Deserter

by Paul Bagdon

  “That right?” Will said. “You’ll take up my rifle and outshoot me with it?”

  “Just as sure as you’re standing here,” Jake said.

  Will chuckled, but the coldness that had set into his eyes made a lie of what his laugh said. “Cocky sumbitch, ain’t you?” He paused for a moment and then grinned again. “I guess I might just as well drink for free tonight on you, Jake. Think you can find ten dollars somewhere?”

  “I can.”

  Will removed two cartridges from the side pocket of his coat and put them on the bar in front of Jake. Each was almost three inches long and as thick as a stout man’s finger. “Here’s how this’ll go,” he said. “You take your two practice rounds and then I pick a target and we both get but a single round. Best shot wins—no arguments. If it’s real close, Weasel here will judge it. He’s a crooked-looking sumbitch for true, but he’s honest. Agreed?”

  Jake picked up the two cartridges. “Agreed,” he said. Will handed the Spencer to him, handling it almost reverently. Jake paid the weapon the same respect. The group of men moved out to the street. About a hundred yards from the saloon the road leading to town took a bend around a heifer-sized boulder, its dusty brown crags and surfaces glinting in places as the sun struck bits of mica. Sinclair fed a cartridge into the Spencer’s breech, worked the lever action, and raised the butt to his shoulder. The rifle was slightly lighter than the Sharps he’d gotten so accustomed to, but he felt the quality and power of the Spencer as he sighted at the boulder. It was immediately apparent to the group what Jake had selected as a target. The report was like that of a cannon. A geyser of dirt erupted an inch to the right of the rock.

  “I’ll give you five to one ’gainst Will, mister,” an observer offered.

  “Me too,” another voice said.

  Jake ejected the spent cartridge and inserted the second one. “Five dollars each?”

  “Five’s good.”

  Jake’s second attempt clipped a cigar-sized piece of rock away at the very edge of the boulder and the slug ricocheted into the distance, its high-pitched whine echoing after it.

  “Nice shootin’,” one of the men said sarcastically. “’Specially since that li’l rock ain’t no bigger’n a goddamn barn.” Sinclair ignored the laughter.

  Jake handed the rifle to the shooter named Will. “What’s your target?” Jake asked.

  “Just a couple pieces of board with bull’s-eyes painted on them, Jake. Nothin’ fancy. We got some already made up inside.” Will turned to the group. “Yappy—you go on an’ set up a couple of the targets out there about 150 yards or so, will you?”

  Yappy hustled back to the saloon almost at a run. “I buy him a drink or two every so often,”Will commented.

  Yappy grabbed his horse from the rail and rode at a gallop out past the boulder a good distance. There he stopped and turned back, waving to Will. Will returned the wave. Yappy took his horse far off to one side. The two boards he’d stuck in the ground a yard apart were a foot and a half tall and about eight inches wide. Toward the top of each a bright red circle was centered.

  “I’ll take the right one,” Will said. He fed a cartridge into his rifle, cocked it, and raised it to position with the ease and understated skill of a true rifleman, not wasting a motion. He barely appeared to aim before he fired. He handed the smoking Spencer to Jake. “Have at it.” He grinned.

  Jake accepted the rifle and another round. He loaded and cocked the weapon, brought it to his shoulder, and peered down the sights. He spread his boots apart a few inches wider and squeezed off his shot. Yappy grabbed the two targets, scratched something onto Will’s with a pencil, and rode back. He reined in and handed the two boards to Will. The one with the W scratched below the bull showed a good shot. The slug had made a clean hole through the dried wood, very slightly off center.

  Jake’s shot had been dead on, the hole precisely centered in the red circle.

  “Well, shit,” Will said. He handed over a ten-dollar bill. The two men who’d offered odds paid twenty-five dollars each, neither of them pleased about it.

  “One more time,” Will grunted.

  Jake nodded. “Sure.”

  Twenty minutes later they were back in the bar,Weasel sliding beers to them. Jake was better than a hundred dollars richer than he’d been before the contest.

  When the group saw that the shooting was finished, they wandered off to poker games or some serious drinking along the bar. Jake and Will stood side by side.

