He made it a point to ride right past Amanda as she stepped toward them in their leave-taking. When she held out her hand he reached out with his. And seeing the tears streaking her dust-covered face, he gripped her thin fingers a brief instant as his horse carried him past. Then kicked the horse for all it was worth.
He was feeling his own eyes sting as the animal beneath him bolted into a gallop.
And he didn’t slow the horse until he and Shad reached the bottom of the next swale where he could no longer look back over his shoulder and see the wagon camp. Nothing more than that long smudge of dust rising yellow against the hot, pale blue of the summer sky as the sun finally broke the horizon—instantly creating shadows in the cedar thickets where before they had been only shades of gray outlines.
He found the body at the head of a draw.
Instantly sizing things up from the saddle, Titus did not find a single bootmark until it was plain how the rider had dropped from his horse and approached the animal. Those weren’t Roman Burwell’s square-toed boot tracks either. Not deep enough, nowhere big enough for the tall sodbuster. Titus sighed, searched in three directions for Shad, took one last look around for sign of Roman or maybe a strange rider on the horizon, then came out of the saddle. Dropping the reins he stepped toward the carcass of the milk cow. A few flies were clustered on the udder, and by the hundreds they were already clotting the long, deep gash across the throat.
He followed the half dozen boot tracks to the carcass, saw how the man had walked right up to the docile animal, then slashed its neck then and there. There was a dribble of blood where the boot tracks ended, then cowprints as the animal stumbled sideways, flinging its head and blood in both directions until it fell several yards from where the boot tracks ended. Titus stepped beyond the last of those prints, right over to the cow, and knelt beside its head. He held out his left hand, fingertip tapping the wide puddle of dark brown molasses beneath the carcass.
Cold. A little gummy beneath the crusty surface. But soaked into the ground and hard for the most part.
Wiping his fingers across the gritty soil, he stood and turned back for the horse. Shoving his right foot into the wide cottonwood stirrup, Scratch heaved himself into the saddle and shifted the big .54 across his thighs. Things did not look good for Roman.
Whoever it was came out here did this sometime after dark last night. This killing wasn’t done in the last few hours. The lone horseman had wrangled the cow away from the rest of the stock, then herded it over two hills and into the bottom of this draw. When he finally had the animal boxed at the head of the draw, he had dismounted and slit its neck.
Things did not look good for Roman Burwell at all.
Slamming his heels into his horse’s ribs, Titus Bass tasted the sour burn of dread rising in his throat with the burn of gall.
“If You really do listen to folks,” he whispered bitterly as he reined directly up the side of the coulee, “then I want You to listen to me. You can’t do this to Amanda. Can’t take Roman from her like this.”
He suddenly saw Shad appear at the top of the next hill, farther south than he would have thought to look, but back in the direction that unknown rider would have herded the cow. Sweete yanked his reins to the side, hard, forcing his horse to make a circle, then a second tight circle as he held his rifle high in the air. When Shad stopped after that third circle, he pointed with his rifle and kicked his horse into motion down the side of the draw. Titus hammered his horse into a gallop a heartbeat later. They both reached the body about the same time.
That’s when he raised his eyes to the sky and whispered again, but only one word this time, “P-please.”
Finding it hard to breathe, Titus was the first to leap out of his saddle, sprinting those last few yards toward the gnarled, wind-sculpted cedar where Roman Burwell was tied—his arms outstretched, legs spread-eagled. His shirt had been ripped from his shoulders and hung in tatters from the high waist of his drop-front, button-fly britches. From the bruises up and down the washboard of muscles rippling over his chest and belly, it was plain to see they had done their best to break the man’s ribs. And that gave him hope as he lunged to a stop a foot away from the body.
He grabbed a handful of thick hair on Roman’s brow, pulled the head back so he could peer into the face. The eyes barely fluttered. By damn—he was still alive!
Sweete was trudging up behind him, swinging that big .62-caliber flintlock side to side as he covered Titus’s back. For a heartfelt moment, Bass looked at the sky once more. “Thankee. Thankee more’n You’ll ever know.”
“He breathin’ any?” Shad asked quietly.
“Some,” he answered. “Barely. Roman?” Then he thought and told his friend, “Cut ’im down, Shadrach. I’ll hold him up best I can while you cut—”
“He’s a big lad, Titus,” Sweete volunteered as he stepped right against Bass and propped his .62 against the foot of the cedar. “Lemme hold him and you cut the ropes.”
Soon as he dropped his rifle against a clump of sage, Scratch slashed through the narrow rope that held the legs spread; then as he cut through the bonds around the wrists, the body sank from sheer exhaustion and the relentless tug of gravity.
Sweete supported Burwell in his arms as Titus dragged the farmer’s legs out to the side. “Like they was crucifying him, Scratch. Tied him up this’a way—like they was crucifying this poor man.”
“Cruci—” he repeated with a grunt as he helped Shad ease the big farmer’s body down onto the rocky ground. “What’s that?”
“Way they done to Jesus when they kill’t Him.”
Titus slipped the blade of his knife under the greasy strip of cloth the attackers had tied around Burwell’s mouth. “Jesus, that fella in the Bible?”
Shad scooted back on his knees and laid a hand on Roman’s chest. “That’s Him. My mama always wanted me to know that story. How the man’s enemies hung Him on a cross. Died. Later He come back to living for all time.”
As he slowly patted Burwell’s cheeks, Titus said, “I ’member how my ma told us young’uns that story over an’ over too. Damn—wish I’d brung some water with us.”
“I’ll go fetch some,” Sweete volunteered but hesitated to move.
Scratch laid his ear against Roman’s bare, blood-crusted chest. Then lifted his eyes to Shad’s. “We need to get him back.”
“How?”
For a moment he cogitated on it, staring at the two horses. “He’s a big chunk. You think you can hold ’im up?”
“Alone? On my horse?”
“Ain’t gonna work,” Titus agreed. “G’won back to the wagon. They got them ridgepoles lashed under the belly. Bring a pair of my woman’s buffler robes too, an’ two or three coils of rope.”
“Rawhide all right?”
“Any rope—buffler, rawhide—just be quick about it.”
Sweete clambered to his feet, swept up his .62, then paused a moment before he laid it back against the clump of sage beside Bass’s. “You keep that. I got my belt guns along. I best leave that’un with you … ’case someone shows up.”
Scratch shook his head. “Ain’t no one gonna come back, Shadrach. They left him for dead after they beat him. Cowards like them, they’re long gone now.”
The big man’s face hardened like stone. “You an’ me both know who it was.”
“Maybe not the three or four of ’em it took to drag the man down,” Bass said, holding up one of Burwell’s hands, studying the raw, bloodied knuckles. “From the looks of the scuffle, they didn’t have a easy time of it. One of ’em’s gotta have some bruises too. I figger that’s why they beat him so bad—even after he couldn’t fight back no more.”
Sweete stood over them, casting a wide shadow on Titus. “How they get him down?”