Now he came out of it, forcing himself to a sitting position, not without many a gasp and groan. When he got his upper body upright, he was white faced, his dark eyes standing out against his skin like ink blots. “Hey, Yank . . .”
“How do you feel?” Sam asked.
“Not so good . . . sick, hollowlike—another drink might set me right.”
“Eat something . . . it’ll keep up your strength.”
“What’ve you got?”
“Beef jerky and parched corn.”
“No, no,” Bill said, making a face. “I can’t eat, not that stuff . . . Gaah!”
Bill let himself be persuaded into having some parched corn, downing a couple of handfuls of it.
“This’ll wash it down,” Sam said, handing him a canteen.
Bill gulped eagerly, just as quickly spitting out the mouthful with an expression of unlimited disgust. “Water!”
“Redeye’s in the other canteen,” Sam said, taking the canteen from him. “I’ll take that, water is too precious for wasting. I’m not taking any water runs tonight.”
“You know where you can run to, Yank . . . and there ain’t no water Down Yonder from what I’ve heard tell.”
“No whiskey, either—That’s the hell of it.”
“I’m glad you’re having fun.” Longley glared. “If I only had my gun . . .”
“But you don’t,” Sam said.
“Not yet.”
“You’d be hell in a showdown, Bill. You can’t even stand up.”
Sam hefted the canteen containing the whiskey. “They say redeye loosens the tongue, but your case is different. You’ve got to loosen your tongue for the redeye.”
“If that’s not a Yankee for you! Tormenting a wounded man, bargaining with him for a lousy drink! A Southern man would have more human kindness.”
“Loman Vard was one of your own, a natural-born Son of Dixie and a native Texan, too—how’d that work out for you? Rile Fenton, too. As for human kindness, I used up mine saving your hide.”
“Who asked you? Besides, you didn’t do it for me, you did it for yourself, so you could get to Vard,” Bill said.
“What’s in Hangtree?” Sam asked. “Why did Vard have to kill you before you got there?”
“Ask him, Yank.”
“You fixed it so I couldn’t.”
Bill laughed without mirth. “Now ain’t that a damned shame!”
“It sure is,” Sam said. “It means you go without a drink until you talk. The kind of drink you want, that is. You can have all the water you want anytime.”
“Choke on it,” Bill said. He was shaking, partly from fury but more from the effort of sitting up. He sank back groaning to lie at full length in his bed of boughs. “I’m through talking, I’ve got nothing to say to you. I’ll do my talking with a gun. And I’ll get one sooner rather than later, Yank.”
Sam shrugged. “It must really burn you to be beholden to a Yankee for your life, eh, Bill?”
No reply.
Sam chuckled to himself.
THIRTEEN
The hours of night rolled on, the moon rising high only to vanish behind a veil of clouds. The air was cold, the temperature of a Texas spring day sometimes dropping by thirty to forty degrees between the hours of daylight and darkness.
The fire kept back much of the cold but some managed to creep in as the flames burned low.
Sam slept light, especially when out in the field. He was on duty this night, watchful not only for perils that come under cover of night but also to monitor Bill Longley.
Bill writhed in troubled sleep. He shuddered and shivered under the blankets. His moans, groans, and sighs were punctuated by words, fragments of phrases. He was talking in his sleep.
Sam leaned close to hear what he was saying. Sleepers let slip curious fragments that they never would have uttered aloud during the day. But Bill’s words were too garbled and Sam couldn’t make any of them out at all.
Sam knew from wartime experience that the halfway point between the hours of midnight and dusk is the time that most sick or wounded patients die, a fact well known to doctors, nurses, and hospital workers. Something in the human spirit becomes weakest at those times and most likely to slip across the threshold from life into death.
The moon came out from behind the clouds, shafting silvery beams across the nightscape.
A coyote howled somewhere out in the distance, a lonesome mournful sound to raise the hairs at the back of a man’s neck, as it did Sam’s.
Bill started awake. “I’m burning up!” he blurted out to no one in particular.