  “Strange coincidence,” Will said, his voice low.

  Jake met his eyes.

  “That big battle and then a man showing up here in a nothin’ little town a week or so later who can shoot the hairs offa fly’s ass without touching the fly, I mean.” Will shook his head. “A fella could almost think you’re on the run, Jake—a deserter.”

  “I suppose a fellow could think that. It doesn’t mean he’d be right about it.”

  “No. It wouldn’t. Thing is, if I was you I’d get a good night’s sleep tonight and go along on my way. Some of the sodbusters and store clerks have blood that’s not only red—it’s white an’ blue, too. If they take to believing you might have run out on ol’ General Grant, there’d be trouble.”

  Jake took a mouthful of beer and swallowed. “What about you? Would I have trouble with you?”

  “I’m just giving you a bit of advice, is all. I don’t give a good goddamn what you are—but I’ll tell you this: I know a sharpshooter when I see one.” He paused for a moment. “Like I said, movin’ on wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

  Jake finished his beer and set the empty schooner in front of him. “Thanks for the match,” he said. Before he turned away, he added quietly, “And the advice.”

  The next morning Jake was standing outside the mercantile when Horace VanGelder unlocked the front door at six-thirty A.M. A half hour later Jake rode from the stable on Mare to pick up his purchases: a sack of coffee, an open-top holster, a can of fancy peaches in heavy syrup, a hundred rounds of ammunition, six cigars, a Barlow folding knife with a very sharp four-inch blade, a pair of denim pants he put on in the store, discarding his old ones, a good quality hat with a wide Western-style brim, a quart of whiskey, and a peppermint stick. His purchases—except for the peppermint stick, which he kept out—fit nicely into his saddlebags. The knife went into his pocket. It was a sorry replacement for his original bowie, he knew. But it’d do.

  Five minutes later he rode out of Penderton, Pennsylvania, headed west, sucking on a stick of candy.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Jake rode for seven days without seeing or hearing another human being. He found good grazing for Mare without really having to look for it: The grass in the breaks between the trees and the areas that surrounded the multitudinous spring-fed small ponds seemed to take great delight in pushing itself up from the fertile, loamy soil. He took a few rabbits and got lucky enough to pick a hen pheasant—summer fat and sublimely tasty—out of the air with his pistol.

  At his evening camp that seventh day he uncorked the whiskey he’d bought in Penderton, lowered the level in the bottle a couple of inches, and checked over his hand. He’d had no pain nor heat in it since he’d left Doc Oliver’s infirmary, and the itching had, for the most part, subsided.

  Jake opened the blade of his Barlow knife and tested its edge with his thumb. It was razor-keen and slightly smeared with light grease. He wiped it on his pant leg and slid the very point of the blade under a suture. It took almost no pressure to cut the stitch; he then set the knife aside and plucked out the bit of black thread. Oliver had used individual sutures rather than a running line of them, even on the longer cuts. In fifteen minutes the procedure was completed. Jake sniffed the still slightly reddish wounds. All he smelled was his fresh, healing skin. He grinned and took another long drink from his bottle. He hadn’t looked at the label before. He’d asked for a quart of rye and the owner of the mercantile had pulled down a bottle from the shelf behind him and added it to the small pil
e of purchases on the counter. Jake inspected the label now. It read:

  VANGELDER’S PENNSYLVANIA RYE WHISKEY

  THE CHOICE OF SOPHISTICATED IMBIBERS

  .............

