They fell into line side by side. “Yeah, I guess so. Just promise me you won’t trot out that brain when we set to torching that house and barn.”
“I’m fine. Let’s just get it over with.”
They rode on a few minutes more under the gold half-moon.
“You don’t suppose anybody’ll be there, do you?”
“Let me guess—that brain of yours is working hard to get you to turn around?”
“No, I’m just wonderin’.”
“We’ll only be setting fire to the boss’s own property. But yeah, I reckon that old man will be around somewhere. And that other one too. The one you dragged on back there, remember?”
“How’d you know about that?”
“I am in the employ of a very wealthy man who pays me well to pay attention to everything going on. How could you think I’d not know?”
A few minutes more of silence passed with only the soft footfalls of the horses along the worn lane, then, “You tell Tarleton?”
The silence was uncomfortable. “Nah, what good would that do?”
“Thanks.”
Ten minutes later, the farmhouse came into view. The men dismounted, tied their horses to the split-rail fence that marked the entrance to the spread’s lane.
“There it is,” whispered Reginald. “You with me on this?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Then get that canvas bundle of torches over here and we’ll light ’em when we get closer. Trick is to not get skylined before the light of the flames.”
“I have been down this road before a time or two with you, you know.”
“Way you were carrying on back there, Shep, I thought maybe I’d have to leave you on the trail, pick you up on my way back.”
“You best be kidding.”
“Yeah, yeah. Let’s hit the house first, then the barn.”
“I want to check for any animals in there.”
“You’re worried about animals, but not any people in the house?”
“I’m hoping there won’t be anyone in the house.”
Shepler made a quick pass through the barn, saw nothing in the stalls that looked like a horse, and on his way out the back door saw a paddock with two or three dark shapes, moving close to the fence, alert, maybe looking for a feed. Good, at least they weren’t in the barn.
He rasped a match along the bottom side of his trousers and set it to the torch. The ragged head, soaked in lamp oil, caught with a fwoomp! and for a moment blinded the black-clad stranger. Then his customary single-minded purpose for his task kicked in and he dashed through the building touching dry hay, kicking piles of it close to the planks sheathing the barn’s exterior. Within seconds, it seemed, the broad structure became a smoking, crackling thing, alive with darting light and dancing flame. It always amazed Shepler that way. He took it all in for a brief second, then dashed out the big door, the heat and smoke suddenly closing in on him.
He did the same around two sides of the structure before he couldn’t stand to get near it any longer.
He looked far to his left and saw the once-handsome log home, a long, one-floor structure with a full front porch, take flame all around the outside.
There were no shouts from inside. He hoped no one was in there. It wasn’t as if they’d been given any sort of warning. The boss was in a snit, and when he was cross, there wasn’t a man or beast that the rich Englishman wouldn’t hesitate to lay low. Burning out a rancher, former owner or no, wasn’t something he would think twice about. Double the anger with that spitfire of a girl, and the situation had the makings of a real conflagration, a word Reginald had taught him. That was one big word, and for fires set in the name of Lord Tarleton, it seemed the perfect word to use.
It looked as if his partner had the house pretty well blazing. Cold comfort, but something nonetheless that Shepler could call to mind on those cold winter nights when he couldn’t sleep. Those nights when he’d regret all the things he’d done in the name of Lord Tarleton, all the things that the law always seemed to back, no matter how they nested in his throat, choking him in the still, cold hours after midnight. All in the name of money.
At least he could tell himself that he hadn’t actually been the one to set flame to the girl’s house—just in case it came to pass that there had been someone in there who hadn’t made it out.
* * *
Before he knew it, Reginald’s partner was beside him, smiling in the glow of the flames, the sound of crackling wood being devoured by fire, brighter than anything had a right to be, it seemed.
“Let’s go!” said Reginald, not bothering to whisper any longer, the sound of the fire fast overtaking them.
