Bad Medicine (22 page)

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.

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.”

“No big deal. All we gotta do is kill 'em, an' we been doin' that good.”

“Good point,” said Will.

Neither man slept the balance of the night. Ray honed his knives on his whetstone almost mechanically, as if he were a nonthinking machine designed to do only that. The whish, whish of the blade over the stone eventually began to grate on Will's nerves, but he kept his mouth shut. If sharpening his knives is what Ray needed to do, then he should do it.

Still, it was driving Will around the bend.

Will rolled and smoked cigarettes one after another, flicking the nubs out into the prairie.

“You might could start a fire in the brush with them cigarettes,” Ray said.

Will glared at him. “Don't matter. It's nothin' but scrub, scorpions, an' rattlesnakes. Let it burn.”

Dawn was painting the sky with its usual glory of pastels and sharper colors, too. The men didn't notice.

Finally, as Will was lighting another cigarette with a lucifer he'd snapped with his thumbnail, Ray sheathed the knife he'd been working. “Them goddamn things'll kill you,” he said.

“Bullshit. Tobacco smoke builds up lungs—makes 'em stronger. Plus, it tastes good an' calms a man down, makes him feel better. Hell, they oughta teach smokin' in grade school.”

Ray grunted disgustedly.

Will stood and worked the kinks out of his back. He was silent for some time, but Ray knew from his face that some sort of pronouncement was coming. It was.

“Only one way we can get this done,” Will said. “We're both good—real hardasses an' damned deadly fighters—but One Dog has about fifty men around him now. The odds are impossible.”

“Could be. But what can we do? The army . . .”

“The army is a bunch of clowns chasing Indians off their own land, killin' kids and squaws an' old folks, while the warriors put arrows an' slugs into the bluecoats. If Bobby Lee hadn't screwed up so badly at Gettysburg—an' that moron Pickett didn't do what he done—things'd be a whole lot different.”

“Sure. But . . .”

“We need an army of our own—of men like us,” Will growled. “I know some fellas from Folsom who owe me a favor, an' some others from my robbin' days—good men who ain't afraid to pull the trigger an' don't mind the stink of blood.”

“I know a few myself,” Ray said. “Thing is, they ain't a real trustin' bunch. Most have posters out on 'em. They kill bounty hunters like a housewife steps on a cockroach.”

“These boys friends of yours?”

“Tight friends.”

“Same with the bunch I know. We gotta get 'em here, Ray.”

“Ain't many who'd work for free.”

“I know that, an' it's no problem. I got stashes all over the goddamn place. Plus, maybe we'd find out where One Dog's rebel gold is at,” Will said.

“There's a—hell, it ain't really a town, it's a depot—but it's got a saloon, a whorehouse, an' a telegraph monkey in the depot.”

“How far?”

“Hard to say. Maybe eighty miles.”

“Can you find it?”

Ray grinned. “Hell, boy, I could find a nice, cool spot in hell, I needed to.”

“Thing is, these men don't have addresses,” Will said. “It'll be awful hard to find most of them.”

“That's OK. We don't need most of them. Eight or ten'll do jus' fine. Ten of them boys is worth thirty renegades. Tell you what: you make up a list with names an' towns or ranches or whatever where your men last were, far as you know, an' I'll do the same. I'll send the wires out an' ask that they be forwarded, need be. Then we set back for a couple days an' see what happens.”

“Could be no one will show up.”

“Could be that pigs'll fly outta my ass an' we'll have free bacon forever, but neither one ain't likely, Will.”

Will laughed. “Let's saddle up.”

“No. It don't make no sense for both of us to go. You an' your wolf stay here an' watch what the outlaws are doin'. I should be back in two days.”

“How long you figure it'll take these boys to get here?”

“Beats me. 'Pends on where they're at an' if they care to do some fightin'. Seems to me the ones that ain't dead will get here, one way or t'other. If I'm wrong an' they don't come, why we'll take the renegades on our own selves, just like we been doin. An' we wouldn't have lost nothin' but a couple days.”

Ray saddled his horse.

“You watch your back,” Will said.

“You do the same.”

Ray set off at a lope. Before long he was out of sight. There was still enough dew on the ground that Ray's horse didn't raise a finger of dust that pointed at him.

Will piddled around camp after Ray was gone, accomplishing nothing more than gathering up more scrub and mesquite for the fire. He considered sending Wampus out for a rabbit, but he wasn't really hungry, and he was weary unto death of eating jacks. Wampus followed Will at his heels as he paced—so closely, in fact, that when the man stopped rather suddenly the dog walked right into him.

“Damn,” Will said, “we're as nervous as a pair of ol' whores in church. This isn't what we signed on for—to sit around a camp doin' nothin'.”