  BREWED AND AGED IN THE VANGELDER DISTILLERY

  PENDERTON, PENNSYLVANIA

  Sinclair chuckled. “In the mercantile’s basement or maybe a nearby barn,” he said aloud. “’Course a sophisticated imbiber like me knows good whiskey.” He laughed again and drank again. Food didn’t seem important this evening. The fire he’d already built in a small, hand-dug hole was burned down to white ash—perfect for cooking. Still, hunting for small game was more trouble than it was worth. He filled the empty peach can with water from one of his canteens, dropped in a hefty handful of coffee beans, and set the can on the edge of the fire. When his coffee had brewed he used a pair of sticks to take the can off the fire. After an impatient few minutes he picked the container up, drank a few mouthfuls of coffee that was still much too hot to be comfortable, and brought the level back to the top of the can by adding whiskey. The bottle was considerably more than halfway gone. He corked it tightly and set it aside. Funny thing about whiskey, he thought. It takes the sharp edge off things for me, kind of settles everything down a step or two. Other men I’ve met get happy or giddy after a few drinks, laugh like schoolkids at a picnic. Whiskey makes some men belligerent, crazy-mad, looking for a fistfight or worse as soon as they down a few. And lots of the soldiers I’ve met don’t find happiness or even fun in drinking. It makes them sad—they go on and on about their mothers or wives or homes or children or dogs or whatever the hell when they have a snootful. Jake stretched out next to the dying campfire, his head leaning against the seat of his saddle, watching the stars and the skimpy luminescent clouds that drifted past the window in the limbs and leaves far above him.

  Pa had his bourbon and branch water at the end of each day. He sometimes had a second, but that was rare. He never showed the effects, although there was always a good four fingers in his tumbler along with the sweet water. The only change in him was the smoky, masculine scent of the bourbon on his breath. He’d sit out on the veranda during the summer months and inside during the cooler or rainy times. Sometimes he’d light his pipe and gray-blue snippets of tobacco smoke hung in the air around him.

  Pa would be ashamed of me . . .

  “Shit,” Jake grunted and sat up. After a moment he reached over and picked up the bottle of Penderton’s Best.

  I should have run the day after I signed on. I wish I had.

  Days no longer seemed to be separate and distinct blocks of time. There was no difference to them beyond the hard facts of day and night. He and Mare covered ground as if that’s specifically what they were born to do, but there was no hurry to their travel, no anticipation of arriving somewhere. They were merely moving, and that was good enough for Jake Sinclair.

  Jake bought ammunition for his pistol—he practiced with it every day—and coffee and a few cigars and another bottle in a place that was more of a clearing than a town. He had no idea what state the place was located in, and didn’t care. The Smith & Wesson .22 had become as much a part of his body as his bowie knife had once been. He’d lubricated the holster he bought in Penderton with the greasy fat of a porcupine he’d killed, stripped the skin from and cooked, and the leather was supple and held the pistol snugly. Jake took to tying the holster lower on his leg than would a cowhand or city denizen or farmer, so that when he stood, the very tips of his fingers grazed the bone grips. That made sense, he thought. When the time came that he needed the .22, he’d need it quickly.

  He’d given up shaving long ago, and his hair was well down over his shoulders. He hacked off a few inches of beard with his Barlow knife when its length bothered him, and he did the same with his hair, although cutting the growth in the back of his head was harder than shearing off the growth in front when it reached below his eyebrows. He bathed every so often when he began to smell himself. Jake crossed roads and wagon trails at times but saw no reason to follow them. They’d inevitably lead to people, and he had no need for people just then. He wondered a bit about feeling as he did, but didn’t spend a great deal of time worrying about it. He realized that in truth he had no true destination; he believed that eventually he’d get to Texas and meet up with his partner’s family, but the mission no longer had the urgency it once possessed. He was riding for the sake of riding, moving vaguely west, eating when he was hungry, sleeping when he was tired, with no plan whatsoever for the next day or week or year.

  Jake Sinclair’s future had been pretty much locked into place the day he was born, the day his mother died bringing him into the world. Jake would live a structured boyhood, guided by his father. He’d go off to college, come home, find a suitably Southern wife, and take over his father’s thousand-acre plantation upon the old man’s death. He would be wealthy—rich, actually—just as his father was. His cotton and sugarcane crops would continue to be bountiful, to make him yet richer. He’d hold clear title to over three hundred slaves. He and his suitably Southern wife would start a family and the circle would be repeated, the plantation passed on, the great-grandchildren of slaves now living on the property of Jake’s future family after his death. Jake knew all this was true because his father had told him that it was. The War of Northern Aggression never figured into the equation.

