by Jeff Rovin
Their cries brought Cuthbert out. The leader was smoking a cigar, and he stared through the smoke at the bundle of dead man still athwart McWilliams’ horse. He threw the smoke aside out of respect.
“What happened?” he asked quietly—though his dark, ridged brow and scowling mouth were anything but gentle.
McWilliams dismounted and, in respectful tones, explained what had taken place on Peak Road. Pound remained silent. Since he was not one of the original Red Hunters, he did not offer intelligence and reconnaissance unless asked. It had nothing to do with his skin color but with the history the others had together. He accepted that as proper and natural.
When McWilliams had finished, Cuthbert was seethingly quiet for a long moment before he stepped over to look at the body.
He stood beside the corpse, which was draped over the back of McWilliams’ horse. The head had been wrapped in the buckskin jacket the man had been wearing. It was thick with blood that was still plip-plopping on the ground. There were scurrying sounds out by the entry and along the path, vermin already feeding on the blood that had spilled from the wound.
At last, Cuthbert spoke.
“One of us gone,” he said mournfully, his face downturned, his voice falling onto the stones beneath his feet. “Lost in the line of duty. That’s something. I always thought— Well, this being Grady, I always thought he would die over a card game. He would have liked knowing he went like a soldier.” Cuthbert’s eyes were red when they looked back at McWilliams. “What he would not have liked is that the coward who did this still lives—and was allowed to ride off on the horse that belonged to Grady!”
“Sir, this man Stockbridge believed it to be stolen from a fella name of Ben Keeler,” McWilliams said softly.
Only Cuthbert’s military training stopped him from slapping the speaker with open disgust. He moved to within inches of the man’s cold breath. The captain spit a piece of cigar wrapping to the side. It landed on McWilliams’ sleeve. He left it.
“I don’t know or give a ripping damn who Ben Keeler is or was,” Cuthbert hissed. “I do know that a Hunter is dead, and the man who killed him isn’t. That will be fixed. Where did he go?”
“He left going south along the trail. I got the impression he was going to shadow the folks in the wagon in case we came after him.”
“Which you should have done!” the captain said.
“I’ll find him,” McWilliams vowed. “I swear I’ll find him. Grady was my friend, too.”
DeLancy came forward. “Captain, I read about this man Stockbridge. Dr. Vengeance, they call him. Carries a double-barreled—”
“A double-barreled what?” Cuthbert turned on him. “I don’t care if he’s got a twelve-pound Howitzer strapped to his back! He is one man with one gun, and he’s looking after a woman and children! How is that a problem for the bloody Red Hunters?”
The others stood in still, shamed silence.
Cuthbert laid a hand on Foxborough’s dead shoulder as if it were a Bible and he was taking a vow. “I want the killer’s body right here, living or lifeless, ready to feed to the wolves!”
DeLancy did not bother reciting what else he had read. He nodded to the captain and stepped back.
Cuthbert turned away from the horse and its dead rider. He looked at every face in turn, noted the grief in each, though with McWilliams it was mixed with abject shame.
“The name of the family he was with,” Cuthbert said without looking at McWilliams or Pound, “it was Keeler?”
“Yes, sir,” McWilliams answered.
“Fine. I was going to go and visit Molly for the night. I’ll leave early, just as soon as we’ve seen to our fallen comrade. While I’m down there, I’ll get a bead on the family and see what anyone has seen or heard of this Dr. Vengeance.”
“You want I should come with you to town?” DeLancy asked.
“To do what? Take a bath?”
“No, sir. I was just thinking we could both ask around—”
“I can hunt a man with a double-barrel Parker Brothers by myself. Thank you,” the former officer said. He snickered. “You see, Sergeant? I do read, sometimes.”
“Captain, that man—he didn’t face Grady,” Pound said. “What we could tell, he snuck under him and blew off part of the ledge he was on.”
“So he’s a coward,” Cuthbert said. “Maybe the newspaper lied about that showdown, dressed it up for the readers back east. So much the better.”
“What I mean, sir, is he may come at you from hiding, or in the dark.”
“I will not let him,” Cuthbert said. He looked around again. “None of us will! We will be as vigilant as if we expected him to come riding right into New Richmond at any moment!”
Cuthbert’s eyes returned to the black man.
“You, mister,” he said, his eyes sliding to the other man, “and you, Corporal McWilliams, will be going nowhere today.”
McWilliams stiffened and seemed to want to object but thought better of it. The other men seemed on Cuthbert’s side, even Pound.
“After you bury Grady, you will stay out of my sight until I bring in the man who did this. Do you have any questions about those orders, brothers?”
“No, sir,” both men replied as one, McWilliams without enthusiasm.
Cuthbert inhaled his grief and stood a moment longer beside the body of his comrade. Flies were beginning to circle. The captain shooed them off and then slowly, almost reluctantly, pressed his right palm on a bloody section of the jacket. Walking back to the cabin, stomping hard on the still smoldering cigar, Cuthbert lingered at the threshold and pressed a red handprint on the outside of the oak door.
“This is the first red patch of one of our own men,” he said without turning. “There will not be another.”
