"Of course I do, dear. Now drink."
He did, gagging theatrically.
"Dreadful," he croaked, thankful for the water that followed it.
"Go to sleep," Travis told him.
"Do you - have t'go?" Ezra yawned.
"No," the judge told him.
"Ah won't - miss circuit - will Ah?"
"No - it's weeks away."
"Good...." Yawning again, Ezra followed the pull of the drug and his own exhaustion down toward sleep.
Travis leaned forward, putting a hand on Ezra's chest to feel its rise and fall growing easier and steadier.
"Grandsir!" Ezra cried, snapping awake and grabbing the judge's arm.
"What is it?" Travis demanded. "What's wrong?"
"Mother..." Ezra forced out between his clenched teeth. "Don't - tell mother...."
"I won't," Travis promised, taking Ezra's hand in his.
"She - wouldn't understand...."
"I know. Go to sleep, son."
It took a few minutes, but Ezra did go to sleep. Travis waited another ten just to make sure before letting go of Ezra's hand and tucking his arm under the blankets.
"That didn't look very demonic t'me," Buck finally said, ending the silence in the room.
Mrs. Potter rose, picking up the tray. "I thought you said this medicine used the mind to heal the body?" she asked Vin.
"Yes, ma'am - that's what the talkin' dreams can do."
"Well, it seems to me that Ezra has a very good mind - a mind smart enough to know that what its body needs is rest. I think it took him to a time and a place where he knew he was safe."
"It sure wasn't here," Buck sighed.
"Of course not," Mrs. Potter told him, pushing him back down on his bed with her index finger. "This is a place he protects, not where he's protected. He could never rest here, not like he needs to."
Clearing his throat, Travis rose from the bed and headed for the door. Chris and Mary made room for him to get through it. He stopped for a moment in front of Mary, looking at her with old, old eyes before shuffling away down the hall.
"Mary..." Chris begged.
"All right," she answered, covering her eyes with her hand. "I won't print the exposé - I'll wait until you have hard evidence."
++++
"He's still sleeping," Mrs. Potter pointed out, patting Ezra's foot. They'd gathered around and between Standish and Buck in an uneven horseshoe.
"Right calm, too," Vin admitted.
"So are you sayin' we should keep givin' him that stuff?" Chris demanded of Tanner.
"Will he stay calm?" Judge Travis asked. "When are these demons supposed to come out of the woodwork?"
"The medicine doesn't make the dreams," Josiah answered. "It's what's in a man's heart. Maybe he'll have the Midas touch.... Maybe he'll be chased by the victims of his peculiar genius, or bound in chains of gold.... There's just no telling with Ezra. "
"Dlike hell," J.D. said, his battered face fierce. "Dhyou know damn well who Ezhra's demons are, Djosiah - and dwhen he starts givin' orders to get their boots, I'm comin' after yours."[ix]
"Yeah," Vin smirked, drilling Chris with his gaze. "Gold ain't got nothin' t'do with Ezra's demons."
Chris dropped his head in his hands. 'Snakebit and outflanked,' he groaned to himself.
"Maybe the men he left on Marye's Heights'll come callin'," Buck murmured, unable to let Vin's taunt pass unanswered.
"Or the friends that fell around him," Tanner countered.
"Or his mother," Mary said, sharing a look with Gloria.
"Hell, maybe he'll think Nathan's a giant bottle of laudanum come to chase him to perdition," Chris suggested, almost amused by the idea.
"Bnope," J.D. said. "Dhit's gonna be boots - boots, and a dreally big chicken."[x]
"Chickens?" Travis whispered, leaning in toward Mary but keeping a wary eye on the men howling with laughter around him. She shrugged, equally mystified by the uncharacteristic behavior of her father-in-law's vigilantes.
"Jesus, J.D.," Chris gasped. "I think Ezra addled your brains when he hit ya...."
"Dhi could be wrong," the kid agreed, glaring painfully at Larabee. "Iht could be outhouses."
Chris stopped laughing.
"Bhut I think dat's one of yours." After a moment, he amended the accusation to "one of ours."
"Yeah," Chris said, turning to look at Ezra huddled up on the bed under the quilt. 'I wouldn't have followed Jones into the outhouse, either, Ezra,' he silently apologized. 'I'll even tell you that to your face, if you manage to live long enough....'
"Well?" Mrs. Potter asked. "Are we agreed that this course of treatment is working?"
"It's workin' better than anything else we've tried," Buck sighed.
"We'll stick to it for now," Chris decided. "But I swear, any more surprises from you Josiah, and you'll be watching the sun rise diggin' your own grave."
Everyone sagged a little in relief, glancing at Ezra slumbering in fresh-scrubbed oblivion under his quilts.
"We gotta get hard evidence on Hopewell," Chris said, changing the subject. Rising from his chair, he limped over to the clothes press to investigate the delicious smells rising from the primly covered baskets and plates crowding its top. "Something that'll connect him with the Stutz family..." he mused, appropriating a basket of warm cookies.
"Time t'have a talk with that feller we got in jail," Vin agreed, reaching out for the basket when Chris passed by where he sat.
Chris handed the basket over, offering the handful of small cakes he kept for himself to the gently snoring Ezra for form's sake before settling into the chair that sat between the heads of the sickroom's two beds. Propping his aching foot up on the edge of Buck's bed, its spur jammed into the side of the mattress, he couldn't help sighing.
"Do you think Hopewell was stupid enough to deal with him directly?" Travis asked from the chair that sat opposite of Chris's at the end of the beds.
"Maybe," Vin said, chucking the basket over to the judge after filching his share. "But I doubt it."
"I'd kinda like t'fhind somethin' that would tie Stewart James to the murders," J.D. said, time and sleep having made a world of difference in his ability to make himself understood. The swelling around his eyes had become puffy bruises that promised to produce a stunning rainbow of colors over the next couple of weeks.
"Kid's got a point," Buck coughed. "Got a few things I'd like to ask that fella myself."
"You ain't goin' nowhere," Nathan risked telling him sternly, taking the rapidly emptying basket from Judge Travis. "Not if'n you want to keep that leg attached to your body."
Buck gave Nathan a dirty look, but the anger making his heart beat faster when he heard Nathan speak kept his mouth shut even more than the fever radiating from his aching calf to throb pain into every joint in his body. Jackson offered him the basket in consolation for being restricted to his sickbed, but the aroma of the freshly baked cookies turned his stomach and he hastily handed them to Mary, who shared them with Mrs. Potter before passing them over to Francis to polish off. By unspoken consensus, Josiah was not even offered the crumbs.
