At least the sun had gone down. During the day, whenever he slowed down to a walk or even a soft jog, his shirt was suddenly covered by flies, dining on the blood, he guessed. But there wasn’t any sun, now, and the flies had all gone.

  Course, that wouldn’t keep some critter from smelling the blood and trying to seek him out.

  He smiled. Well, he’d take care of that, if and when it happened. Once, when they were all kids, he’d gut shot a bear on purpose. He’d had a high old time following it around for two days while it died a slow and agonizing death.

  Rafe and Rufus were pissed that he hadn’t taken them along for the festivities.

  They wouldn’t miss the festivities this time, though. Not if he had anything to say about it.

  “Go back and get my saddlebags, you fool,” Amos hissed. He had protested mightily when Slocum moved him the last few feet—mainly, Slocum supposed, because he’d grabbed Amos’s shot-up shoulder.

  “It was the only way to get you around that bush,” Slocum grumbled, then ducked just in time to miss a bullet flying overhead.

  Amos made a face. “Will you please listen to me, Slocum? The saddlebags! I’ve got two more sticks of dynamite in the bloody things!”

  Slocum, who had been holding Amos’s head up, said, “Well, why the hell didn’t you say so?” and let his head hit the ground.

  He heard Amos’s latent “Ouch! I hope this isn’t going to be a habit!” as he crawled back toward the open, and the saddlebags.

  Halfway there, he stopped. The gunfire had calmed down to a few occasional potshots, and he thought he heard something—or someone—crossing the brush beyond him. He froze and stared, gun in his hand and ready. He stayed there a full two minutes, and when no sound came again, no brush moved or rustled, he finally crept forward again.

  Looney, that’s where he was going. But he still needed to remind himself that somebody was out there. Someone unknown and very dangerous.

  That slug hadn’t just ricocheted off thin air and turned around to hit Amos in the back.

  Rance Carthage was in position once again. Slowly, he drew a bead on the back of the man on the left flank, waiting for the perfect opportunity.

  The man rose up slightly.

  Rance held his breath and squeezed the trigger, just as a lance of pain stabbed him in the goddamn shoulder.

  The man he’d aimed at fell, but he was shot again, dammit! And by one of his own brothers’ bullets—couldn’t be anything else!

  This time it was in the right shoulder, not the left, and when it struck him, he’d sat down hard. Cursing softly under his breath, he ripped the ruined fabric away from his shoulder and felt the bone grate as he moved.

  In the joint! In the goddamn joint! No way he’d be able to get this one out by himself no matter how much whiskey he drank, no matter how many leather straps he bit down on. It was at the wrong angle, and it rendered his right arm next to useless.

  Good thing he could still shoot with his left.

  Not as well, of course, and he already had a wound that kept opening and closing at will in that arm. But it’d work good enough.

  It had to.

  Slocum, making his way back with the saddlebags, heard a strange absence of gunfire from his left. At first he thought that Arvil might be out of ammo, and coming back for more. Then, when he hadn’t come by the time Slocum was back with Amos and digging out the dynamite, he figured something was wrong. Really wrong. It wasn’t like Arvil to just quit.

  But he didn’t say anything to Amos. He let him supervise the bringing out of the dynamite, and listened while Amos strained to say, “That’s a three-minute fuse, old chum. Or thereabouts.”

  “I know that,” Slocum said as he pulled out a match and struck it on his heel.

  “Oh yes, I forgot,” Amos said, panting a little. “You know everything.”

  “That’s right,” Slocum said without looking at him. He lit the fuse, and they both watched it burn for a long minute and a half.

  And then Slocum suddenly darted out into the clear, stood up and hurled that stick of dynamite as hard and as fast as he could toward the roof of the cabin, then dove back into the brush.

  He and Amos both covered their ears.

  Nothing happened.

  Amos said, “I say, are you sure you didn’t hit the water trough?”

  “No, you blew that up already.”

  “Then what in the world—?”

  The explosion took them both by surprise, and rolled Slocum off his heels.