He shook out his saddle blanket. Once, many years ago, he'd tossed a blanket onto the back of a good horse—a blanket that had a good-sized scorpion attached to it. It'd taken him months before he could get a blanket on that horse without it going berserk. Will eased the blanket onto the pinto's back and dropped his saddle into place. Even the horse craved some action: he danced and snorted and tossed his head. When Will mounted, the pinto put on a minor bucking exhibition, sunfishing, kicking out with his rear hooves, doing some twisting and turning.

Will enjoyed the workout as much as the horse did. They rode back toward Olympus at an easy pace, and on his way he came upon a fine piece of good
luck. There weren't many shaggies left—the skin hunters had shot hell out of the once-gigantic herds—but there were still wandering groups of a dozen or so.

Will came upon a gimp, a yearling with a severely twisted and damned-near-useless right front leg. He had some fat to him, although not much. Still, he'd been able to graze when the rest of the herd stopped. Something had spooked the other buffalo—probably the outlaws—and they'd stampeded, leaving the gimp behind. It was only a matter of time before the wolves or coyotes made a meal out of him.

Will untied the latigo that held his throwing rope at his right knee and shook out the kinks. He hadn't carried a lasso for some time, but Ray had convinced him to do so. “You never know when you might need to string up a Injun,” he'd said.

He cut the pinto hard in front of the buffalo and dropped a loop over his head, at the same time swinging his horse in the opposite direction, pulling the gimp off his feet. Will piled off his horse and followed the rope down to the bawling yearling. He placed his knife perfectly into the critter's heart. It died almost immediately. He slit it from gut to touch-hole, scooped out the innards, sawed off its head, and retrieved and coiled his rope. He tossed the heart and liver to Wampus. He'd pick up the partially butchered buffalo on his way back. “No more damned jackrabbits,” he said. “Not for a few days, anyway.”

They rode on. As he had the night before, he tied his horse a good three quarters of a mile from the lip, and Will continued on foot, crouching. He noticed
that Wampus was trembling. “Jesus,” he said, “you for sure got a taste for that renegade blood, don't you?”

The sun was fully risen now and the day promised to be yet another fifteen hours of unremitting heat. Will's shirt was soaked within a few minutes of walking. They spooked a rattler. They never saw it but they for sure heard its castanets of warning. Wampus began to trot over to the sound. Will's snapped fingers brought the dog back to his side.

Will crawled to the edge of the lip and looked down at Olympus. The two blackened, shriveled husks that had once been living men remained chained to the fence posts, almost obscured from sight by masses of flies.

Boozing for the day had already begun and there was racket from the inside of the saloon. Outside, several Indians wandered aimlessly, faces blank, hands hanging at their sides. A few mumbled incoherently.

Mushrooms,
Will thought.

One of the Indians seemed intent on climbing the slight rise from which Will watched the town. He was as clumsy as a drunk on a rolling log—he fell several times. When he struggled to his feet the last time, his lips and mouth were encrusted with sand but his face retained the same expressionless, zombielike semblance.

Wampus growled, but stopped when Will elbowed him.

For some reason, this babbling, weaving, mindless creature flared Will's temper to full blaze.
This piece of dung burned two innocent men. He might have killed Hiram or his wife or daughters. If the Indian had fought
those two men . . . But he hadn't. He'd burned them like kindling.

The renegade topped the rise twenty feet from Will and Wampus and saw neither man nor dog. A sharp ammonia smell reached Will almost immediately. The front of the Indian's Union Army pants were soaked to the point of dripping. There was another wretched stink, too—that of long-dead carrion or an overloaded outhouse with a too-shallow pit.

Will snarled as he raised his arm and pointed at the renegade. Wampus was off in half a heartbeat, silent, belly close to the ground, ivory eyeteeth glinting in the sun.

Wampus hit this one from the front, his bowie-knife-sharp teeth in a death clamp on the man's jugular. Blood spurted as if from a well spigot, but amazingly, the renegade fell almost gently and completely soundlessly. After a moment the blood stopped gushing. Wampus released his grip and stepped back. He sat, staring at the corpse, almost if he were bemused by it. Will watched silently, wondering what the dog would do next.

Wampus stood, moved ahead a step, and sniffed the blood at the renegade's throat. Then he stepped back, sat, pointed his muzzle at the sky, and howled long and loud, the eerie sound echoing about the valley, washing over the town, resounding again and again, quieter each time, until it died.

There was nothing, Will realized, that was at all canine about that howl. It was all wolf, the kind of ululation that sent shivers up and down a person's spine. Ray certainly knew his critters.