"J.D. - if Buck tries to get outta that bed, sit on him," Chris ordered, scowling at Buck.
"Would you please stop tellin' him that?" Wilmington groused, lying back down on his pillows. "He takes ya serious-like...."
"I am serious," Chris informed him. "You up to a stroll, Vin?"
Tanner nodded, wiggling the bare toes sticking out from his sturdily wrapped ankle. "What ya got in mind?"
"Think that fella over in the jail might be interested in learnin' some of those Indian tricks you keep tellin' me about?"
++++
"I mean it, Buck," Nathan said, pulling the sheets and blankets back over Wilmington's naked, feverish body. "You stay off that leg or you're gonna lose it." He showed Buck the pus-streaked, spent onion poultice he'd just replaced. "If that wound goes putrid, I'll have to take your leg off at the knee before it kills ya."
"Okay, okay," Buck grunted, turning his head away from the stench of the corrupted onions. "I hear ya, Nathan."
"J.D., go ask Mrs. Potter for some of that chicken broth of hers," Nathan said. "Buck needs t'get somethin' in his stomach, and its 'bout time for Ezra t'be wakin' up fer more of Josiah's medicine. Best he eats, too."
J.D. nodded, immediately regretting it. He frowned at Buck, who flopped a tired hand at him.
"I'll be here," he promised, covering his eyes with his arm. Even if he wanted to, he doubted he could get up out of bed at that red hot moment - at least not without finding himself face first on the floor enduring all the pleasures of a bad Morning After.
"Dyou'd better be," J.D. told him. "DhI'd hate t'see what Chris would do to both of us if you hain't."
'That's playin' dirty, Kid," Buck thought sourly.
"I can still take a piss, can't I?" he groused aloud, swatting at J.D. when the kid trotted by on his way out the door.
"Maybe," Nathan told him. "Depends on where you wanta take it." Shifting painfully on his chair, he added, "Just be grateful ya still can...."
"How's Josiah?"
"Put him back to bed.... Best place for him right now."
"He gonna be all right?"
"Josiah's gonna be fine - best you be worryin' 'bout yourself, now," Nathan chided.
"Hell, I've lived through worse'n this," Buck bragged, absent-mindedly rubbing the scar across his chest.
"You vill stay in bed nonezeless," Mrs. Heidegger announced, sailing into the room like a fast frigate with her decks cleared for action. Mrs. Potter followed behind her, carrying a tray loaded down with bowls and plates.
"Yes, ma'am," Buck agreed meekly, content to contemplate the wonders of creation from the vantage of his pillow.
Smiling and shaking her head, Mrs. Potter put the tray down on the table on the press side of Ezra's bed. Mrs. Heidegger glided her way up the aisle between the beds, the better to glare sternly at Wilmington before she bent down and kissed his forehead.
'She loves her husband,' Buck reminded himself, thinking that there were some circumstances in which a man who expired of suffocation would die happy.
"He has the fever," she announced, straightening up and turning to face Nathan.
"Yes, ma'am," Nathan agreed. "Willow bark tea and some feverfew oughta knock it down some, long as we keep them drawing poultices on the leg."
"Dlook out!" J.D. called, and Buck went up on his elbow the better to see what was in the tin tub the kid was helping the Heideggers' oldest daughter Katarina carry through the narrow door into the sick room.
"That ain't soup, is it?" he guessed, frowning at the steam rising from the tub the two kids sat down at the foot of his bed.
"Is for vashing," Mrs. Heidegger informed him. "Men who are vounded and ill vill not grow healthy if they are filthy."
Buck lowered himself back to his bed with a sigh. "You work for the Sanitary Commission durin' the war?"
"Nein," Mrs. Heidegger replied coldly, her splendid eyes flashing. "It vas not active in Charleston."
'Damn!' Buck sighed to himself, closing his eyes to the sight of Mrs. Heidegger laying a tender hand on Ezra's cheek.
"I miss Charleston," Katarina admitted shyly, smoothing her hands over the damp spot on her bodice where water had sloshed over the lip of the tub onto it.
'She's a child,' Buck reminded himself, averting his eyes. When he had first arrived in Four Corners, Katarina had been skinny as a rail, all elbows, knees and big blue eyes. Three months later, Nature had wrought perfection from all that clumsy, and sweet little Katarina who still played with her dolls was now wearing her mother's old corsets.
"Ach," Mrs. Heidegger clucked, bringing her daughter to her side with a beckoning gesture. "You vere a baby of three years ven ve left. Vat do you remember of Charleston?" she asked, smiling down into her child's face.
"Ice cream," Katarina replied.
Mother and daughter laughed, and Buck bit his mustache at the sight they made.
'You are going straight to hell, old son...' he warned himself.
"I like ice cream," J.D. said, grinning at Katarina. She grinned back, and Buck was hard pressed to stifle a groan, absolutely certain that if he somehow contrived to get J.D. and Katarina alone together, they'd wind up playing checkers
"Ve need another tub," Mrs. Heidegger said, sending her daughter off to collect it with a fond pat. J.D. followed Katarina, and Mrs. Heidegger regarded his back with narrowed eyes and pursed lips.
'Match-makin', mama?' Buck wondered, his protective hackles stirring.
"He's waking up," Nathan announced. Mrs. Potter was closer and faster than he was, beating him to Ezra's side and sitting down on the edge of the bed.
"Ezra?" she called softly, picking clumped strands of hair off his face and forehead.
He squirmed under his blankets, his eyes shut with the determination NOT to wake up, whatever provocation was offered.
The charley horse that ripped through his right calf when he pointed his foot in an instinctive stretch proved too much for his resolve and his eyes flew open with a cry of pain.
"What is it?" Mrs. Potter demanded. "What's wrong, dear?"
"...L-leg..." he answered, reaching for her like a child reaching for his mother. She gathered him in as if he were, kissing his head and rocking with the rhythm of his stifled sobs.
Mrs. Heidegger threw the covers off Ezra's legs. Seeing the twisting flex of his cramping calf muscle, she grabbed it with one strong, long-fingered hand. Taking his foot in her other hand, she pressed it back as far as its ankle could comfortably go, immediately stopping the spasm and the agony it caused.
