“We can’t let them do this,” Ray said grimly. “Hell, no man deserves to die that way.”
“You’re right, Ray. But look on down there. There must be twenty-five new riders.
“They’d chew us up an’ spit us out if we attacked—Wampus or no Wampus.”
“So what do we do?”
“You know that as well as I do,” Will said quietly. “It stinks, but we got no choice.”
Will began to push himself back from the lip, Wampus quivering beside him.
“Where ya goin’?”
“To fetch my rifle from—”
“Screw your rifle,” Ray snapped. “Jus’ stay put.” Ray slid his buffalo gun off his back and checked its load.
The outlaws had chained the two black men to the posts, taking several wraps around each man, binding them tightly. The fire in front of the saloon reflected its sharp yellow-orange light from the sweat-covered chests and arms of the captives. Each had obviously worked the fields in their former lives; thick muscles pushed at the skin of their arms and forearms and their guts were flat. There probably wasn’t an ounce of fat between the two of them.
A ragged, drunken cheer arose as a pair of Indians stumbled out of the saloon with flaming torches in their hands.
“You want them two?” Ray asked.
Will nodded.
Ray handed over the .50-caliber weapon. “Drop the rear sight a notch an’ leave the front one alone.” After a moment, he asked, “You ever fired one of these?”
Will didn’t answer.
“OK,” Ray said, “here’s the thing: the recoil’s a pisser. Keep your face a hair away from the stock. Otherwise you’ll end up with a busted jaw or lose a slew of teeth.”
“OK,” Will said.
The cannonlike bellow of the buffalo rifle was louder than thunder, louder than dynamite—louder than anything.
So powerful was the rifle that the massive slug passed directly through the renegade closest to the post’s chest, leaving a gaping hole the size of a large man’s fist, without knocking the man down. Gushets of blood pumped from the aperture for half a minute and then slowed and, finally, stopped. It was then that the Indian went down, but he went down slowly, as if he were dozing off. He fell a bit forward and his bare chest pressed the flaming torch into the grit of the street, but by then, he was well beyond pain—or anything else.
Will took the second renegade with a hurried, sloppy shot that hit the Indian between his neck and right shoulder. He spun a few times from the impact of the three-quarter ounce of lead, tangled his feet with one another, and went down.
“Sumbitch was dead while he was twirlin’,” Ray said, “but it wasn’t that bad of a shot, all in all.”
A barrage of useless pistol and rifle fire dug divots of dirt out of the lip, but accomplished nothing else. The outlaws were shooting simply to shoot. They knew they couldn’t put a round into the men beyond the lip.
What started out as a fistfight between an Indian and one of the new men captured the outlaws’ attention. The Indian was getting his ass kicked: his nose was broken, both his lips were split, his front teeth were gone, and his eyes were so swollen that his vision was reduced to what he could see from between a pair of narrow slits. The white man danced around the Indian; he’d been in the ring before and he knew what he was doing. He moved smoothly about on the balls of his feet, bobbing, weaving, never still. He landed a few more punches to his opponent’s face.
A fat renegade moved between the fighters, holding up his hands in front of the white man. Will and Ray couldn’t hear what was being said, but it was obviously conciliatory, declaring the white man the winner. The white man, grinning broadly, held his arms up in victory.
The fat Indian slid a dagger between the white fighter’s ribs, puncturing his heart.
“Maybe that’ll—”
“Bullshit. That fight was business as usual. Gimme the rifle.”
As Ray spoke, two renegades pushed through the batwings of the saloon, each with a flaming arrow nocked and bows drawn.
Their aim was good. The kerosene-saturated wood exploded into flame.
Ray stood, buffalo gun to his shoulder, regardless of the silhouette he presented, and fired twice, quickly—so quickly, the reports sounded like a single round.
The heads of both black men tipped forward loosely on their necks. Blood seeped rather than poured from the neat, oblong holes between each of their eyes. The backs of their heads, of course, were a different story.
“I ain’t gonna ever forget what I had to do here,” Ray said, his voice a tone of huskiness Will hadn’t heard before.
“No,” Will said. “You won’t. But you done what you had to.” He put his arm over Ray’s shoulder. “Come on—let’s get back to our horses.” Ray slipped the sling of his buffalo gun back over his shoulder as they began walking.
Chapter Eight
They said next to nothing as they walked back to their horses. Even Wampus was subdued, walking closely enough to Will so that the dog’s side touched the man’s leg.
Wasn’t anything else we could do for those two men once the fires started—not a single thing. Was I in the same fix, I’d welcome the bullet, the quick, clean end rather than the awful suffering, the screaming, the begging.
Still—we killed them. It for certain wasn’t murder, but that doesn’t make them any less dead, their bodies charred and twisted, with no more resemblance to the living men than a dead mouse has to a mountain cat.
Jesus.
A couple of guys, no doubt with women, maybe children, waitin’ for their men to rattle up in their wagon loaded up with the framing for the houses the families would live in—free, with no more shackles, no more whips, no more “Yassuh, massa boss, sir” horseshit.
And then—Olympus. It must have been some time since they’d been to town. They knew nothing of One Dog.
’Course they couldn’t buy a drink in the saloon, but they’d bought a whole lot of lumber from the mercantile for cash on the barrelhead, so the clerk would sell them a bottle, carefully avoiding touching their hands. They’d probably drunk and laughed all night, headed to their homes—or what would be their homes.
Wampus whimpered quietly, plaintively, as if he were reading Will’s thoughts.
Ray’s skill with that .50 caliber saved those men a world of pain. It was a good thing—the right thing—to do.
Will Lewis felt like a murderer of innocent men.
They mounted and rode at a jog back to their camp. After a long time of heavy silence, Ray said, “Where do you think all them extry men came from?”
Will considered. “Well, like I said, there’s always a slew of crazies lookin’ to ride with somebody like Quantrill or One Dog. I’m thinkin’ this might be somethin’ else, though.”
“What’s that?”
“I had a smith—a good friend—tell me that once every year or so bands of loons meet, get drunk, eat mushrooms, smoke ganja, an’ carry on—shoot one another if they get to arguin’.
“See, it’s like when the mountain men meet, ’cept them trappers an’ hunters aren’t loons. They jus’ don’t like anybody but other mountain men. No harm there that I can see. A man’s ’titled to pick his friends.”
“Where’s the army at?” Ray asked. “The raiders.”
“Chasin’ Indians.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah—forcin’ ’em onto reservations or killin’ ’em.”
“So,” Ray said, “there might could be a bunch of these raiders comin’ toward Olympus? No?”
“My friend, he says there’s a whole herd of the sonsabitches get together.”