without him,” she confessed. “Don’t know how Roman was able to go from this place.”

“You can too,” he vowed. “Because you’re gonna take Lucas with you when you leave this place behind.”

Her red eyes studied his a moment. “How?”

“You’ll take the memory of him from this place, Amanda. Allays remember his smile. Remember the way that shock of his yellow hair fell in his eyes an’ he had to keep pushin’ at it? Take that with you to Oregon now. Keep the memory of your boy Lucas with you.”

She pressed her face against his chest and murmured, “When I come back here I won’t be able to remember where we laid him, Pa.”

Gently raising her chin, he wanted to convince her she never would return to this place … but instead he wiped some of the tears from her dust-streaked face and said, “Yes, you will remember, daughter. Look there, at them hills. See that cone where the water bubbles up. Then lookit the cut in that ridge yonder.” He turned her slightly. “See that saddle there, and the sharp rise of that butte. Look here now where the creek makes that horseshoe … an’ you’ll remember where we made camp here. You’ll remember where we put ’im to rest.”

She nodded confidently. “Yes, I will remember when I come back to see him again, real soon I’ll come back—”

“No, Amanda,” he finally admitted it as he held her tightly. “Once you get to that Oregon country with the memory of your li’l boy, there won’t ever be no need of comin’ back here again. Just keep the memory of Lucas in your heart … an’ let his body, this place, an’ this long, hard road to your new home be nothing but a distant memory. Once we turn our backs on this place, it’s gonna be up to you to keep him alive in your heart, an’ forget this place. There’s nothin’ here for you to ever come back for—”

The profane smack of a lead ball against the tree trunk reached him an instant before the low grumble of the gunshot from a distant rifle.

Immediately throwing himself across Amanda, Titus quickly searched to find where he had propped his rifles, laying both pistols across the shooting pouch he left at the base of the same bush before he had picked up the shovel and—

A second ball sliced through the branches right above them, and the weapon’s roar floated overhead on the hot breeze.

Two shots, too close together for it to be one shooter. There were at least a pair of them.

“C’mon!” he cried as he rose to a crouch, counting off the seconds they had before that first attacker could reload, aim, and fire again.

Grabbing Amanda at the back of her collar, Titus dragged his daughter in a crouch toward the low boulders to their left, snatching up the pouch and one of the pistols on the way past the brush—

A third shot rang out … kicking up a spurt of dust near his hand—coming too quickly for that first shooter to have reloaded.

Shit. There’s least three of ’em.

“Get in!” he ordered as he shoved her through a cut in the scattered rocks that stood about knee-high.

As Scratch was turning around he pushed Amanda down against the ground, slinging the pouch and powder horn against her shoulder. “You know how to load a rifle?”

She looked up at him dumbly, but nodded her head.

“Good,” he said, and patted her on the shoulder. “All I gotta do now is go out there to them guns of mine and get back in here ’thout getting shot.”

“I-I can help, Pa.”

“I ain’t lettin’ you go out there—”

“Will you listen to me?” she said, scooting up on her hip. “Man like you, seems you’re always attracting trouble like flies to syrup.”

He snorted, flicked a glance at the open ground between them and the sound of those guns, then looked at her. “Awright, what you got in mind?”

“I can shoot, Pa.”

“Pistol?”

“I can hold it.”

He squinted a moment at her. “Maybeso you give me a break to get them guns, Amanda. Here,” and he pressed the big horse pistol into her hand. “When I bust outta these rocks, they’re gonna aim at me real quick. So when I start movin’, I want you to count to three while you’re aiming off there at them trees—”

“That where they are?”

“I think so, but I ain’t for sure,” he admitted. “You count to three, then you shoot that pistol at the trees. That oughtta make ’em flinch a wee bit. Mayhaps gimme time to grab them rifles an’ get ’em back in here.”

“If you don’t get back here with them?”

“Then you reload that pistol from my pouch,” he said, staring her hard in the eyes, “an’ you keep it cocked till they come real … real close—so you can stop one of ’em.”

“You think they’re comin’ for me?”

He shook his head. “I hope it’s me they’re comin’ for. Now, cock that hammer an’ tell me when you’re ready to start countin’.”

“I’m ready.”

Quickly touching her cheek with his fingertips, Titus crouched in the gap between rocks, then rasped, “Start countin’!”

He was counting himself as he exploded from cover. While his mind roared with the number one, a gun thundered from that copse of trees off to the south. Too quick a shot, indicating he had caught them by surprise. The ball went wild as he reached the rifle’s on the count of two. And turned, scooping up the pistol and stuffing it in his belt as he kept moving in a half circle. Three—

Her pistol barked. Immediately answered by a rifleman she must have scared a shot out of, for that man’s ball went wild too.