  It was immediately followed by a rain of burning straw thatch and heated, flying rocks, one of which clipped Amos in the face before he had a chance to cover it with his arm.

  They waited for the storm of debris to subside, and then Amos peeked out from behind his arm. “I believe you hit it, Slocum.”

  “Yup,” Slocum said. “Stay here.”

  “As if you thought I could do anything else . . .” Amos muttered.

  Slocum went out in the clear again, but stayed below the top of the hill. No one was shooting, now. Even Blue had stopped.

  Slocum called, “Hello the cabin!”

  No one answered.

  He cocked his gun, took off his hat, and eased his head up over the rim of the hill.

  The cabin was pretty much blown to hell. He guessed his throw had placed the dynamite square in the middle of the roof, and it had rolled nearly to the front before it went off. The roof was gone, and half the front wall was blown down. Small fires, set by flaming straw, blazed all around in the brush.

  “I said, hello the cabin!” he repeated. “Rafe and Rufus Carthage, come out now if you’re alive!”

  From his right, he heard Blue holler, “Or even if you’re goddamn dead!” and he smiled. It was good to know that Blue, at least, was in a fine fettle. He wasn’t so sure about Arvil.

  And they still had that sharpshooting lurker to deal with.

  As if Blue was reading his mind, he called out, “Hey Arvil! You hear me?”

  Silence.

  “Think he’s down, Blue,” Slocum shouted. “He stopped firin’ a bit ago.”

  “How’s Amos?”

  “He’s down, but he ain’t out,” Slocum called back.

  “Not by a long shot,” Amos added loudly. And painfully by the sound of it.

  “You got any more of that stuff?” Blue called.

  “One more,” Slocum replied.

  “Well, toss it. I don’t trust them boys to not be playin’ possum on us.”

  Slocum grunted, then remembered himself and hollered, “Yup.” And then he went back to where Amos waited with the last stick of dynamite.

  19

  When the third and last explosion blew the rest of the cabin apart, Rance Carthage was halfway back to his horses. As furious as he was, he knew his brothers—his baby brothers, his only kin—were dead. And he also knew that he couldn’t take on the remaining two men with only half of one good arm.

  Especially if one of those men was Slocum.

  As much as it pained him, both spiritually—if such men can be said to have spirits—and physically, he made his way slowly to the horses.

  Slowly was the only manner in which he could move, now. It seemed like that last slug he’d taken had awakened all the rest of the pains in his massive body. If he’d been closer to human, he would have just laid down and died. Or at last passed out.

  But nobody had ever accused Rance Carthage of the least bit of humanity.

  He reached the horses at last and somehow managed to get himself up on the sorrel. Slowly, to avoid sound as well as raising dust, he rode away from the cabin and what was left of his brothers and that sonofabitching, bastard posse at an angle, in the hopes that they wouldn’t think to look out here for tracks.

  Course, they probably would, but he might be in luck. The sky was clouding over, and there was barely enough moon to carefully ride by. Maybe the wind or the rain would come and wipe out his tracks.

  Maybe, just once, for a change, something would be on his side.

  Right now, he had to find somebody to take this slug out of his shoulder, and he thought he knew just where he could find someone.

  Slocum rolled Amos over the top of the hill, against his protests, and then went looking for Blue. He met him halfway back, and unceremoniously pulled him down to the ground.

  “Hey!” Blue shouted. “What’d you do that for?”

  “Cause I think we got a sniper back there,” Slocum hissed, tipping his head to the brush behind them. “Somebody shot Amos in the back.”

  Blue’s face suddenly took a turn for the worse. “He ain’t dead, is he?”

  Slocum shook his head. “No. But I think Arvil is. Ain’t heard a word or a noise from him since right after the first blast.”

  “Shit,” Blue said sadly. “Sonofabitch. You wanna try and dig out this sniper a’yours?”

  “Yup.”

  “All right,” Blue said. Nothing could stop good old Blue. He added, “You fade out to the left, I’ll take the right.”

  Slocum nodded, and disappeared into the brush. Blue did the same.

