When all the yelping, hollering, and thunderation finally abated, I holstered my strong-side weapon, then ran a hand into the waistband of my pants. Fingers came out covered in a sticky coating of fresh blood. Went all weak in the knees. Stumbled backward a step or two. Leaned against the jail’s bullet-riddled front wall.
I glanced Boz’s direction. The jailhouse door stood wide open between us. Noticed the near-headless corpse of Boston Teal was draped atop Rufus Cosner. Appeared the luckless Cosner had somehow got blasted straight to a sulfurous Hell ’bout half a second before he removed most of Boston’s thick noggin with a single shot.
Boz had gone down, too. Sat with his back to the slug-peppered, cross-tie wall and worked at poking a handkerchief into a blood-gushing hole in his pants’ leg. My partner didn’t even look up when he said, “Reckon we got ’em all, Lucius?”
Ripped the bandanna from around my own neck. Shoved it against the leaker in my side. Pressed on the crude dressing and gasped for air. “You didn’t even bother to glance my direction, Boz. Hell, I could be deader’n Julius Caesar for all you’d know.”
A strained chuckle came from my friend’s direction. “Hell, boy, figure there ain’t nobody livin’ right now who’s gonna have skill enough, or grit enough, to kill you in a straight-up pistol fight.”
“Well, you could be wrong about that, by God. Lord could’ve come and taken me as easy as them skunks lyin’ yonder in the street. Or these two unfortunates splayed out here in the doorway for that matter. Shit, I could be just as dead as Andy Jackson right now.”
My friend tightened the crude bandage around his blood-soaked leg. Then, he leaned back against the wall and let out a tired, exasperated sigh.
“How bad you hurt?” I said.
“Oh, not too awful much. Been hurt worse. Been shot in lots worse places, too.”
“Well, not me. This is the first time for me, by God. Ain’t never been shot before. Damnation. Hurts like burnin’ perdition.”
Boz struggled to his feet, then hobbled over. He pulled my hand away from the wound, then poked around in the bloody hole. “Aw, hell, boy. She ain’t near as bad as you think. ’Course she’s gonna take some time healin’. Gonna pain you worse’n the dickens for a spell. Might even put you in bed for a few weeks. Maybe more. Festerates could well kill you. Otherwise, figure you’ll heal.”
I shot a glance at his leg. “That don’t look good.”
He flopped down next to me and swept a pained glance up and down Rio Seco’s only street. “Oh, might not do any riding for a bit, that’s for certain sure. Suppose we’d best scare up a sawbones, Lucius. Wouldn’t want to go and bleed out ’fore we can get these holes plugged by someone with a bit more in the way of medical experience than I’ve got.”
Turned out as how the town’s only pill pusher’d heard the commotion and came a-running. He had the pair of us cleaned up, sterilized, and stitched back together in a matter of minutes.
Bone popper couldn’t do much of anything for them other boys though. First two blasts out of the box, from that big popper Boz carried, came near cutting Tyler, Manion, and Keller in half. Got to avow, though, they ’uz tough ole boys. The three of them went down blasting, in spite of being pretty much dead whilst doing it.
Once we got them on their backs, all our other shooting didn’t really do much in the way of death-dealing damage. Except when it came to Irby Teal. Think me and Boz both might’ve put three or four each in the man. Literally shot him to pieces. Corpse leaked blood like we’d turned him into a human sieve. Could’ve read the Fort Worth Ledger through his bullet-riddled hide.
From all we could determine, Deputy Cosner had made good on his threat. He’d touched off a single round that splattered Boston Teal’s pea-sized brain all over hell and yonder. Found a gory, fist-sized gob of the mess splattered across my back and shoulders. I was so preoccupied, though, I never even felt the man’s skull filler when it hit me.
Me and Boz came to believe that Cosner must have figured that hiding behind Boston Teal was the safest place in town. Unfortunately the man couldn’t have been more wrong. Somebody still managed to put one through his right eye, and another bored its way through the tip of his nose. Made a hell of a mess. But we did discover, later on, as how he’d lied about a wife and child. Man was simply possessed of henhouse ways.
Boz stood over Cosner’s corpse, shook his head, and said, “Guess the poor boy wasn’t as lucky as I figured.”
And so, that bloody session of gun smoke and quick death is how me and a leg-shot Randall Bozworth Tatum came to rent a half-assed horse ranch and cattle operation out in the Devils River country, south of Sonora. We were both injured badly enough that traveling didn’t seem like a good idea at the time. Figured as how we’d just lay up in the shade and set to mending. You know, rest and recuperate for a spell before we headed on back to Fort Worth. Even made arrangements to send Cap’n Culpepper a telegraph message to let him know our plans. ’Course, he wasn’t at all happy with the situation but did seem to understand.
Looking back on the whole dance, our plan seemed solid enough. But, as it turned out, that’s when my bad dreams started. And, not long after, that’s when me’n Boz got tangled up in one of the bloodiest, most awful messes of my entire ranger career.
Thermometer I got from the Baker Brothers Funeral Home in Domino says it’s 105 in the shade right now. Thank God for lemons, ice, and sugar. Sitting here in the shade with a sweat-covered glass in my hand, just thinking on that whole grisly dance of uncommon horror and how we came to meet up with a beautiful little gal named Clementine Webb. Blood-soaked tale still has the power to send shivers charging up and down my ancient spine like a herd of longhorns stampeded by pitchfork lightning. Jesus, amazing how some memories have the capacity to make my aged blood run as cold as Rocky Mountain river water.
5
“DAMN IRBY TEAL FOR A GOOD SHOT.”
NOW, ME AND Boz had hoped to get far enough away from civilization to forget about doing any ranger work for a spell. But, to my dismay, we hadn’t been living on the Devils River ranch much more than a few weeks when the realization thundered down on me that no hope existed of ever escaping the everyday events of my blood-soaked past.
See, when the oft avoided blackness of sleep descended, the power of dreams could, once again, bring my bygone experiences, with blood and thunder, to vivid, brutal, frightening life. Always the dreams. Nightmares to be more precise.
Looking back on it, I’m convinced that having Irby Teal plug me, in that Rio Seco dustup, was what precipitated the whole life-and-death dance that followed. Have always felt there’s nothing like getting shot to put a man in touch with his own mortality. In truth, I’ve come to realize that I had never suffered from such a crisis of conscience before that period. Or afterward, come to think on it.
For reasons that are still unclear to me, the most compelling of the nocturnal reveries concerning my short but turbulent ranger career invariably involved the lingering, stomach-churning stench given off by slaughtered men. The acrid fragrance released by roiling clouds of spent, death-dealing gunpowder lingered in my sleep-leadened nose. The bilious odor of spilled blood hovered over my bed, along with the reek of puke, urine, and human waste. The bitter, coppery taste that swelled on the back of a man’s throat and always accompanied the putrid aroma of sudden death came along for the ride as well.