Scratch was thinking he was going to make it back to the rocks with his weapons, scuffing through the sage on that sandy ground when he slipped and spilled onto a knee. A ball cut a furrow across his hip, pitching him into the brush with a grunt.

“Reload, Amanda!” he cried as much in anger at himself as in pain.

“Pa—”

He started to gather the rifles against him again, painfully, when he interrupted her, “Reload!”

“Old man!”

Jerking his good leg under him, Titus froze at the call from the trees, trying his damnedest to place that voice.

“We come only for you!”

A second voice shouted, “Like to get my hands on that friend of yours too, but he can wait.”

The lead ball plowed into the ground right near his cheek as he lay gasping with the pain of the hip wound, wondering how bad it was, if it had broken a bone, if he’d walk again, if it was the sort of deep injury that would eventually mean a slow and terrible death.

“You ready, Amanda?” he whispered with a grunt as he cocked the good leg under him.

“Ready.”

“Shoot!”

Her pistol roared as he rocked forward, lunging a few yards before he landed again in the sage—almost to the rocks. “Take the guns from me!” he ordered.

Her hand came out, grabbing the muzzle of the first rifle, yanking it back inside her fortress. She was pulling at the second when another ball smacked the rock near her arm. She flinched, withdrew her arm, then quickly reached out again and snatched the rifle out of sight. Dirt exploded near his shoulder, and another ball slapped against the boulder—sending slivers of rock spraying over him, cutting his cheeks and eyelids as he tried to turn away too late.

“Pa!”

When he opened his eyes, he saw Amanda’s arm sticking from the cleft again, farther this time. She was holding it out for him. As he brought his good leg under him again he stretched out for her hand, grabbed it. Together they pulled and got Titus between the rocks as another ball stabbed against the boulder overhead, showering them with tiny chips of lead and rock.

“How bad you hurt?”

Rolling onto his rump, Titus pulled up the bloodstained hem of his long calico shirt and saw how the ball had gone through the tie that knotted his legging to the belt, into the hip muscle, and must have come back out through his buttock.

“Damn,” he muttered as he interlaced his fingers around that right knee and pulled the leg up. It hurt, but not the way it would have made him pass out with pain if the ball had hit bone. “I ain’t gonna die,” he told her, sweat dripping in his eyes. “Not just yet, I ain’t.”

“C’mon out, old man! Just get this over quick and we’ll be on our way.”

Titus dragged one of the rifles over and passed it to Amanda. “Here, you hold on to this while I shoot this’un. Then we’ll swap an’ you reload.” He shoved the loaded pistol across the dirt toward her feet. “Keep that’un right by you. Don’t use it less’n they get me an’ you can take one last shot when they get close to the rocks. Keep it … keep it for yourself till the very end.”

“Who are they?” she asked as she got to her knees and looked at him.

With a shrug, he said, “White fellers. Out here, shootin’ at me—I got a purty good idee, Amanda.”

“Who?”

That’s when Scratch flung his voice toward the copse of trees: “Hargrove with you stupid niggers?”

“No!” the voice cried. “He’s back with the train.”

“Like I figgered,” Titus yelled. “Just like afore, he sent you boys to do a man’s work, again.”

A ball smacked the rock, but this shot came from much closer. He was immediately worried, but didn’t want her to know as he grinned and said, “’Pears we made ’em mad.”

“That was close, Pa.” Amanda was shaking.

Likely she figured that out for herself from the sound. So he said, “Just gonna make it interesting—”

Bass heard the scrape of feet somewhere behind them. He dragged the hammer on the rifle back to full cock and prepared to rise on the good leg. Popping up with the rifle already into his shoulder, he spotted the man just darting away from a clump of brush, making for the rocks. The rifle slammed against him as it roared, the ball catching the attacker in the side of the chest. Spinning him back into the brush where his legs thrashed as Titus sank back into their fortress, two balls hissing overhead where he had been standing for but an instant.

Amanda was already reaching for his empty rifle, passing him the loaded gun. “That’s one of ’em, Pa.”

“You any good with one of these?”

She shook her head. “Roman, he taught me how to load, and shoot too. But, I didn’t hit much when we went hunting. Everything was so far away I never did any good—”

“This time, things gonna be much closer, Amanda—”

A loud voice interrupted him, “Did he get Ohlman?”

Another voice, closer still, shouted in reply, “Dropped ’im. Ohlman’s out of it.”

“All right, Corrett, you an’ Jenks work in on him.”