Bill wriggled under the covers, trying to toss the blankets aside. Sam reached over, holding them in place. “Don’t—you’ll catch a chill,” he said.
“I feel like I’m on fire!” Bill was agitated, the one eye he could open fully showing a wild look.
“Easy, easy,” Sam soothed. “Want some water?”
“Lord, yes! . . . Mouth’s dry, throat’s closed up . . . I feel like I’m choking!”
Bill’s hands trembled. He seemed lacking in the strength to hold the canteen up by himself. Sam held it for him. Bill drank deeply. Raising a hand to show he’d had enough, he sank back down, head resting on the folded blanket serving as a pillow.
The wildness was gone from his expression. He looked around, experiencing a moment of clarity, aware of his surroundings.
“I don’t know if I’m going to make it, Yank,” he said quietly.
“You will,” Sam said with a positivity he was far from feeling.
“Stop lying.”
“Sure, all Yankees are liars but you’ll live.”
“I’ve been hurt before, shot before, but not this bad. I feel something trying to pull me under, away . . .”
“That’s just your imagination,” Sam scoffed. But inwardly he wondered, Just keep holding on and fighting it.
“Listen, if I don’t make it—”
“You will.”
“Let me say my piece now while my mind’s right, before those crazy fever dreams come back,” Bill said. “The things I’ve been seeing, not knowing if they’re real or not . . .”
“They’re not, that’s just the fever making your mind play tricks on you.”
Sam Heller was playing a game himself, a double game. He very much wanted to hear what Bill Longley had to say, particularly if Bill thought he was on his deathbed, which he just might be. The statement of a dying man could be vitally important, most people not wanting to go into the Great Dark with a lie on their lips.
Bill Longley said, “This is important. There’s a man in Hangtree name of Cross . . .”
“Johnny Cross!” Sam said, surprised into an involuntary remark. Should this matter involve Johnny Cross, it was important indeed.
Now it was Bill Longley’s turn to be surprised. “You know him? You?”
“I know of him,” Sam said. In truth he knew Johnny Cross very well indeed. “He’s one of the town’s leading personalities,” Sam added dryly.
Bill Longley was silent, seemingly deep in thought. “Then there’s still a chance,” he began, sounding stronger and more determined than before. “If I don’t make it tell Johnny I had a message for him. Tell him that Cullen Baker’s set to hang in Clinchfield at the first of the new month.”
Cullen Baker! There was a name known to Sam, if only by ill repute. Cullen Baker, a gunfighter and outlaw, “a real bad un’,” as Texans say about such men, and they said it of Baker, a drunken brute and heedless killer. From what Sam knew of him, hanging Cullen Baker seemed like a good idea.
“You can tell Cross yourself when we reach Hangtree. We’ll be there tomorrow,” Sam said offhandedly, as if the subject was of little interest to him.
“I’m feeling powerful bad,” Bill said, his voice thick.
“Fight it!”
Sam turned away, picking up some broken branches to throw on the fire. Bill sat up, gripping Sam’s forearm.
“Remember: Cullen Baker hang
s in Clinchfield the first of the month,” Bill rasped.
“If the worst happens, I’ll see Cross gets the message,” Sam said.
“Don’t pass it along for somebody else to tell him and you wash your hands of the matter. You tell him yourself.”
“Why me?”
“If you say you’ll do it I know it’ll get done.”
“Thanks—I think.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, Yank. If there was anybody else I could rely on I’d use them but there’s not, so you’re elected. You could have killed me anytime here and made yourself a sweet payday because there’s them that want to see me dead real bad.”
“I kind of got that idea,” Sam said, a tilt of his head indicating where the Vard gang’s bodies lay sprawled.
“Remember: Cullen Baker hangs in Clinchfield on the first of the month,” Bill repeated. “That’s all of it. When Johnny hears that, he’ll know what to do.”
“I got it,” Sam said. “You can let go of my arm now; it’s gone numb.”
“Huh? Oh, right,” Bill said, loosing his grip on Sam’s forearm. He sank back down into his bed of boughs, exhausted by the effort he’d just made. He closed his eyes, tumbling instantly into sleep.