Shepler looked back once as they loped up the lane to their horses, the twin black beasts dancing and straining their reins. He hoped they didn’t pull free. How to explain that—afoot not far from a fire, in a place he had no claim on.
He looked back again and saw that the house had become fully consumed by the flames. They curled up and over the roof edges. The chimney belched long flames straight up it; the porch had already begun to sag. He thought he heard shouts but couldn’t be certain. A lot of times logs would do that very thing—make sounds like people, but it was the deep-buried pitch popping and the logs checking, twisting, cracking like gunfire.
The fire spread in runners along the ground to little outbuildings, probably the privy out back, then to something that looked like a smokehouse, the log corral that stood before the barn, empty now. He heard horses and what sounded like a mule braying.
Shepler stopped, his horse’s reins in his hand. “Hey, you hear that?”
The other man, already mounted, said, “What? Get on your horse. We did what the boss wanted. The place is his. The land is his. And mostly he didn’t want to give that ranch girl he’s hotted up over any reason to come back here. So we just gave him what he wanted, right?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
They thundered back down the lane that would lead them back to Klinkhorn proper. A quarter mile later, Reginald fished out a nearly full quart bottle of bonded whiskey from his saddlebag and let out a yip. He glugged back a few heavy swallows, then handed it to his gloomy partner. “Drink up, Shep. We did it all quick and easy. No sign of us left behind.”
His partner snatched up the whiskey and pulled on it until he ran out of breath. Then he gasped for air and handed it back.
“Take it easy on that stuff. You’re liable to regret it come morning.” He smiled and took another pull himself.
It was a long time before Shepler couldn’t see the orange glow in the sky behind them, growing and seeming to almost advance on them. It would be a much longer time before he could forget what he’d just helped to do. The knot in his gut told him it had been a bad thing. And the little bird in his brain told him that if he found out there were people in that house, it would be a very bad thing indeed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
The sneeze awoke him. Tucker had never before sneezed in his sleep, though anything could have happened when he’d been drunk for two years, and he might not ever have known. But this was something else. It left a feeling of blood in his mouth, and something more . . . Smoke?
A whooshing sound above his head pulled him from sleep with the force of a gut punch. Fire? Where was he? The house, Emma’s house . . . on fire? As if to answer his sleep-dazed question, he saw long snaking fingers of flame digging at the tops of the walls, clawing their way under the closed door of the room he’d been staying in—her uncle’s room, the very room of the man who had died in his arms, Emma’s uncle. There were other rooms—Emma, Arliss . . .
Tucker spun from the bed, fully wake, the heat stoking sudden burning sensations at him, laving him with waves that with each new assault pained him more and more. The room filled with smoke, and as he worked to tug on his boots, knowi
ng he wouldn’t stand a chance if he ran through the flaming floor in his bare feet, Tucker screamed with all the power he could muster out of his lungs for Emma and Arliss. He shouted their names and the word “Fire!” over and over, not letting himself stop. The second boot was half on and he bolted, stomping into it, as he snatched a smoldering blanket off the bed and draped it over his head. He bent low and battered his way into the log wall to the right of the door, then used the blanket to grab the steel latch and fling the door wide.
Hot snapping flames whipped at him and for a moment he backed off, considered driving himself through the small window on the back wall of the room. But he knew if he did he’d never get back into the house.
Still shouting, Tucker hugged the wool blanket tight around him and rushed into the heat. It was the most difficult thing he’d had to do since burying his wife and daughter. He called upon them now, in the maw of the raging firestorm, prayed for their help. He had to get Emma and Arliss out, had to know that they were safe.
He knew she was in her room. He hadn’t heard a peep from her since she locked herself in there in the afternoon, but Arliss assured him she did that from time to time when she wanted to be alone. “Girl thoughts,” he’d said, “are the deepest ones of all. Best let her be, son.” And so Tucker had abided by the old man’s sage wisdom, given that Arliss had known Emma her entire life, had been like a second or third father to her.
