Abandon

Ezekiel had hoped to see the revolver trembling in Billy’s hand, but the enormous Walker Colt was steady and leveled on his chest like a small cannon. “That was some shootin back there,” Ezekiel said. “Head shot from what? Fifty, sixty yards?”

“Told you, throw that artillery down.”

Billy’s face twitched as if someone had placed hooks in the left corner of his mouth and was yanking them with a string. Ezekiel found the boy’s eyes, didn’t like the jitteriness he saw, would have preferred two rounds of ice. At least you saw it coming that way.

“We’re neighbors, Billy. Our wives are friends.” As he spoke, Ezekiel let the carbine’s barrel ease down. Another few inches, he’d take the boy’s head off. “You got a nice family in Bessie and Harriet, and I believe that shot that kilt the Doc was a accident. Now, I can’t speak for your partner, but your bark ain’t this hard.”

“Well, Mr.Curtice, guess you don’t know me so good after all.”

THIRTY-TWO

When Oatha Wallace arrived, Ezekiel was leaning back on a small shelf in the rock. He’d pulled off his fleece-lined gloves and unbuttoned his slicker and sack coat and vest, unclipped his suspenders, torn open the muslin shirt.

“Where’s his rifle?”

“Somewhere i-i-in the snow yonder.”

“He ain’t got a sleeve gun, do he?”

“Naw, I checked.”

Oatha stared at Ezekiel. “He’s gut-shot.”

“I-I-I-I tried to shoot him in the head, but—”

“Naw, that’s fine, Billy. His horns is clipped. Lead ball from a Walker in the bread wallet. Helluva thing. Caught a case a the slow, didn’t you, old buscadero?”

Ezekiel watched the steaming black blood leak through his fingers as he tried to put back the gray tube of gut that kept pushing out. He could feel blood running down his legs and into his boots. Some had streamed down the rock and melted a burgundy hole in the snow. He looked up at Oatha, at the boy who’d set him on his sunset trail, and when he spoke, his voice came broken and strained by ragged exhalations. “Bushwhacking, huh? So that’s how you operate?”

“Whatever gets it done,” Oatha said.

“How much y’all come away with?”

“They’s sixty-nine bricks, twenty-two pounds apiece.”

“But you done the math.”

“Sure, I done it. Just over five hunerd thousand.”

Ezekiel nodded. “Maybe you can buy this boy a new gun. That Walker must be forty years old.”

Oatha grinned. “And some clothes, too.”

Billy blushed. Too poor to afford a greatcoat or a slicker, when he ventured out into winter conditions, his only recourse was to clothe himself in every ratty, moth-eaten garment he owned, so his ensemble comprised layer upon layer of old shirts, threadbare hand-me-down sack coats two de cades old, and a blue frock coat that had barely survived a house fire back in Tennessee, and still bore the black-fringed fire-eaten holes to prove it.

Ezekiel looked at Billy. “You’ve broke your wife’s heart, son.”

“Ain’t ye son. I want his Justins, Oatha. My feet are cold.”

“We’ll discuss the man’s plunder in a bit. You got even a jot a decency in you, boy?”

Ezekiel moaned, “Got-damn.”

“Hurt as bad as they say?” Oatha asked.

“They wasn’t buildin a high line.”

A dense cloud had blown over the pass and begun its rolling descent through the boulder field.

“You wanna go on and tell me, then?” Ezekiel said. “Don’t see what you got to lose now.”

“Tell you what?”

“I know my brother left Silverton with you back in the fall. He wired me before he left. I know it was you, Nathan, and two other men. Then you come into Abandon three weeks later all by yourself, sayin they decided not to go last minute.”

“And you called me a black liar.”

“And I stand by the claim. Christ.” Ezekiel winced.

Oatha tossed his double-barreled hammer shotgun to Billy, waded toward Ezekiel, and knelt before him in the snow.

“Nathan was your brother.”

“My little brother.”

“What the hell. Don’t matter much now, does it? I didn’t wanna ride with ’em, but they caught up to me on the trail to Abandon in early October.”

“It was four a you?”

“That’s right. Started snowin the second afternoon, and it didn’t stop for a week. We’d only packed provisions for three days a travel and we was hungry by the time the snow quit. Didn’t have no webs. Ten miles from anywhere. Six feet a powder on the ground. Imagine tryin to walk any considerable distance in this shit.

“We tried to hunt, but all the game had gone down to winter in the foothills. Never saw so much as a rabbit.

“We was camped at timberline in a stand a dead spruce, and come October’s end, we was starvin. One man run off. Horses died and froze. Circumstances was dire. The other men had the look a death about ’em already. I weren’t far behind. There was enough snow melted, we coulda walked out if we just had a little strength.

“One mornin, I took my shotgun, so weak, I could hardly stand. Ways out from camp, I fired it into a tree. Started yellin I’d shot a elk. They come a-runnin. Hootin. Hollerin.

“McClurg arrived first, and I shot him. Nathan realized what was happenin, what we had to do, but he didn’t want no part of it. I was left with no choice but to kill him.

“I didn’t cook your brother, though. McClurg was plumpest, least gant up. I roasted his ass. Had both sides. Got my strength up, stowed everthing in a old bear den, and broke camp next mornin. Walked into Abandon three days later.”

Billy stared at Oatha, mouth agape, broken teeth showing, looking more than a little mystified. “You et a man’s backside?”

“Weren’t no face-lickin Thanksgivin dinner. I was starvin, Billy. And this don’t concern you anyhow. Just thought the man deserved to know his brother’s fate.”

In the midst of a cloud, mist blowing past and a few stray flakes of snow, Ezekiel was overrun by a coldness that settled so deep inside him, he knew he’d never be rid of it. He was dying and he thought of Nathan dying, felt a strange connection to his brother in that moment, wondered if he’d felt this alone in that moment before Oatha murdered him.

Ezekiel’s respiration slowed. He tasted blood in his teeth, felt it trickling from the corner of his mouth. He had a terrible thirst, and he trembled with cold as he looked up at Oatha.