  About twenty minutes later, after turning up nothing but a bent path through the weeds that led down to poor Arvil’s body—also shot in the back, dead center—Blue whistled him up again.

  Slocum made his way toward the sound of the bird trill, and there was Blue, standing fully upright in the shadows of the night.

  “If he was here,” Blue said, “he’s gone now. Probably a ricochet, anyhow.”

  “Tell that to Arvil.”

  Blue’s brows shot up. “In the back?”

  Slocum nodded.

  “Sonofabitch.”

  Slocum said, “If you’re sure it’s clear out here, I’ll take your word for it. And I won’t waste any time trackin’ tonight.”

  “Yeah,” Blue said, staring off toward the open range, into the night. “Looks like a blow’s comin’ up anyhow. Let’s get back and take care’a Amos and bury those bodies. What’s left of ’em, anyhow.” He shook his head. “Jesus, I don’t know what I’m gonna say to Harry and Dutch.”

  “Tell ’em Arvil died brave, helpin’ to kill the last of the Carthage boys,” Slocum said. “That ought to do it.”

  But still, as they walked back toward Amos and the cabin, he wondered: Who the hell could have been out there, and what bone did he have to pick with Amos and Arvil?

  Maybe he had a bone to pick with all of them.

  Chances were, they’d hear from him again.

  Right about the time that Rance Carthage’s goal came into sight, just before the steady wind began to carry rain down to the thirsty ground, he fell off his horse.

  He managed to hang onto his reins, but the bay moved off a few yards and started grazing.

  Swearing a blue streak, he managed to get to his knees, then slowly, painfully pulled himself upright using the sorrel’s saddle leather, hand over hand. He was too close to pass out now.

  And too damned tough, he reminded himself bitterly.

  The rain was pounding down now, but through it he could see the lights of the little shack. Maybe it was her, maybe she’d been thrown out and there was somebody else there, now.

  It had better not be some land-grabber. He’d show them to take Letitia’s shack away from her.

  He walked slowly onward, leaning his bulk against the sorrel gelding, stumbling occasionally on the increasingly muddy soil. The bay simply followed along, grazing its way after them.

  In front of the old shack, he pulled his right gun, the only usable one, now that his right shoulder was banged up, and knocked on the door.

  He heard the sound of a rifle’s cock, and then a female voice demanded, “Who is it, come to me out of this storm?”

  “Letitia?” he asked, more relieved than he could have possibly imagined by the sound of her voice. “Tish, honey, it’s Rance.”

  Suddenly the door swung open wide. A short women stood there, perhaps thirty or thirty-five, wearing a grubby dress. Her blond hair was knotted back in a tight bun, and her nails were black from working in the dirt all day. The look of joy on her face overcame her otherwise dull features.

  She was the prettiest sight Rance had seen in a coon’s age.

  She took one look at his shirt, at the blood, and said, “Get in here right now and get the hell out of that shirt. I’ll see to your horse.”

  “Horses,” he corrected her.

  Before he knew what hit him, she had kissed him square on the mouth, then he was inside, sitting on the edge of an Indian-blanketed bed, and she had closed the door between them.

  The storm swept in full force before Slocum had a chance to get more than Arvil and one of the cabin’s unfortunate former tenants underground. The third man, they blanketed and left until morning.

  They couldn’t find enough pieces of the Carthage boys to be worthy of a shovel full of dirt, and decided to leave the bits and pieces for the coyotes to pick.

  There was enough of a wall left—the right rear corner—that the three of them could huddle in it against the wind, with their horses tethered nearby in the shelter of a couple of young cottonwoods.

  Amos, who had been fixed up good and proper by Blue, lay against the wall with his blanket over his head—protection from the pelting rain—and said, “You know, you could have at least left us a little roof, Slocum.”

  “And I suppose you could’a done better?” Slocum asked. He was huddled beneath his blanket, too, as was Blue.

  “Most certainly,” Amos replied.

  Blue was staring out at the rain. He said, “I don’t believe we’re gonna be able to track your sniper come morning, Slocum. Any tracks he left are wiped out by now.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Slocum said. There was a tone of defeat in his voice. “Just wish I knew who the hell he was.”

