That appraisal clearly unsettled Hargrove. As the hired men turned their heads to look at their employer, he ordered, “Don’t listen to his rantings. If he makes a move to use either of those guns, drop him where he stands.”
“Come down to just you an’ me, Hargrove,” Titus said as he flicked a look at Harris starting to stir among the sagebrush.
The pilot wagged his head, groggily rolling onto his hip behind Hargrove, rocking onto his hands and knees shakily.
When he fixed his eyes again on the train captain, Titus found Hargrove had cleared a pistol from his belt, yanking it into sight with his left hand.
Without considering those orders Hargrove had given his two henchmen, Titus brought up his two weapons on instinct, instantly deciding he would take the horseman with the pistol, then use the trade gun loaded with shot to deliver a scattered pattern at the man to his left because he stood a better chance of hitting him with a wide pattern than with a single ball.
He pitched forward onto his knees after firing his first shot with the pistol, with barely enough time to watch the ball slam into Hargrove’s shoulder before he pulled the trigger on the scattergun in his left hand. He felt the hired man’s ball snarl past his ear at the very moment that double load of coarse drop-shot chewed through the gunman’s belly like a nest of angry wasps, flinging him backward, his feet pin-wheeling in the loose sand.
But a gunshot rumbled from the rocks behind the bloodied man, knocking his body forward. He landed with the side of his face down in the dirt.
Immediately afterward a second weapon roared from the boulders, off to Bass’s right this time, the ball furrowing into the ground beside the second gunman’s boot.
“No! No! Don’t shoot me!” the henchman screeched in utter panic as he hurled his rifle loose and raised his arms.
Fury clouded Hargrove’s face as he gazed down at his bleeding wound, angrily nudging his horse forward. “Isn’t this a predicament, old man?” he crowed. “You’ve emptied both of your weapons … but I still have both of mine.”
Scratch hoped Waits could place her shot close enough to Hargrove that it would give her husband at least a heartbeat to dive out of the way, perhaps even make it to that loaded rifle the hired man had just pitched aside before the bully shuffled back in terror, his arms still high.
“I’ll still make it to California, old man,” Hargrove growled, “but your bones’ll rot here in the middle of nowhere.”
The instant Hargrove whipped both of his weapons into play, Bass dove for that loaded rifle in the sand. One of the captain’s bullets kicked up dirt at his heel the moment he smacked onto the ground and his hands scooped up the weapon. He was just beginning to wheel with it, not anywhere near ready to fire, when he winced the instant Hargrove’s second gun boomed—
But the horseman’s shot went completely wild.
Titus watched the man’s back arch suddenly, a reflex that forced his pistol to fire at the sky. A long moment, then Hargrove peered down at his chest, beginning to gurgle, finding that patch of blood beginning to seep around the bubbling black hole at the middle of his brocade vest. Then, as Hargrove slowly turned around in the saddle and Bass rolled onto an elbow so he too could look behind the man’s horse—they both found smoke curling from the yawning muzzle of that big-bore flintlock held by Moses Harris.
“D-don’t shoot me!” the hired man blubbered repeatedly as he crumpled to his knees, sobbing.
After swallowing his heart back down from his throat, Bass hollered in Crow at the rocks, “No more shooting—hold your fire!”
Mules and oxen were braying and bawling from the echoes of that noisy gunfire behind Hargrove as the train captain brought his red hand away from his chest, stared down at the blood on it, then inch by inch keeled out of the saddle and fell onto the sand. Shrieks erupted from the first women to reach the scene with their men. Children surged forward between grown-ups’ legs, held back by their parents as the crowd swelled up behind Harris, pressing in on one another for a view of the carnage.
As Titus got to his hip, then pushed himself to his feet with that rifle in hand, still uncertain if this had been played completely out or not, Harris lowered the weapon he held in his hands and trudged those few steps that brought him to Hargrove’s body with a sad weariness.
When he stopped to peer down at the wagon master, Harris grumbled, “Idjit son of a bitch.”
Scratch came to a halt on the other side of Hargrove as the captain spewed blood, trying to speak as his half-glazed eyes stared up at Harris; then his head rolled slightly so he could peer at Bass. Dropping to his knee, Titus held his ear close to the blood-covered lips.
Harris asked, “What’s he say?”
Titus looked up. “Said he’d see both of us again … in hell.”
The instant Harris raised his rifle in the air as if he intended to smash it down into Hargrove’s face, Bass knocked it aside with his loaded weapon. Harris took a step back, his dark face hard as slate, glaring at Titus with fury-tinged eyes.
“Leave ’im be to die,” Scratch said quietly. Then watched some of the anger disappear from the old trapper’s face. “Likely he’s right.”
“Right about what?” Harris demanded.
“Chances are, we’ll both see ’im again in hell.”
“Damn this son of a bitch,” Harris growled, his tone one more of disappointment than fury now. “Owes me money, an’ a spree in California too. Señoritas an’ some pass brandy. Damn this dead son of a bitch anyway.”
“I’ll lay you can scratch up some money back there in his wagons,” Titus suggested.
A bright light dispelled the last remnants of darkness in the old trapper’s eyes. “By doggies, you’re right!”
The crowd was inching forward as Scratch said, “Why’n’t you go an’ take these here folks right on to Californy like you was set on doin’ anyway. I figger you’ll be set for quite a spree out with all them Mexican señoreetas.”
With a growing grin, Harris looked down at Hargrove’s wide, unmoving eyes. “S’pose I still could take ’em on to California at that—”
“What’re we going to do without Hargrove?”
Looking up at the new voice, Titus found the face, one of those who had been Hargrove’s biggest backers when it came time for the mutiny by the Oregon company.
“You wanna go to Californy, this pilot gonna take you folks there,” he snapped at the man. “Elsewise, you all can rot right here waiting for Hargrove to raise hisself from the dead.”
“What’m I gonna do now?” the last hired man asked, still frozen in place, his arms raised.
Harris eyed him menacingly.
But it was Titus who spoke, “You ever fire a shot at me or my kin?”
“N-no, I didn’t,” he admitted with a frightened wag of his head.
“Ever you do harm to any of these other folks?”
Again he shook his head. “No.”
Scratch turned on those men and women, and the children clutching their mothers’ skirts, wide-eyed. “This man ever raise a hand to any of you?”
Some hung their heads, others continued to stare at the dead bodies, and a few mumbled their answer.
Turning back to the hired man, he said, “Then I s’pose they might let you stay on with ’em all the way to the end of the trail.”
He could hear the weight of that breath escaping the man’s lungs. Jabbing his head toward Harris, Bass told the young man, “Seems like you can throw in with your pilot now, an’ the two of you have yourselves a grand time. Makes no nevermind to me.”