Throughout the entire episode, Bill Longley had not once demanded a drink of whiskey. That struck Sam Heller as the most worrying sign of all.
That boy is in bad shape, Sam said to himself.
* * *
Several hours passed, Bill Longley’s fever spiking higher. Sam hovered over him during the watches of the night, listening closely as Bill’s ravings become steadily more outlandish, the stuff of opium dreams . . .
There was a kingdom in the swamplands ruled by a modern-day Caesar, a red-haired red-bearded tyrant who lorded over the bayou with his own private army and an armored steamboat that was a floating palace. “Barbaroux!” Bill whispered.
A name that evoked a memory in Sam of a routine wartime briefing by Union Army and Navy intelligence officers reporting on certain black market kingpins and profiteers operating in the Greater New Orleans and Mississippi River delta zone, who were amassing fortunes dealing in contraband cotton and other smuggled goods; the name of one Barbaroux being on or near the top of that list.
Bill Longley’s feverish rant touched on other such matters, of river pirates and waterfront melees, pitched battles between gunboats manned by the authorities and swamper smugglers, betrayals, poisonings, a fortress that was also a prison, hangings, and hired killers—
There was a woman in it, at the heart of it—there always is, thought Sam with a wry grin common to those who believe themselves to have outgrown such foolishness—Bill’s voice taking on a soft and tender tone those few times he said the name: “Julie.”
Master of the swampland, Barbaroux wallowed in extremes of luxury for himself and his inner circle and terror for all those outside it, carrying on like an emperor of Imperial Rome. Barbaroux surrounded himself with wanton women, hulking bodyguards, musicians, flatterers, fools, flunkies, even a fortune-teller or Conjure Woman as they were called on the bayou. Her name: “Malvina.”
Hearing that name, Malvina, Sam suddenly knew with a shock of certainty that what he’d thought to be the ravings of delirium were nothing but the naked truth, that Something Had to Be Done and that he, Sam Heller, was going to do it, come hell or high water.
FOURTEEN
Bill Longley awoke in a misty limbo.
He had had a rough night but found himself still alive as darkness ebbed and the scene was lightening. His fever had broken, which meant the worst of it had passed.
He sat up suddenly, groaning as pain from his shoulder wound spasmed through him, leaving him breathless and gasping.
Gray-white fog surrounded him, swirling in banks and sheets. Its touch against his skin felt clammy, damp. The haze was thick, like being inside a cloud. Bill could see only a few paces in front of him.
Confused, disoriented, he whipped his head from side to side in search of some touchstone to reality.
The sight of the campfire nearby was something to hold on to, restoring his sense of balance. Its low-burning flames were a muted palette of pastel yellows, oranges, and reds.
A manlike outline floated into view. Blurred at the edges, phantomlike, it came onward, plowing through the fog.
It hunkered down beside Bill, revealing itself to be Sam Heller.
“Oh, it’s you,” Bill said.
“Who’d you think it was?”
Bill’s right hand knuckled his eyes one by one, rubbing the sleep from them, using a very light touch on his narrowed left eye. “For a flash I thought I’d died and gone to heaven and was floating on a cloud. Then I saw you and knew it couldn’t be. No damned Billy Yank will crash those pearly gates.”
“What’re you worried about? You’re headed in the opposite direction anyway,” Sam said.
“Not today.”
“No, I reckon not.”
Sam held a battered tin cup. Steam rose from it, carrying the earthy smell of fresh-made coffee, rich and aromatic.
“Think you’re fit enough to handle this?” he asked, holding out the cup to Bill.
“What’s wrong with it?” Bill asked sharply.
Sam took a long sip, gulping it down. “Nothing’s wrong with it, you suspicious fool. Save for that poison I put in it. Don’t do me any favors. If you don’t want it I’ll drink it. I had my morning cup while you were sleeping, but I could always go for another.”
Westerners do crave their coffee and Bill was no exception. Its rich scent made his mouth water.
“I’ll take a chance,” he said grudgingly. “If Vard and his gang couldn’t kill me, I reckon I can survive your cooking.”