"Is better, ja?" Mrs. Heidegger cooed.
Ezra hid his face against Mrs. Potter's neck before he nodded.
'He must think he's three or four again,' she realized. 'Young enough to think that mama can fix anything...."
"Mein kleiner Schätzi is shy?" Mrs. Heidegger teased, letting go of Ezra's foot to cover everything but the leg she held with the blankets.
Ezra lifted his head so that he could peek at her. She smiled at him and he turned his face away quickly.
'Little flirt,' Mrs. Potter thought fondly, checking the state of the bandages that held the thin poultice against his back wound. They were still tight and she blessed Josiah for his unorthodox inspiration.
'Bastard,' Nathan silently fumed. 'Half-dead and drugged out of his mind, and he's still gotta wrap folks around his baby finger....'
Ezra's stubbled cheek rubbed against Mrs. Potter's neck and she felt his breath tickle in her ear.
"What, dear?" she asked, leaning into the whisper this time and listening hard. After a moment, she laughed. "No, you didn't fall off your pony."
After another moment of listening, she laughed again. "I know it feels like it, darling, but you really didn't. You - did something very brave."
Another burst of breath rustled in her ear, once again too low for her to understand the words.
"Hmmm? What did you - " Closing her eyes, she tightened her arms around Ezra. "Yes, just like your Daddy...."
'So young to lose a father,' Mrs. Heidegger thought sadly, the side-effects of Josiah's 'cure' having been explained to her by Mary and Gloria. Slowly, she began to gently work the tension from the muscle bulging under her hands.
"Ggnnnhhh!" Ezra cried, trying to pull his leg away from Mrs. Heidegger.
"I know it hurts," Mrs. Potter soothed. "But she has to do it to make it feel better."
"Bring me a towel of the hot water, Herr Nathan," Mrs. Heidegger commanded.
Biting back the desire to tell her to fetch it her own damn self, Nathan obeyed, savagely wringing the piled cotton fabric free of all the water he could before handing it to her.
"Danke," Mrs. Heidegger thanked him, wrapping the warm cloth around Ezra's calf. "Maybe some strudel vill help you feel better?" she suggested to him.
Ezra shook his head in refusal, looking at Mrs. Heidegger from under his lashes and the security of Mrs. Potter's arms.
"How about a nice piece of pecan pie?" Mrs. Potter offered.
"Mah tummy hurts, Momma Peggy..." Ezra confessed, huddling miserably against Mrs. Potter.
"It does?" she asked, gazing up at Nathan. Mrs. Heidegger turned to him as well, her hands stopped in the middle of wrapping a dry length of wool around the wet towel. They were giving him the look he'd seen hundreds of times before on the faces of mothers who had come to him when their own ability to help their children had been exhausted.
"He ain't et nothin' but a little cup of beef tea for days," Nathan reminded them, the words hard to get out of his tight throat. "And he's been kicked around like a dog.... 'Course his stomach hurts. Get that soup in him, as much as you can, that'll help make it better."
"Will that be enough?" Mrs. Potter asked.
"It's a start," Nathan told her, unable to meet her worried eyes. "You got any soft bread?" he asked Mrs. Heidegger.
"Ja, in the kitchen.... You tell Georg vat baking you need, he make it for you."
Nodding, Nathan turned painfully toward the door.
"Nein!" Mrs. Heidegger scolded, rising from the bed like a cresting wave about to crash down on top of Jackson. "I go - you sit."
A deceptively lovely hand crushed Nathan's bicep and Mrs. Heidegger muscled him into the chair at the foot of Buck's bed. "Ven is the last time you eat, Herr Nathan?" she demanded, feeling his forehead with the back of her hand.
"I... had some cookies a little bit ago," Jackson told her numbly.
Mrs. Heidegger snorted her disapproval and cruised from the room, leaving both Nathan and Buck limp in her wake.
"Where's Fatima?" Ezra suddenly demanded, twisting fretfully in Mrs. Potter's arms to look around the room.
"Fatima?" Mrs. Potter echoed.
"She'd be Mama Peggy's slave girl," Nathan informed her, having grown up among Didos and Cleopatras and Scheherazades, named by owners who wanted to show off their educated whimsy.
Green eyes flashed angrily, and suddenly the child in Mrs. Potter's arms became the man he was, his gaze pinning Nathan to his chair like a butterfly on a sample card.
"Mah people do not hold with slavery!" Ezra stated, raising his chin proudly.
"They don't?" Nathan blinked.
"It is a scourge upon our Nation," Ezra declaimed, precisely parroting the opinions of his elders.
"It is?" Nathan asked faintly.
"Yes, suh. Fatima is mah cat."
"Fatima is outside," Mrs. Potter decided, quite able to believe that Ezra had been a precociously articulate child.
Ezra brightened.
"Think she'll bring me a bunny to play with?" he asked hopefully.
A vision of Ezra, still in the skirts and long curls of infancy, holding a bobcat with a pink ribbon around her neck and a terrified rabbit in its mouth sprang to Buck's mind.
"I think it's time for your breakfast," Mrs. Potter told him, neatly side-stepping the issue of Fatima all together. Ezra curled up in silent protest against the idea of eating.
"It'll make your stomach feel better," she promised him, laying him back on his pillow and turning to the bowl of soup keeping warm under its silver cover.
Nathan looked away from Mrs. Potter fussing over Ezra and found Buck smirking at him, Wilmington's gaze seeing everything Jackson was only beginning to recognize about himself.
"Shut up," Nathan told him thickly, burying his face in his hands.
++++
"Gentlemen," Francis greeted the prisoners, preceding Chris and Vin into the jail. "These lads heard we had guests and came t'see how ye'd passed yer night," he said, waving a casual hand at the two men held in separate cells. One stood up when he saw them, managing a glower despite the handicap of a spectacular black eye. The other prisoner cowered back on his cot, rubbing his bandaged wrists.
"Somethin' like that," Vin winced, sitting down on the edge of the desk to take his weight off his sore legs. Francis settled into the chair behind it.
"Thought there was just one," Chris said.
Francis pointed at the standing cowboy. "This is Roy. The ladies brought him in this mornin'. His sleepy friend there is Stanley."
"Howdy boys," Vin smiled, tapping his fingers along the shortened stock of his Winchester.
"I keep tellin' ya, I ain't never seen this fool before in my life!" Roy snarled.