Then he went inside to prepare for his journey, a trip that would take the better part of the afternoon.
Outside, the other men gathered around the horse and its grisly cargo. Their cold breath, expressions frozen in bereavement, and their drab winter colors made them seem deader than Grady Foxborough.
“Wasn’t there no way you could have shot him?” vacant-eyed Tunney asked of McWilliams.
“Even if he took you down, where was your honor?” DeLancy asked. It was an earnest question. He truly did not understand.
“I wanted to fire! Lord Jesus, I almost did. But—Woodrow, you saw; you warned me—that shotgun would’ve cut me and Woodrow in half before I could have shouldered the carbine.”
DeLancy’s eyes rolled toward the black man. “That true?”
“Which part? Yeah, Liam was going to draw. Yeah, I told him we’d both likely be shot off our horses.” The big man stepped forward, his hand on the hilt of his knife. “I’m no coward, and I will gut any man who says so,” he said, and nodded toward the cabin door. “But then you’d have three patches up there and no idea who did it or where he went.”
“Where did he go?” Tunney asked.
“We didn’t see,” McWilliams said. “He was behind us, damn it. He made us ride off.”
Pound gave his companion a disapproving look. It wasn’t the only one. As Baker joined the others, every eye, every tightly closed mouth, every fist said the same thing: You should have died trying.
All of them knew, without saying it, that the Red Hunters could have survived three deaths easier than two cowards.
Woodrow Pound broke the silence by heading toward the toolshed.
“Liam, let’s take care of Grady,” he said.
There was more than a touch of anger in his voice and in his posture as well. McWilliams had blamed him, the Red Hunters outsider, for the fact that they were both alive. They had survived the encounter because Pound had urged caution instead of stupid Southern pride and backbone.
You did that with Freddy, and Freddy didn’t listen, he thought.
Fr
eddy Hat had been named for the tattered straw hat he wore over his head in the field to keep out the sun and over his face at night to block the torchlight when he slept. He had no last name that he knew of. In the ledgers they just recorded “Freddy.”
Freddy looked after his fellow Africans. He used to admonish Pound as he did all the male field slaves, “Move careful, ’cause you don’t get another chance in life.” Freddy was older by about ten years. Shortly before Pound was bought, Freddy had tried to escape while the slaves were bathing in a river. He was caught by whites and pulled down by dogs, and when the overseer caught up, he slashed Freddy’s left hamstring on the spot. The slave had the choice of bleeding to death in the rushing waters or dragging himself back to the South Carolina cotton plantation.
He wanted to live. With his tattered shirt tied tightly just above his ankle, he half stumbled, half crawled back.
Woodrow Pound, too, had wanted to live—even when he made the same escape on the same river in the same way. He did that for himself and for Freddy, who had died under the lash the week before. Freddy had really died on that river, his spirit crushed, but he had lived on for just over a year.
Pound had used that year to make a knife. He made it from a spike that had been used to hold a slave chain to a rock, working it out with a tenpenny nail. He had worked the iron out and over the next thirteen months rubbed it over and over on any stone he could find until it was deadly sharp. He killed the first dog that had caught him, then threw its dead carcass at the others in the pack. They all stopped to chew it up while he got away.
“Why’d you lie about where Stockbridge went?” Pound asked as they made their way to the shed.
“Got my reasons,” McWilliams answered, and that was all he said. “Just shut up. You done enough talking.”
“Me?”
“I wanted to shoot him. I should’ve took him.”
“You didn’t see you.”
McWilliams glared at the other. “What the hell does that mean?”
“You sat there like a statue. You hadn’t decided nothing.”
McWilliams stopped and grabbed the front of the taller man’s coat. “You saying I’m yellow?”
Pound slapped his large hands on those of the other man and pried them away. He held them tight so McWilliams had to stay where he was.
“I’m saying that you and the others with your Southern swagger—you’re all ambush fighters. You never had to face a man with a whip or a dog whose leash he was eager to let go. I learned to pick my time. Back there on Peak Road? That wasn’t it. Your life, brother? It was yours to spend if you wanted. What I didn’t want to risk was my life on you outdrawing a man who carried that custom shotgun like it was part of him.”
Pound released the other man and turned toward the shed. McWilliams stood there a moment, staring at the ground, seeing the moment again.
“No,” he said softly.
But in his brain he said, Yes. He had been afraid to test himself against that man. To turn and raise the carbine and aim and fire—while facing those double barrels that had scattershot Grady Foxborough to the next world.
With the sudden weight of shame bowing his shoulders, McWilliams continued on to the shed.
The interment was slow and somber, with picks chewing up the hard earth and just McWilliams and Pound tending to the chore. The other men did not want to be around them. McWilliams muttered about being ashamed, and Pound told him to shut up.
“We ain’t ever gonna be forgave,” McWilliams said.
“By who? Them or you?”
McWilliams frowned. He had not thought of that. “Both.”
“What d’you want to do, go hang yourself from the hayloft?”
“No,” McWilliams said. “I got a different idea.”
“Yeah? What?”
“That’s my business. I had your advice enough for one day.”