  Jake’s father had meetings at his home long before Sumter. The other plantation owners, sipping whiskey, smoking cigars, and enjoying the Sinclair hospitality, weren’t nearly as wrought over the discussions that encompassed state’s rights, “those lunatic abolitionists,” “Abe Lincoln’s perfidy,” “and the federal government’s desire to crush the Southern way of life,” as was Leighton Sinclair.

  Jake sighed and did his best to push the memories from his mind. It was better—far easier on the nerves—to simply enjoy the cool, crystalline clarity of the autumn day, the riotous colors of the changing leaves, the pure smells of a season rapidly moving from the heavy doldrums of late summer to the crispness of the fall season. Mare had begun getting fidgety about midday. After so much time alone with his horse, Jake knew her well, knew when she was content or tired or frisky, when she required a few minutes of stroking along her neck and rubbing between her ears. This afternoon she’d seemed nervous. Her ears were almost constantly in quick, jerky motion, flicking here and then there, pointing at nothing other than the normal things of the woods, snorting frequently. When he came upon a small water hole with some good grazing around it, Jake decided to rein in for the day. His horse’s lack of ease had been transmitted to him to a minor degree and he found himself starting at the quick scolding of a bird or an unexpected rustle of a small animal in the brush. It was too fine of a day to argue with Mare. He hobbled her, stripped off her saddle, and left her to graze. He walked out of the clearing breathing deeply of the pristine air, half wondering when he’d come across his nightly meal.

  When the cock pheasant erupted from scrub cover five feet in front of Jake, the frantic drumming of the big bird’s wings was as loud as a cannon and as unforeseen as a thunderclap on a sunny day. Jake’s hand snaked to his side and before the bird was ten feet away two slugs slammed into it, flinging it cartwheeling to the ground. Sinclair grinned as he replaced the two spent cartridges and reholstered his pistol. The draw had been automatic, reflexive, and his shooting damned near perfect. Plus, he had his evening meal—and a fine one, at that. He gathered up the pheasant and carried it by its feet back to where he’d left Mare.

  Digging a small fire pit with a stick and his hands and lining it with stones didn’t take long. He placed dry wood carefully in the pit, started his fire, and, in the brush, cleaned the pheasant. He washed the meat in the water hole and cut it into chunks that were thick enough to skewer. After doing so he picked up a couple more armfuls of wood; the nights were getting chilly.

  Mare was moving about more than she ordinarily did. Jake watched her for a few moments as he roasted the me
at over the fire. To salve his own unusual nervousness he drew the Winchester from the saddle scabbard and placed it at his side on dry ground, away from the fire. The bird’s meat was sweet and tasty and dripped fat into the flames, turning the outside crisp and sealing in the gamy juices. Jake barely noticed how fine a meal it was and by the time he was flinging the remnants into the brush, he was cursing. Whatever was bothering his horse was now nagging at him. His senses were alert, on guard, and he found himself clenching and unclenching his fists, his eyes every so often swinging to the 44.40. When he heard the sounds far behind him in the direction from which he’d come, it was almost a relief. The bell of a steel horseshoe striking a rock rang clear and true and carried easily through the thick woods. Jake listened intently. There were a few of them, he figured, and they weren’t wasting time. As he strained to hear, eyes tightly closed in concentration, the sounds became more distinct: the thud of hooves, a bit of a man’s exclamation, the snapping of twigs and small branches. Mare squealed and began to pitch, fighting against the hobbles.

  The blow that took Jake down came from behind him as he rushed to his horse. He saw—didn’t actually see, but instead, felt—a brilliant flash of light that encompassed everything around him, that was far too screamingly bright to see past or through. He dropped as though lifeless, face first, and didn’t move, didn’t feel the blood rushing from the tear in the skin on the back of his head.

  “If this boy swings, I want first say on his horse an’ saddle, Sheriff.” The voice seemed hoarse and sort of far away, but the words were clear. Jake opened his eyes. Ground passed beneath him and there was sweat on the belly of the horse he was draped over, facedown.

  “Too late—least about the mare. I already got a pretty good saddle. I’ll have to think on that.” The answering voice sounded nearer and there was a slight chuckle behind it. “I guess whether or not he’ll stretch a rope is up to the judge, ain’t it? Come to think on it, that saddle is a good piece of work—better’n what I’m riding.”