Grinning, Chris stalked up and down outside the barred doors of the two cells, looking at the prisoners like they were breakfast.
"You ain't got no legal grounds for holdin' me," Roy growled.
"We need legal grounds, Vin?" Chris asked, stopping in front of the belligerent cowboy.
Vin thought about it for a moment. "Nope," he answered. "See boys, we ain't the law." Shaking his head, he looked over at Corcoran. "Seems folks is always makin' that mistake."
Francis snorted, leaning back in the desk chair to enjoy the show.
"You're bluffin'," Roy sneered.
"No they ain't!" Stanley cried, staring wild-eyed at Chris.
"Shut up!" Roy barked. "They ain't gonna do nothin' with a Federal Judge in town."
"You see a Federal Judge anywhere, Vin?" Chris asked, sizing Roy up like a hungry tiger licking its chops.
Vin looked around the room, up to the ceiling, then leaned over the desk to take a peek behind it.
"Sure don't," he answered.
"You fellas wouldn't happen to know a couple a hands out at the Stewart place, name a Clem and Jasper, would ya?" Chris asked.
Stanley started badly, his already pale face blanching white.
"See, Clem and Jasper showed us a right good time a few days back," Vin said softly, studying the two men in front of him. "We reckon we oughta show friends a theirs the same kinda hospitality."
"Ain't never heard a them fellas," Roy insisted.
"You sure about that?" Chris asked, skewering Stanley with a gaze that made him slink back to his bunk and bury his bruised face in his lacerated hands.
"I'm just passin' through, lookin' for honest work ridin' herd," Roy claimed.
"Now that's not what Stanley told me," Corcoran countered. "He said you were workin' for Stewart James."
Roy ground his teeth together. "He said he was workin' for James - I keep tellin' ya, I ain't never seen this idiot afore in my life!"
"Maybe these fellers cin help us figger out that bet," Vin suggested, pretty sure that Roy was the brains of the duo, the one that it would take some pressure to crack.
"Bet?" Stanley squeaked in alarm.
"It's jist a little bet," Tanner told him, holding up his thumb and index finger with half an inch of space between them. "Reckon it won't take long for you boys to settle it."
"Vin here's always tellin' me the Comanche and Kiowa are meaner than anyone else on this earth," Chris began.
"And Chris here's always sayin' I don't know what mean is," Vin continued. "See, he was raised up by nine sisters and says there ain't nothin' anybody coulda taught them girls 'bout makin' a man twist."
"Now you boys get to tell us who's right," Chris finished, winking at Stanley.
++++
"Damn it, Kid! Nathan said I could take a piss by myself!" Buck fumed, his attempt at a whisper coming out more like a roar.
"Dyou can, Bhuck - but you gotta do it here!" Dunne replied, crossing his arms and frowning stubbornly down at Wilmington.
"J.D.!" Buck pleaded, with a worried look at Mary and Mrs. Potter.
"I think I'll check on the progress of our other invalids," Gloria decided, with a fond shake of her head.
"I think the washing is ready to come off the line," Mary agreed. Mrs. Potter took herself off to the adjoining room where Nathan and Josiah lay sleeping, and Mary went after the laundry, thus removing the objection Wilmington had to using the chamber pot waiting patiently in its commode to be of service.
"I don't need any help," Buck huffed, pushing J.D. away from him to lurch the few steps to the cabinet sitting conveniently in the corner of the room next to the open window.
'I hope...' he admitted to himself, his head spinning right along with the room.
++++
Ezra woke with the suddenness of a match striking into flame. His eyes snapped open for an instant, before experience overruled instinct and closed them again. Something was wrong, something so wrong that it could drag him from the deepest sleep he could remember to complete awareness in the time it took to blink.
'No gun,' he realized. 'No clothes, narrow bed....' Blood hummed in his ears, rising in his veins and twitching into his fingers, and he was hard put to resist his body's demand to fill his lungs to capacity.
'Damn it, Ezra!' he scolded himself. 'Don't react - think!'
But it was hard to think past the nausea in his gut and the pain that made him want to crawl out of his own skin to get away from it.
'Aaoowww,' he admitted to himself. White-sparked blackness tugged at the edges of his consciousness, trying to pull him back down into nothingness. It took all of his will to fight it off, to stay awake, aware. Still struggling with his need for more air than the even breathing of sleep would bring him, he used his ears and his nose to try and place where he was.
It took a moment to overcome the loud thudding of his rapid heartbeat, to hear the sound of heavy, open-mouthed breathing and the scuffle and creak of bodies moving on a wooden planked bed.
His nose brought him the stink of sweat, his own and that of at least two other men. He could smell blood, too, and vomit, and laid over the effluvia of a sick room was the scent of a lady's powder and rose-infused soap.
'Peggy,' he recognized, remembering where he was now. Opening his eyes the barest crack, he directed his gaze to where his nose told him she was. She had her back to him, folding bed linen and stacking it on top of a clothes press along one wall of the home her husband had commandeered.
"Stay down, damn it!" an angry voice ordered, its flat, nasal vowels betraying more than a trace of New England in its uneducated accents. Ezra turned his gaze to the other side of his bed, to a young rowdy shoving his knee into Mitchell's gut.[xi]
The mystery of what had roused him was solved.
"I mean it!" the Yankee threatened. "You try and pull any more stunts like that, and I'll - I'll shoot ya!"
'Over my dead body,' Ezra silently promised. With one last look at Peggy's back, he gauged the distance between his bed and the custom-made ivory grips of the matching handguns riding low on the Federal's hips.
'Amateur,' Ezra realized, his smile hard with contempt.
++++
"You and what army, Kid?" Wilmington demanded weakly.
"C'mon, Buck!" J.D. pleaded. "You heard what Nathan - "
J.D. stopped speaking abruptly, his face going chalk white beneath the livid swelling of his bruises.
"Kid?" Buck asked.
The sound of two single-action Colts being cocked behind Dunne's back answered him. Wilmington didn't need to look down to know that J.D.'s holsters were empty, but he did anyway.
"Not a word, son," Ezra commanded, his voice hoarse and cracking with the strain of speaking. "And I'd best not hear a peep out of you, either, darlin'. I assure you, I will kill both of you if it becomes necessary to secure our... emancipation."