“Sure. I’ll be quiet, with you the loser.”
After the picks had loosened several feet of hard soil, the men used the shovels. With solemnity and respect, and all but Cuthbert watching from the windows, the men removed the body from McWilliams’ horse and laid their dead brother in his grave. Only when the uneven, six-by-two hole had been covered and patted down did the others come out. There was complete silence in the circle until Cuthbert said words over the grave.
“Lord, we give you the remains of our beloved brother, and we vow to send your way the man who did this. It is our hope that you accept the soul of Grady Foxborough and consign the eternal spirit of the bastard who killed him to hell.”
The leader of the Red Hunters was ready to go by then. He had his overnight grip, which included pearl-handled twin Colts in their holsters—worn guns upset delicate Molly—and his horse was saddled. He went to the stable and departed without comment, riding off with a fury the others had not seen in eighteen years—not in the War, but in the shameful peace, the news of which Colonel Moore had brought to them.
DeLancy, Tunney, and Baker went inside, followed by Pound. McWilliams stood by his horse, his hand on the bridle, his eyes on the ground.
“No, Woodrow,” he said under his breath, “it will not be Liam McWilliams hanging from the hayloft.”
Somber and decided, McWilliams climbed into the saddle. There was a reason he had not told Cuthbert that Dr. Vengeance Stockbridge had remained on the trail and headed east. He did not want Cuthbert to run off in pursuit. The captain was angry, but he was also a careful man. He used to plan their attacks after getting as much information as possible.
He would do that now. But because he was mad, he would hurry to do that now. He would take the fastest way down from the uplands, a turn to the north, headed higher, then a winding slope straight down. It was steeper and more dangerous but faster. The route was prone to rockslides, rutted with runoff, and home to bobcats. It was not only faster, but it went around the hundreds of acres of homestead and would put him closer to Buzzard Gulch, the town where Molly worked. It was a place where Cuthbert could ask around about the Keelers and where they lived, maybe find out from Sheriff Neal something about the man with the shotgun.
McWilliams rode off. He did not look back to see if the others were watching. He did not care. Right now he was not a Red Hunter; he was Liam McWilliams with a stain on his name—a stain that could only be washed off with blood.
He would win back the respect of the captain and his brothers—even if it killed him.
CHAPTER SEVEN
John Stockbridge and the Keelers had reached the point where the foothills became a plain. They had been mostly silent on the passage down so that Stockbridge and Rachel could pay attention to their footing. It was an unseen fissure, hidden among weeds, that had spilled them before. Lenny helped, keeping a careful watch.
The only one who spoke was Mrs. Keeler.
“I want to go back for him,” Mrs. Keeler murmured every now and then on the way down. “We must go back.”
“We’ll see to that presently,” Stockbridge had replied, just once. “First, we’ve got to put some distance between us and those men.”
The woman continued talking, as if she were in a trance. The others let her be.
They had stopped at the start of the level trail only long enough for Stockbridge to swap horses. Stockbridge wanted to be on his trusted mount in case there was pursuit. Having left the foothills behind, they were now on level ground with a clear view to about a mile back, where the path curved into the trees. They tied the Palomino to the back of the wagon, Mrs. Keeler eyeing it as if she expected her husband to appear magically.
They were riding among boulders and cacti, about the only things above ground level here. Stockbridge was riding a pace ahead of the buckboard, looking back at Lenny and Rachel—and their subdued mother, in the rear—but he was really keeping an eye on whatever might be behind them on the trail. He knew that if he kept tur
ning around to check, it would make the Keelers nervous. This way was better.
With Ben’s horse behind her, Mrs. Keeler started up again with a different cant.
“Where are you?” she said to the shadow in her mind. “Where could you be?”
Since she wasn’t asking anyone other than herself, and since the question was unanswerable at present, the others said nothing.
“What book were you reading, son?” Stockbridge asked Lenny as cheerfully as he could muster. “The one that fell over the side?”
“I wasn’t reading a book, Doctor,” Lenny said, puffing his chest a little. “I was writing one.”
“Oh?”
Rachel said, “My pa reads a lot to us when he’s home. While he’s gone, Ma schools us. She taught us how to read and write.”
“Good things to know.”
“I got bored just writing words, so I strung ’em together,” Lenny said.
“Makes sense. What were you writing about?”
“A dog we had, Terrier Joe. He was killed fighting coyotes. I wrote about some of the adventures I’m sure he had in secret. All dogs do, I reckon. I drew pictures, too.” He tapped his temple. “I remember most of it, though. I can do it again.”
“Good lad.”
“Did you ever have a dog, Dr. Stockbridge?” Rachel asked.
His voice was wistful when he said, “Once I did.”
“Or maybe I should write about you, Doctor,” Lenny said after some consideration.
“I see. But then it wouldn’t be doggerel.”
“Sir?”
Stockbridge smiled. “I was making a joke. That’s what you call a kind of fun-loving story.”
Rachel smiled. “And Lenny’s story was about a dog. That’s funny.”
Mrs. Keeler crawled forward, bundled in the blankets. “Dr. Stockbridge?”