“We gonna get ourselves snowed in here, Silas!” Billy Hooks whined.
“What about game?” Titus asked, anxious, his belly growling.
“Game?”
Bass continued, “How we gonna eat?”
“There’ll be game, Scratch. Don’t y’ fret yourself ’bout that.”
“And if there ain’t, for balls’ sake?” Tuttle demanded, slogging up through the snow that reached to their knees.
“Then we’ll eat our damned horses,” Cooper replied, glaring at Bud. “Beginning with yours!”
For a moment the two men stared at one another, shoulders loose, hands encased in those crude blanket mittens ready to snatch up a belt pistol or knife if the other jumped.
“C’mon, boys,” Hooks finally cooed. “Let’s g’won back down there some to that last big patch of trees where we can fort up.”
Without taking his eyes off Tuttle, Cooper said, “Plumb center idee you got, Billy. Let’s camp, boys.”
Until Silas and Billy yanked their horses and mules around and started back down the slope on foot, followed a moment later by Bud Tuttle, Bass didn’t realize he had been gripping the butt of the big pistol he carried stuffed in the wide belt at his waist.
There was something deadly about Silas Cooper—something always there right under the surface, something that he figured could strike with the quickness of a cotton-mouth while the man was still smiling at you, talking to you … giving you no warning of the danger. In his thirty-one years Titus had learned that some men were easy to steer clear of because you had a clear sense of who they were and the danger they posed. And then there were a few like Cooper. They were the scariest of all.
The sort who could turn on you in the blink of an eye. When you had no idea it was coming.
Down the gentle slope the four men slid and skidded, plunging between the sparse, wind-tortured scrub cedar until they reached the copse of stunted pine Hooks had suggested. Here at least, Titus thought as they crowded into the cluster of trees, they would be out of most of that wind driving the snow into thick, wavering banners of ground blizzard, a wind that this high could cut through a man like a hot pewter knife would slide right through Marissa Guthrie’s freshly churned butter.
“I-I …,” and Bass worked hard to keep his teeth from chattering in the cold. “I ain’t n-never been this g-goddamned high afore.”
Tuttle turned his head to regard the leaden sky, the clouds no more than fifty, maybe as much as a hundred, feet at the most over their heads. “You best watch your swearing, Scratch. We’re up high enough on these mountains a man might just run hisself into a angel or two!”
Hooks laughed easily with that. “Long as them angels is womens—I don’t mind running onto ’em at all! Yessirreebob! Been dreaming more an’ more about soft breasties and a woman humping up and down on my stinger. I’d take me a angel right about now—right here in the snow!”
Tuttle wagged his head, looking at Bass to say, “Billy and his womens. Always got a passel of ’em on the brain.”
“Been thinking on women my own self,” Titus admitted.
Tuttle smiled. “Ain’t hard to figger, Scratch. Not when a man’s been doing so long without.”
“Sounds like you think on the womens too, Bud.”
Tuttle stopped his horse, turned toward it to throw up the stirrup and grab the cinch. “I’m a man—like any else, I s’pose.”
“You think back on a special girl?” Titus inquired.
“Just remember women. First one of ’em to come into my head. I ain’t never been particular when it comes to poking a woman center … so why should I be particular when it comes to thinking about ’em?”
“I remember this one gal back along the Ohio,” Titus began to explain. “She weren’t my first, but she was a whore—so she was the first what showed me how much fun poking could be with a woman.”
“You ’member her name?” Bud asked as he dragged the saddle and blanket from his horse.
“Abigail—uh, Mincemeat was her given name.”
“There been others, ain’t there?”
“A few. Sweet farmer’s daughter and a mess of dark-skinned backwater whores.”
“And don’t forget that widow woman what give you them passel of gray back nits.”
“Even thought on her a time or two, I have,” Bass admitted. “All them lonely nights I camped along the Platte, even after I got out here to these mountains.”
“Sometimes all the quiet out here can make a man’s mind turn to such things as womenfolk, the women a man left him back there,” Tuttle suggested as he turned away to gaze at the rest of their pack stock Cooper and Hooks were driving into the trees.
“Only natural, ain’t it—”
The loud shriek of the mule interrupted the two of them. In the copse of stunted pine, there amid the jostling mass of pack animals and horses, Bass could see Cooper lunging about, swinging a long tree limb—and each time he connected with a sound audible over the crying wind, one of the mules bawled in a painful bray.
Titus began to step in Silas’s direction. “What the devil do you think—”
But Tuttle leaped out, grabbing Bass’s sleeve, snagging it and stopping Titus in his tracks. “For balls’ sake—don’t! It ain’t none of your business, Scratch.”
“Any man beating his animals, that is my business,” he said as he whipped his arm free of Tuttle’s grip.
As Titus moved this way, then that, to cut a path through the milling stock, which Cooper and Hooks were corralling within a roped-off area strung between that stand of trees, Titus watched Silas work himself into a fury, lashing out, lunging, swinging that long tree limb at the back of the mule mare that reared and scree-hawed in pain and fear, clumsy because only half her packs had been taken from her back. As Bass got closer, he saw the limb snap in half at the back of the mule’s head. Dazed, the animal stumbled sideways, wild-eyed with fear, nostrils throbbing as it tried to swing its haunches around and kick out.
Cooper swung once more with the short half of the limb he clutched like a war club in both hands—but didn’t make contact as the mule lunged aside. His rage boiling over, Silas hurled the limb down into the skiff of snow, where he fought a moment for footing, then dragged his big smoothbore horse pistol from the wide sash that held his blanket coat closed. As the weapon came up, Cooper was cursing above the bawl of the mule and the cry of the wind, dragging the hammer back two clicks to full-cock … then pointed the muzzle directly at the mule’s head, little more than an arm’s length from the frightened eyes that stared at the human, the beast not knowing its next breath would be its last.
Leaping and shoving his way through the anxious, milling, frightened animals, Titus landed next to Cooper, grabbing Silas’s left wrist—and clamped down with all the strength he could muster. All he could remember was how the packmare’s eye stared up at him as he pulled the trigger.
“You weasel-stoned son of a bitch!” Cooper growled as he jerked around to stare right into Bass’s face. “Let go a’me!”.
“Put it away!” Titus snapped, feeling the big man’s arm tremble in fury.
“Gonna shoot you first!”
Struggling to keep the oak-thick arm down and the pistol pointed at the ground, Bass pleaded, “Don’t shoot that mule—damn, please don’t shoot it.”
Cooper’s eyes narrowed, and he immediately quit trying to thrash his arm loose of Bass’s two-handed grip. “The mule? The mule, is it?”
“Don’t kill ’er.”
“That mare ain’t been nothing but trouble since we took ’er on,” Cooper said, his eyes still seething. “Time I got rid of what makes trouble for me. Now, y’ just let go a’me and stand back. I got work to finish—”