Ezra's raspy chuckle at his ironic joke sent ghosts racing down Buck's spine. 'Wrong army!' he realized with a dreadful premonition of escalating trouble.
"J.D.," he said, pitching his voice low and holding the kid's frightened gaze with his own. "You do exactly what he tells you to, y'hear me?"
Swallowing hard, J.D. nodded once to let Wilmington know he'd not only heard him, but that he'd even listened.
Nathan was listening as well - and had been listening since the sound of two pistols being cocked had woken him from his fitful nap.
'Hell,' he thought, rising as carefully and quietly as he could from the bed to peer through the door that separated the rooms of the hospital suite from each other. He watched helplessly as Ezra ordered J.D. away from Buck, making the kid stand next to Mary in front of clothes press. He wasn't sure how Ezra was managing to stand up, but he knew that things would go from bad to worse for Standish if he did it much longer. Without really being aware of what he was doing, he started forward to try to intervene in the dangerous standoff.
"No!" Josiah hissed in Nathan's ear, clapping his hand over Jackson's mouth and forcibly holding the younger man back from rushing out of their cover to confront Ezra. "He'll kill you if you make him, Nathan!"
++++
"I dunno, Vin..." Chris frowned, rubbing his left thumb with his right one.
"Hanging by the thumbs takes a long time to kill a man," Tanner replied, keeping an ear attuned to the muffled cries of the men in the jail.[xii]
"Roy'll take some work to crack," Chris mused, "but old Stanley'd sell his mama if you looked at him cross-eyed...."
"So why ain't Stanley rattin' out Roy?"
"Maybe he can't. Maybe we ain't got a two-headed snake - maybe we're dealin' with two different critters," Chris suggested.
"Jist 'cause the ranchers have bought an' paid for Hopewell don't mean he's livin' in their back pocket," Vin agreed, slowly nodding.
"I think we got the right hand and the left hand in there," Chris said.
"Roy's workin' fer Hopewell, an' Stanley is one a Stewart's boys?"
"That's the way I read it."
"Well, hell," Vin grinned. "I guess some days, y'jist get lucky!"
A particularly painful yowl from Stanley made Chris flinch. Vin frowned at him and Larabee shrugged.
"Reminds me of laundry day..." he explained sheepishly.
Vin didn't quite smile.
"C'mon," he said, giving Chris a pat on the back. "Let's go tell the boys the good news. Just about time fer supper, anyways," he pointed out, not needing to check the position of the sun in the sky to confirm what the scent of pies cooling and cakes baking throughout the town had told him.
Grinning, Chris led the way across the street to the hotel. Vin was right: Any minute now treats meant to tempt an invalid's appetite would begin piling up in the hotel. Trust Vin to keep track of the important details....
Mrs. Heidegger was in the lobby when they came in, her arms full of baby and her skirts full of toddlers. She smiled at them and they tipped their hats to her as they continued down the corridor toward the sickroom. Vin gave up trying to match Chris's pace when his knee viciously protested the length of stride being demanded of it.
'You might get there first,' he silently promised Chris, 'but you ain't gonna get Mrs. Potter's apple pie all to yourself this time!'
Still, he hustled to catch up with Larabee, given the chance to close the distance between them to a single, short step by the fact that the door to the sickroom was closed. Grinning, he poked Chris in the back to remind him that he was there.
"Finders, keepers," Larabee shot back, throwing the door open and striding through it. He stopped in the doorway, shocked into slack-jawed stupidity by the sight of Ezra standing in front of Buck's bed, protecting Wilmington from J.D. and Mary with his naked body and one of the kid's matched Colts. The sight and sound of Ezra's right thumb cocking J.D.'s second pistol in Chris's face focused his attention nicely and he shut his mouth with a snap of teeth.
'I'm a dead man,' he realized, meeting the murder blazing in Ezra's gaze without flinching. He'd always figured that expression of seething, crazy hatred was the last thing he'd see in this life, but somehow he'd never expected to see it in a friend's eyes.
"Colonel," Ezra greeted him pleasantly, taking his sight right between Larabee's eyes.
"Hands up, Blue Belly!" Vin barked behind Chris, drawing and cocking his Winchester and pressing its barrel against the back of Larabee's skull. It was pure reaction to Tanner's first sight of Ezra over Chris's shoulder, a desperate, split-second bid for survival. He was dead if Ezra pulled the trigger; Larabee's head might stop the first bullet, but there wouldn't be enough of it left to stop the other five Tanner knew would follow it. The kind of rage that held Standish wouldn't let Ezra stop with just one shot; he would empty the Colt's chamber into the place where Chris's head had been as if it were the center of an ace of spades, and the last sound Vin would hear would be the repeated cocking of the Colt's hammer and the 'click, click, click' of its spent chamber.
Chris reached for the sky and held his breath. After a moment, the triumph in Ezra's expression soured into disappointment and he eased the pressure of his thumb on the trigger, letting the pistol's hammer come to a gentle rest against the percussion caps of the loaded chamber. Larabee watched the tremors of fatigue and muscle strain suddenly shaking through the arm that Ezra dropped to his side, and resolved then and there that if any of them got out of this alive, Standish was buying.
"Who the hell are you?!" Ezra demanded of Vin.
"Sergeant Vin Tanner, Sharpshooter, 17th Mississippi," he answered in a rush, hoping Ezra couldn't see how badly his hands were shaking.
If Ezra couldn't see it, Chris could feel it in the cold steel trembling against the base of his skull. 'Breathe, Vin,' he encouraged.
Ezra frowned. "Get his gun, Sergeant," he ordered. Vin did as he was told, slipping Chris's heavy Peacemaker into the waistband of his trousers.
"Y'may join your lady wife, Colonel," Ezra told Chris, managing to make every syllable an insult.
Keeping his hands high and his movements slow and deliberate, Chris obeyed, making sure he kept several feet between he and Mary. Behind Standish, he saw Buck sinking back onto his bed, too sick to get farther in his lunge to stop Ezra than one foot on the floor. A shiver of movement caught in the corner of Larabee's gaze, translating into the shadows of people standing outside of Ezra's view in the adjoining room.
'Stay put!' Chris silently ordered whoever they were, hoping that he had done nothing to reveal their presence to the dangerous man who was looking for any reason to kill him. He would have been confident that he hadn't betrayed them, had he been facing anyone other than Ezra.