“I always carry a coffeepot and pound bag of coffee in my traveling kit. I can do without a lot of things, but I’ve got to have my morning coffee,” Sam said, handing the tin cup to Bill.
Bill took it with the air of someone accepting it as his rightful due. Sam noted, not for the first time, that the youth was not one for saying, Thanks, or, much obliged.
Bill eased back into his bed of boughs, leaning against a fallen log that served as a backrest while he was sitting on the ground. He raised the cup to his mouth, then paused, thoughtful.
“One more thing—watch who you’re calling ‘fool,’ Bluebelly.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Sam nodded, straight-faced.
“See that you do.”
He took a sip of the steaming black brew. It gave him a jolt—the hair on his head felt like it was standing straight up.
“Whew! I take it back, your coffee might do me in at that,” Bill said.
“Puts hair on your chest,” Sam said brightly.
“You must have a pelt like a brown bear.” Bill nibbled away at the brew, taking small sips over the rim of the cup. It made his heart race and his pulse pound, clearing away some of the cobwebs left strung across his mind by a night of troubled sleep and delirium dreams.
“How about some redeye to brighten this brew?” Bill asked hopefully.
“All gone, I drank it last night,” Sam said.
“You would.”
“Had to do something to pass the time.”
Bill sat there sipping his coffee. With his wits about him, Bill grew more mindful of his mission. Cullen Baker’s date with the hangman loomed ever larger in his thoughts, overshadowing all other concerns.
“When do we get moving?” Bill asked, all at once antsy and eager to be gone.
“Have to wait till this mist comes undone. Can’t break camp when you can’t see what you’re doing,” Sam said.
He took a tobacco pouch from an inside breast pocket of his buckskin vest and opened it. Inside the waterproof carrier bag was a corncob pipe, package of shag tobacco for pipe smokers, match container, and a few other odds and ends.
He stuffed some tobacco in the pipe bowl, tamping it down with a thumb. He struck a white-tipped Lucifer match against one of his boot soles.
/> Sam drew contentedly on the pipe, puffing away. “Something else I can’t do without is tobacco. That first morning pipe is the best.”
He held the pipe out to Bill. “Smoke?”
“No.” Bill must have realized that sounded rude, even for him, for he added, “Not a pipe smoker.”
“Too bad, you’re missing something.”
Bill remembered that he had a couple of cheroots still unsmoked. He unbuttoned his shirt breast pocket and reached inside, fishing around with his index and middle fingers held together. Instead of finding a pair of the six-inch square-cuts he habitually carried, he encountered a mass of loose tobacco leaves all shredded and crumbled.
The cigars must have gotten broken sometime during yesterday’s dust-up with the gang. Bill Longley swore bitterly. The loss of the cheroots burned him as badly as anything that had happened to him in the last twenty-four hours.
“Something wrong?” Sam asked.
“Broken cigars!” Bill said curtly.
It’s the small slights that really sting a man, Bill brooded, like ticks and chiggers that burrow under the skin and nest inside to make a proper job of bedeviling a fellow. He hadn’t realized how much he was looking forward to a smoke until the instant he fully realized that small comfort had been snatched away from him.
“Sure you won’t have a smoke from the pipe?” Sam offered.
“No,” Bill said sharply. “That is, yes, I’m sure I don’t want any, thank you very much.”
Bill’s vexation amused Sam, but the latter kept his face blank and his thoughts to himself.
Bill was not so easily balked, he was mule-stubborn when he set his mind to some purpose. Surely there was a piece of a cigar, some fragment large enough to be smoked.
Sam sat puffing away on his pipe, looking anywhere else but at a red-faced and ever-more frustrated Bill Longley hauling piece after piece of broken cigars from his pocket to toss them into the low-burning campfire when found unsatisfactory.
Finally Bill found a piece that looked like it might do. At last! he thought, fumbling it in fingers grown thick and clumsy by stiffness that was the product of rage. He almost dropped it in his eagerness but made a quick recovery—a gunfighter must have fast hands, after all.
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