  Blue nodded, and Amos said caustically, “Not half so much as so I.”

  Slocum snorted.

  No matter how he turned it over in his head, he couldn’t figure out who in the hell that sniper had been.

  Now, he had made a lot of fellows mad at him over the years. Mad enough to shoot him in the back, if push came to shove. But he didn’t figure that any of them could possibly be in this exact vicinity, or that they’d take down two other men when it was him they were after.

  It was a puzzlement.

  If he didn’t know better, he would have sworn they hadn’t killed Rance back in Hoopskirt.

  He gave a disgusted shake to his head. No, that was pure impossible. He was reaching past the point of all reason.

  It had to be somebody else.

  “Hold still, blast your hide!” Letitia growled as she dug for the bullet. “Jesus Christ, if you ain’t been shot up six ways from seven, Rance! Here, take another slug’a whiskey.”

  He lifted the bottle with his good left hand, and chugged down a few mouthfuls. “It hurts more comin’ out than goin’ in, Tish,” he complained.

  “That’s cause it ain’t gone nowhere yet,” she said, taking the bottle from him and pouring another dose over her pocket knife. “I’m still tryin’ to find the damned thing. Where was Rafe and Rufus when you got shot, anyhow?”

  Rance stayed quiet on that, mulling over the right way to answer, when she leaned back, knife up in the air, and said, “Well?”

  “They’s dead, Tish. Murdered,” he said at last.

  She sat there, dumbly looking at him. Then she said, “No, really. Where was they?”

  “Just told you,” he growled.

  Silence.

  Then she seemed to gather herself. “You gonna get the sonsabitches that did it?”

  “Soon’s as you get me patched up.”

  She handed him a small knife scabbard. “Bite down on this.”

  He did, and she stuck the knife in his wound, twisted it twice, and flicked the offending slug across the room. It hit the wall, leaving a small, red speckle, then fell down between the worn floor-boards.

  20

  Slocum didn’t get much sleep that night.

  He and Blue took turns keeping watch in case their sharpshooting friend came back, but even when it was Slocum’s turn to sleep, he slept poorly. He couldn’t blame it on the hard wet ground or the rocks that kept on digging into him, no matter how many he pulled from underneath him and chucked away. He’d been there, done that before.

  He couldn’t blame it on Amos, because they allowed him to sleep through the night, which he did like a goddamned baby.

  He couldn’t even blame it on the occasional—all right, more than occasional—thoughts that went through his head about the fair-haired and lovely Lucy, waiting for him back in Hoopskirt.

  No, what kept him awake was the knowledge that somebody was out there. Somebody who was gunning for their whole party. Otherwise, why shoot Arvil and Amos? Why else bother to ride all the way out here, to the exact middle of nowhere?

  At the break of dawn, they were up—well, he and Blue were, anyway—burying the last of the bodies.

  When they were finished, Blue and Slocum took off their hats and Blue did the honors. “Lord, we don’t know who these two fellers were, but we ask you to take ’em into your arms along with Arvil Roman, who was one helluva cowhand and a real nice feller. Amen.”

  “Amen,” echoed Slocum and put his hat back on.

  “Amen and amen,” came Amos’s voice, through the craggy rock wall of what was left of the house. “Not going to say anything nice and uplifting about our friends, Rufus and Rafe, are we?”

  Blue said, “I reckon the Lord’ll put ’em where they belong without no comment from me,” and folded his shovel away.

  “True, so true,” said Amos with a sigh. “Breakfast time. What I wouldn’t give for some nice kip pered herring . . .”

  Slocum walked back over, and went to the fire they’d started before they commenced filling in the last grave. “You’re gonna have to settle for coffee and cold fried chicken. How’s the shoulder?”

  “Better in one way,” Amos admitted, “but bloody sore.” He let out a theatrical sigh. “I fear it may be some time before I’m back to my old, devil-may-care self. I may find myself in need of a full-time nurse.”