Keeping Larabee in his peripheral vision, Ezra returned his attention to Vin, looking him up and down with a hard, raking scrutiny. Vin came to attention, cursing himself for breaking the promise he had made to himself ten years ago to never, ever do anything that remotely resembled such an action again for as long as he lived, amen and hallelujah!
"Lt. Colonel Beau Standish," Ezra said at last, his Tidewater drawl unencumbered by the harsher veneer of St. Louis. "Army of Northern Virginia, currently on detached duty with the Army of Tennessee." Giving Chris a venomous look, he added, "Your timin' is deplorable, Tannah."
"Yes, sir," Vin agreed numbly, sharing an 'oh, hell!' look with Buck.
Ezra turned his full attention back to Chris. "As much as it pains me to forgo your generous hospitality, suh, Ah am afraid that my men and Ah must bid you farewell. However, Ah find myself at somewhat of a disadvantage where travelin' is concerned."
Once again, Chris found himself staring down the muzzle of J.D.'s gun.
"Ah require your trousers, Colonel."
'Over my dead body!' Chris thought, managing not to blurt the foolish invitation aloud. Unfortunately, his expression said it for him.
Standish's upper lip lifted in a glittering coyote snarl. "Your trousers or your life, suh!"
'Give him the God-damned jeans!' Buck silently begged. 'Jesus Christ, Chris, it ain't worth dying for!'
Chris didn't move or speak, the same stubborn pride that was keeping Ezra on his feet holding him in its foolish grasp.
"Ah appreciate how such a loss would affect the dignity of your position," Ezra told Chris softly, his eyes gleaming in anticipation as he cocked the hammer back on the Colt yet again. "And Ah know the kind of sufferin' the preservation of that dignity has demanded. It would be mah pleasure t'honor that sufferin' by strippin' those trousers from your warm corpse."
"Colonel!" Vin interrupted, momentarily disconcerted when both Ezra and Chris turned their gazes fractionally to acknowledge him. "Uh, Colonel Standish, sir.... That there Federal's a mite scrawny fer his britches t'fit ya."
Despite the fact that Tanner had undoubtedly just saved his life, Chris shot Vin a dirty look.
Ezra blinked, an expression of confusion suddenly revealing his exhaustion as he looked at Larabee and then at himself, trying to understand Vin's observation. Unwilling to know if the man Standish thought he was trying to kill was bigger than Chris, or if Ezra was back in a time and place where starvation had reduced him to little better than a skeleton, Tanner pointed with his Winchester to the basket of clean laundry tipped over at Mary's feet. "Looks like there's a pair a' britches in there that might could fit ya."
Ezra's confusion disappeared into exasperation as he glared at Vin. "You always this damned helpful?"
Vin grinned at him, feeling like he was getting back on familiar ground. "Toss 'em here," he told Mary, with what he hoped was a reassuring nod of his head.
Taking a deep breath, Mary gathered Buck's clean, wrinkled trousers and took a step toward Vin.
Ezra moved the gun he held on Chris to cover her, raising a warning eyebrow that quickly put her back into her place.
"Toss 'em here," Vin said again, holding out his free hand to catch them. Mary did as she was told, breathing a sigh of relief when Tanner snagged the trousers out of the air.
"That's a good girl," Standish sneered at her, his face as ugly as his tone. Her flesh crawling, Mary raised a hand to the base of her throat to ward off the violent insult Ezra's suddenly cold gaze promised her. "But you're always a good girl, aren't you, darlin'?"
'Oh, Lord,' Vin said to himself, remembering the look on Ezra's mother's face when she'd seen her son clear the tail of his jacket from his gun in a deliberate and calculated statement of his displeasure.[xiii] Another man might have dismissed the moment as an empty warning, or possibly an adult version of a jealous child's tantrum, but Vin knew better - and the fear in Maude's eyes had told Tanner that she did, too.
Chris shifted instinctively toward Mary, his protective hackles rising in response to Ezra's intimidation. His mind told him he was crazy, that Standish didn't have it in him to hurt a woman, but his gut told him to remember Fredericksburg, and the kind of evil things war made a good man do.
"Such gallantry is rewarded in heaven," Ezra growled, the frosty contempt with which he'd regarded Mary melting away in the heat of his hatred for the man Chris represented. "Ah am astonished at you, Colonel - after all, you are the one who taught me that a gentleman's honor is a soldier's liability."
'Who the hell was this guy?!' Chris wondered, desperately trying to figure out how to play along with Ezra's 'demons' without winding up six feet under. There was no doubt in his mind that Standish had made the original of the character he was playing into worm-food years ago.
A muscle spasm got the better of Ezra's lethal intentions, a right arm that simply couldn't hold a pistol on Chris any longer cramping itself down to his side. Ezra hunched toward it, unable to contain his gasp of pain.
The shadow in the adjoining room moved again and Chris stopped breathing. Ezra caught the movement too, raising the pistol he held in his left hand as he turned toward it. He found himself looking at J.D., who had seen Nathan almost break Josiah's hold and, with everything Ezra had ever tried to teach him in his mind, had stepped forward to give Standish what he expected to see.
"Uh-uh!" Ezra grunted, pointing the gun in Dunne's face. "Back in line, Billy Yank!"
J.D. nodded, stepping slowly and carefully back into his place on wobbling knees.
'You owe him, Nathan,' Chris thought grimly, watching Buck's leg collapse yet again under an attempt to rise to his feet and tackle Ezra from behind without a flicker of reaction to cue Standish to the danger behind him.
"At ease," Ezra ordered, turning his head toward Buck without ever taking his gaze from Larabee. "We'll be leavin' here momentarily, Sergeant-Major."
"Wonderful!" Buck groaned, huffing a great sigh of air through his mustache and letting his body crash back onto the bed. 'Wonder where the hell we're going when we do?'
Ezra sidled toward the foot of Buck's bed, his injuries making him move like a decrepit crab.
"The trousers, Tannah," he prompted, and Vin moved closer to hand them to him.
"On the bed," Ezra ordered. "You keep them covered while Ah dress. And Sergeant - if one of 'em even sneezes, say 'bless you' after you shoot them."
"Yes sir," Vin answered, chucking the trousers on top of Buck's twisted covers before making a show of staring down their three ruthless captors.
'Hopeless,' he sighed to himself, noticing J.D.'s face screw up in an attempt to scratch a suddenly itching nose without lowering his hands from above his shoulders.