All these fragments of thoughts and more ricocheted in Tucker’s brain as he staggered, crouching low, along the short hallway toward the far door. It was Emma’s, and he kicked at it, tried the knob. It swung inward. But the room was a roiling mass of smoke and flame. He felt agonizing pain sneak up behind him and sink its fangs into his back and legs. It was fire devouring the blanket. He held it away from his legs as he lurched about the room, more by feel than sight. He felt the edge of the bed, hot to the touch, the wood frame raising blisters on his hands, grabbed at it, felt the buckled edges of a ticked mattress, but it had been scorched and curled now, shot through with flames.
The smoke became unbearable and he realized he was choking and coughing all at once. He tried to shout her name, lunged around the small room like a madman and couldn’t feel a thing that might be the girl. He dropped to his knees and scrabbled all over the floor with his flaming, blistered hands for her body, any sign of her. He rousted the flaming mattress, wondering if she had tried to climb under the bed for safety. It didn’t seem like her to give up that way, though. Emma was nothing if not a fighter. Tucker screamed her name, but his voice was drowned out by a full wall of rushing flame.
Then he felt something on his back. It hit his head, harder and harder in the same spot. He turned and dimly, beside him, he saw a shape, blackened and short, punching him, grabbing at him, screaming something.
“Arliss?”
“Come . . . on! Out! Out!”
“Emma . . . can’t find Emma!”
“Die . . . we’ll die!”
The next moments were to be his last. Tucker was sure of it. The stink of burning hair—maybe it was the wool blanket, he thought in passing—filled his nostrils, seemed to fill his entire head. Smoke clouded everything he might otherwise be able to see, and the sounds of whooshing walls of flame soon drowned out all the shouts of the two men huddling together. Tucker could barely move, but he knew that if he didn’t they would both soon die.
But a bold image of his cherished Rita, cradling little Sam in her strong arms, their faces young and well and healthy, smiled at him. Love and warmth and light filled him deep inside, almost like a renewing, life-giving force, as if he’d been quenched and drenched in water, and that feeling of power and hopefulness, however slight, was enough to force him to bend low and scoop up the leaning little man against him, quivering and blackened and unable to stand.
Tucker struggled back through the room’s door, now a wall of flame, and on through to the end of what had once been a hallway. He was equally distant from the front of the house and the side door, but he kept going for the side because it lay before him and required no further thought than to get out.
He’d never experienced such pain, and he knew he was squealing like a beast in its death throes. He had heard animals make that sound at their end, had seen a man’s hands slip into a scalding pot on a pig butchering day once a long time ago. The man, a strapping brute half again wider at the shoulder than the average man, had screamed a high-pitched sound like a baby pig being tortured. They all saw why he trembled and howled and wet himself: Layers of skin, from the elbows to the tips of his fingers, had sloughed off. As they watched in surprise, ghostly gelatinous gloves flopped free from the man’s raw arms and into the bubbling, scalding cauldron.
And then Tucker and Arliss were outside into the cool air, away from the fire. Each step brought them farther from it, but Tucker couldn’t walk much more. He was seizing up, and felt as if flames were dancing on him. The night was as bright as a sunny early morning. He looked down at Arliss. The old man lay huddled tight to him as if he were a baby. His long, droopy mustache was a blackened, curled thing and his hair was matted and curled tight to his head.
Tucker dropped to his knees and lowered Arliss to the cool earth. “Arliss, can you hear me?”
The old man’s eyes blinked open. Tucker didn’t think he saw any lashes there, but it was hard to tell, so blackened with soot was he. “Arliss, can you hear me?”
“I hear ya. By golly, boy, I’ll wager you’ve looked prettier. You look like you’ve been through a house fire.”
Tucker wanted to smile at the man’s undefeatable resilience, but all he could think of was Emma.
“Arliss, I . . . I can’t find her. I have to go back in.”