“Remember you promised,” a new voice was raised, “promised I could kill ’im.”

“That’s right, Jenks—you get to do the honors this time since you messed things up so bad for Hargrove before.”

“Jenks?” Scratch hollered. “You the one I beat like a half-growed alley cat a few nights back?”

“Goddamn you, old man!” the voice shrieked in fury.

“I’m here for you, Jenks,” he needled the young bully. “Just waiting for you, boy. You an’ me here now. So you even the score with me … since these other niggers saw how bad I whupped you—”

A ball splattered against the rocks.

“Jenks!” the leader’s voice shouted. “Don’t be a damn fool like that!”

“Yeah, Jenks,” Titus prodded as he watched Amanda pour priming powder into the pan. “Don’t be doin’ anything stupid like that again!”

“You hear that?” she asked in a rough whisper.

“Yeah.”

Another one of them was coming. This time from the north side of their rocks, where they were more vulnerable. He waited, and waited, listening carefully each time the angry voices paused. Listening for the sounds of the man’s approach. Then the voices fell silent. And he heard the sound of them coming from the south too. Three of them now. Two behind the rocks, one in front.

“Amanda, you just might have to show me you can hit something up close here real soon.”

She swallowed hard, her mouth firm and determined though doubt showed in her reddened eyes, and nodded once.

“Gimme that pistol you loaded.”

Passing him the second pistol, Amanda leaned back against the rock and clenched her eyes shut.

“Just like I told you when Lucas was passin’, this here’s come a time when you gotta be strong. Take a deep breath an’ hold on the target. You’re gonna be strong for me, ain’cha?”

Her eyes popped open. “Y-yes, Pa.”

“Get ready for the third one behind us, that way. I’m takin’ on the other two.”

He popped up with that rifle, afraid he didn’t give himself enough time to aim before he snapped off the shot. The ball went wild as the two men ducked aside, then immediately got their feet under them and started running at a full gallop for the rocks. Bass let the rifle slip out of his grip as he heard her gun roar behind him.

“You hit ’im?” he asked as he slapped the pistol into his right hand.

“I-I dunno,” she whimpered. “I don’t see him!”

Bass double-handed the pistol, held for a breath, and pulled the trigger as the man zigged through the brush. The ball caught him in the leg, spun him around a half turn as he flopped to the ground. But the second man kept coming at a crouch through the sage. With no time to reload, he’d have to use the only weapon they had loaded.

“Pa!” she shrieked as he was turning in a crouch to scoop up the pistol.

He saw him. The fourth attacker. Side of his belly was bloody, but he was back on his feet and still coming, that rifle held low in his hands, lunging toward them from the north side of the rocks. And the one who looked like Benjamin—advancing on horseback at a lope from the south.

“Reload me, Amanda!”

“Go on an’ get ’em, Jenks!” the horseman yelled. “They ain’t got a loaded gun between ’em now!”

Back and forth he looked, then decided on Jenks. Closer than Benjamin. Bass swallowed down the burning pain in his hip, setting the butt of the pistol on top of the rocks. Hunching up behind the weapon, he aimed it right as Jenks brought up the muzzle of his rifle and fired an instant before Bass’s ball slammed into the bully’s chest, just below the throat.

Titus was sinking to the ground and dragging the pouch toward him, sensing in the pit of him that one of the bastards would get him now. He didn’t want her to see it—lose a son, then her father too.

“Now you’re mine, old man!” promised that disembodied voice of the horseman.

Plug came out of the powder horn, and he spilled the black grains down the muzzle of the pistol.

The hoofbeats slowed, then stopped. Then there were footsteps as the voice came at him again. “Hargrove wants you real bad—had everything going his way till you came in the picture.”

Desperation overtook him as his fingers scrambled for a ball from his pouch. Pushing it into the muzzle with his thumb, he yanked out the ramrod and drove it home just as another voice yelled.

“Outta the way!”

Whirling with the pistol, he found the wounded man standing just outside the rocks, his rifle wavering as he growled at Amanda. Something in the bully’s desperate eyes told Bass he was going to shoot anyway—

But Titus fired his pistol instead, sending ball and that short ramrod both toward the target.

“That means you’re empty now, old man!”

He spun around with the empty weapon, realizing Benjamin was right. Dead right. Shifting the pistol to his left hand, Titus reached at the small of his back for a knife.

With a wicked and broadening smile, Benjamin stopped, as if enjoying this moment. When the bully brought the rifle to his shoulder and took aim at Titus down the long barrel, he laughed and said, “Looks like you just run outta chances—”

With the rest of his words swallowed by a sudden gunshot that made Titus flinch in surprise.