"Y'can scratch your nose, Kid," Buck said.
"Mitchell!" Ezra scolded, giving Wilmington a scathing glare that had only worry and affection behind it.
"Just put the damn things on," Buck grunted, blotting the sweat dripping down his face with the back of his hand. "Sir."
Ezra gave him a quick nod. "Just hang on," he half-pleaded, half-reassured. Strangling down a groan, Standish made his body bend, sitting down on the edge of Buck's bed.
"Come here, my deah," he ordered Mary, his voice throbbing with menace. "For once, Ah desire your philanthropy."
'This is Ezra,' Mary reminded herself, taking a deep breath and squaring her shoulders before she stepped forward. 'Ezra wouldn't hurt a woman - he wouldn't hurt me. Ezra would die first.'
'Ezra, yes,' she found herself countering as she picked up the trousers and knelt down on the floor next to him. 'But what about Lt. Colonel Beau Standish?'
"You're bleeding," she pointed out, automatically reaching out toward the bright red spot seeping through the bandages that covered the wound he'd taken for her sake.
"Ah'm fine," he snapped. "Now be a good girl and help me put these on, or I'll paint the wall with your husband's brains."
Mary sat back on her heels, her chin rising. "Go ahead. Shoot him - and the sound of that shot will bring every Union soldier in this place down on your head before you can get so much as one foot out the door."
While Chris, Vin, and Buck remembered how to breathe, Ezra considered Mary with narrowed eyes. "Good point," he conceded. "Tannah, bring me his pistol."
Vin did as he was told, careful to play his role as guard straight.
"Thank you," Ezra told him, trading one of J.D.'s guns for the Peacemaker. "Problem solved," he smirked at Mary. "Isn't that right, darlin'?"
Mary swallowed, smoothing her skirt over her knee.
"How long have you been a guest of the colonel and his lovely wife, Mistah Tannah?" Ezra asked.
"Not long, sir."
"His men know better than to come runnin' when they hear the discharge of this particular handgun, Sergeant. They've heard it enough to be able t'distinguish it from the common roar of powder and bullet. No one will bother to investigate should they hear it bein' fired - especially not here, in an infirmary set aside for prisoners. They'll consider it business as usual...." He looked down at Mary, sneering that nasty little smirk she wanted to slap off his face. "Only this time when they file the report about escaped prisoners, it'll be true, won't it, darlin'?"
"Foot," Mary answered, kicking herself soundly for her foolish show of temper. Legs shaking with the effort, Ezra lifted first one foot and then the other into the trouser legs she'd bunched together at his feet as if she were dressing Billy. Automatically, she turned a two-inch, three layered cuff in the hem of the too-long legs before taking hold of the waistband riding just below Ezra's knees. Gritting his teeth, Standish pressed himself up from the bed, teetering back and forth for several moments before he could lock his knees into steadiness.
Meeting Buck's eyes as she rose up off her heels onto her knees to bring the trousers higher up Ezra's beaten-up legs and torso, she found herself blushing furiously, her skin growing as hot as the bruised, fever-baked flesh of the man a scant inch away from the curve of her cheekbone.
She struggled to her feet, hampered by her skirts and the need to keep hold of the waistband of the trousers. Ezra helped her, his grasp on her arm harsh at first, as if he intended to jerk her to her feet. She braced herself for the rough treatment, but his fingers only pressed into her arm, waiting for her to direct his assistance. She looked up into his face, easily seeing in his eyes how much he hated himself for lifting her like a gentleman.
Silently, she tugged the well-worn cotton denim up over his hips, having to pull hard to get Ezra's swollen, black and blue thighs to fit into Buck's trousers. He hissed as the seams of the fabric pressed into him, tensing the long line of muscle in his upper legs.
Mary forced herself to look at what her fingers were doing as she buttoned the front-fly of the trousers.
'Pretend it's Billy,' she told herself, thinking of Stephen instead. She felt her blush grow until she thought her head would explode off her neck.
"The gunbelt," Ezra gasped, the pain of standing up and lifting Mary pushing tears into his eyes and bunching the muscles in his jaw.
Buck handed Mary the gunbelt Ezra had made J.D. take off and leave on the bed. The butt and front of Buck's trousers searched for the support of a waist, failed to find one within inches of their circumference, and collapsed down Ezra's hips to puddle in folds over the pulled seams of the fabric straining over his upper thighs.
'I ain't that fat,' Buck thought to himself, his hand automatically testing the flat washboard of his stomach for any sign of encroaching pudginess. Watching Mary have to shift the buckle on J.D.'s gunbelt to the very last hole available in its length in order to get it to stay somewhere in between Ezra's waist and hipline mollified him somewhat.
'I ain't fat,' he silently told Ezra. 'You're just a freak of nature.'
Ezra holstered J.D.'s gun, switching the Peacemaker into his left hand, freeing up his right one as well as relieving the muscles jerking spasmodically in his upper arm. His left thumb caressed the hammer on Chris's pistol, his gaze flickering up and down Larabee like a man choosing his target. Vin didn't like how Ezra's gaze lingered around Chris's abdomen, or the way those green eyes were starting to glint.
"You there," he said abruptly, threatening J.D. with his own gun to maybe teach the kid a little object lesson about keeping better track of his piece. "Git in that basket, get some of them bandages, and hog-tie yer colonel."
When J.D. gawped at him in what Vin decided was a perfect imitation of a clueless private, Tanner barked, "Move boy!"
J.D. did, snatching up the long white strips of cotton waiting to be pressed in the bottom of the willow twig basket.
"Damn it, Tannah!" Ezra swore, cocking his Peacemaker at Dunne and stopping J.D. in his tracks. "What the hell are you doin'?"
"Escapin'," Vin calmly replied. "What the hell are you doin', sir?"
Ezra didn't have an answer, his chest heaving as the edge of his hatred for the Yankee colonel transferred itself to the glare he was giving Tanner.
"We don't shoot men just t'watch 'em die," Vin said softly.
"And that is why we are losin'," Ezra replied with a chuckle that made Buck's throat hurt. "Which is it, Sergeant - victory, or your manly honor?"
Vin didn't say anything, just caught and held Ezra's gaze until Standish looked away from him.
"And that is why we never had a chance in hell to win," Ezra murmured, laughing softly at the folly of it all. "Carry on, Sergeant," he ordered wearily, removing his finger from the Peacemaker's trigger.