Tucker made to stand, tried to slide his arms out from under the old man, but Arliss grasped his arm with surprising strength.
“Boy, she’s gone. It’s okay.”
“How can you say that?” Tucker heard himself shouting, trying to stand. “She’s in that house, somewhere. Maybe she was in the front room. It would be better protected there, right? Maybe behind the stove, maybe she hid down behind it, where it was cooler, somehow. . . .” Tucker stood, limped a few paces toward the house.
“Samuel! Leave it be!”
Half of the house collapsed then, blasting a fresh onslaught of heat and sparks and hunks of flaming wood at them. “Emma! Emma!” He lurched forward another step.
“She’s in town, boy! I tried to tell you—she ain’t in there!” Arliss’s voice came out strained and weak, but loud enough for Tucker to hear. He staggered back to the old man, who’d tried to drag himself along the ground to reach Tucker.
“What? What are you saying, Arliss? Is she okay? Is Emma safe?”
The old man nodded, capable of nothing more than that, then collapsed. Tucker made his way back to him, lay down beside him. “You’re telling me the truth, Arliss?”
“Yes, boy. She left a note. Said she was going to town, give her answer . . . to that damnable heathen. I knowed there was nothing to be done. I hate it, but . . . she’s growed . . . and a damn Farraday. . . .”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
When Tucker first awoke, he touched his head, felt the damage of the fire in all its horrible intensity. What he saw, facing the wreckage of the log home, was heartbreaking. The house lay, an unrecognizable thing with the few remaining smoking timbers thrust upward at the gray early-dawn sky, clouds pregnant with heavy snow.
Beside him, Arliss stirred, groaned with a hoarse, gagging sound that grew worse, until the old man was forced to his knees and hands, heaving clear liquid, bits of soot and black nibs threading from his blistered mouth.
Every move seemed an unendurable agony, and yet Tucker knew he must. He had to figure out how this could have happened.
“Water . . . Sam . . . need water.”
Tucker nodded. They
had to get to the pump. It had been near the barn. Arliss began a slow, painful trek on his hand and knees toward the pump that lay beyond the remains of the house. With a mighty effort of will, Tucker pushed himself to his feet. He stood swaying for a moment, then said, “Stay here, Arliss. . . . I’ll bring it to you. Wait here.” He staggered forward and did his best to not look at the smoking house but could not help it. Flames were licking like hiding serpents at various spots of the ruin.
Little was left recognizable. The kitchen cookstove still stood, its few lengths of tin pipe long gone. It looked oddly headless, timbers leaning against it. He supposed there was little else salvageable in the place, but there would be time for such considerations far later. Right now he must get to the pump and bring Arliss a drink. In what? He almost laughed at his foolishness. He had nothing to carry water in.
He heard a noise behind him and saw the old man, now upright on his two feet, walking in slow, measured steps beside the house. Tucker bit the inside of his mouth and felt blisters give way. He spat viscous liquid and kept moving toward the pump. The wooden tank remained mostly unburned and half-filled with water. The surface of the dark liquid lay mottled with floating fragments of charred wood, blackened bits of unrecognizable debris.
He reached out for the pump handle and saw his hand for the first time, a blackened thing pocked with blisters and lesions. He grasped the handle and worked it until, squawking, it gave way to motion and he was able to work up enough gumption to coax water from the earth. Soon clear water ran into the tub.
Tucker had no idea how desperate he was for the stuff. He drove his face under it, gagged as the cold sensation of the water poured on his face, choked as it filled his mouth, ran out again, spattered in his crusted eyes. Soon Arliss joined him and the men had an orgy of feasting on water until their bellies distended with it. Their blistered bodies, the clothes they had on—long-handles on each of them, in some places seared onto their hides—were sopping wet, their burned hair coming off in bits, loosened from their scorched scalps by the water.
Ralph Compton Tucker's Reckoning (9781101607770) Page 20