Vin nodded to J.D., and so did Chris, both men silently trying to reassure the nervous kid as he took his instructions literally, leaving Chris sitting on the floor with his wrists tied to his ankles and a gag between his snarling teeth.
Buck nudged Ezra's leg with his toes and Standish looked over at him.
"Mind requisitioning a pair of those for me?" Wilmington asked, his voice light, but his eyes telling Ezra that he'd done the right thing.
Ezra's gaze went to Buck's wounded leg, and Wilmington shuddered when he realized that Standish was seeing bed sheets from his knee down. 'Hello, demon,' he thought, acknowledging the sudden presence of this old and unexpected mutual acquaintance.
The smile Standish forced for him told Buck that Ezra's men would have followed him through hell. The presence of Chris's gun looking so out of place in Ezra's hand reminded him that they had, and he was glad when Standish turned away from him to look at Mary.
"Madam?" Ezra half-asked, half-demanded.
Mary nodded, returning to loot the laundry basket yet again to find a pair of Nathan's trousers for Buck.
Ezra motioned for her to toss them to him, and she did.
"Now you tie up the boy," Standish told her. "And Peggy darlin' - Ah will check the knots."
Mary went numb, her hands unaware of the bandages she clutched in her hands.
'Peggy?' she repeated to herself, at the same time that her stomach twisted with the realization that if he found her knots wanting, he just might kill J.D. to punish her.
Ezra waited until J.D. was gagged and trussed up like a Sunday roast and sitting on the floor beside Larabee before he jammed the Peacemaker into a holster that didn't fit it. With a glance at Vin to make sure that his vigilance hadn't relaxed, Ezra took Nathan's beat-up old trousers and lurched around the bed to stand on Buck's right.
"Your dress uniform awaits, Sergeant-Major!" he declaimed, flourishing the trousers with a bow that had once passed muster at the Court of St. James.
Even from his place on the floor, Chris could see Buck's mustache bristle at the very thought of wearing Rebel gray. Ezra didn't know how lucky he was - any other man would have been on the floor in pieces at the very suggestion.
"We gettin' ready for Sunday inspection?" Buck grumbled, pushing himself up on his left elbow.
Ezra's smile faltered, the effort of forcing it back to its proper level of brightness clenching his jaws together until the veins in his neck popped. "C'mon now, Mitchell! Ah have a bounty of a cherry cobbler promised for returnin' you to the bosom of your wife, and Ah intend to collect it presently!"
"You're sharin' it," Buck grunted.
Ezra's smile disappeared, his chest starting to heave with a dreadful, creeping fear Buck knew only too well.
"Mitchell?" Ezra demanded, his voice too high and his eyes too bright.
"Right here," Buck said, waving his right hand at Standish. "I'm right here, Colonel!"
'But you ain't,' he realized when Ezra started to blink, trying to fight off the grief that was trembling through him, choking off his breathing. 'You're back in the middle of that damned war, watching a friend you love with all your heart finish dying slow....'
"God damn it, Sergeant-Major, answer me!" Ezra ordered, hurling the trousers at Buck. Wilmington fended them off, falling back onto his pillow. The bed dipped as Ezra knelt on it, pushing his knee into Buck's armpit and using his straight leg to hold his balance.
"Ah said answer me, y' double-crossin' yella-bellied son of a bitch!" Ezra bellowed, looming over Buck like the wrath of heaven. Snatching up Buck's wrist and pressing his fingertips against Wilmington's throbbing vein with his left hand, Standish put his right hand on Buck's chest, somehow unable to feel the heart drumming frantically under his palm.
"Y' cocksuckin' syphilitic peckerwood!" Ezra spat, dropping Buck's arm and backhanding Wilmington across his face.
The flashing red blur of the ruby that cut Buck's cheek and mouth combined perfectly with the sparkling blue and white specks dancing him into darkness. From far away he felt his hair yanked and his skull bounced off his headboard.
"Answer me, you pusillanimous sodomite!" Ezra thundered, his voice breaking with rage. Grabbing Buck's shoulders he shook them until Wilmington's teeth rattled. "God damn it! Don't you do this t'me, y' mackerel-snappin' mule-fucker!"[xiv]
"Ezra!" Buck gasped, struggling to get a grip on the arms battering him into the mattress. "Stop it!"
The shaking slowed, growing as ragged and uneven as Ezra's breathing until it stopped all together and Buck was thrown down in disgust.
"God damn you, Jesse," Ezra grated, sitting back on his heel and wiping his face with both of his hands. "You promised you wouldn't do this to me, y'back-stabbin' liar...."
"Ah hell, Ezra..." Buck choked out. "He didn't mean t' do it - he didn't want t'run out on ya...."
Ezra blinked, and for a moment Wilmington thought he might have been able to break through Josiah's demons, but then Standish leaned forward and with a hand as gentle as it had formerly been brutal, he swept Buck's eyes closed.
Buck opened them immediately, feeling the step of every dead man he'd ever buried marching over his grave. Ezra was staring at him, his face blank and exhausted. He reached out to cradle Wilmington's jaw with his right hand, his thumb working back and forth along the handprint he had left there. He was crying without making a sound, tears welling up in his eyes that he blinked down his cheeks to get trapped in the scabs on his face or curve under his chin to fall on his neck.
"Y' promised, y' buttermilk bastard..."[xv] Ezra whispered roughly, resting his index finger in the cut his ring had made until the ball of it was coated bright red. Taking his hand away from Buck's face, he studied the blood, rubbing its slickness between his thumb and forefinger.
'Trigger fingers,' Vin realized, watching Ezra trace the hilt of Chris's Peacemaker red.
He took a step toward Ezra at the same moment that Standish stood up off the bed and pulled the Colt .45 from its ersatz holster. Buck made a grab for him that missed, Ezra suddenly moving with a speed his body shouldn't have been able to manage, going around the head of the beds to stay out of Vin's reach. Once again, Chris found himself staring down the barrel of his own gun, quite certain that he was about to die.
"Colonel!" Vin protested.
"Mistah Tannah?" Ezra replied, staring at Chris with an emptiness in his expression that was more frightening than anything Larabee could remember facing.
"Killin' a man in cold blood won't bring him back," Vin said. "It'll just spit on his grave."
Ezra chuckled, a bitter smile lifting one corner of his mouth. "I haven't got any blood left, son," he replied softly. "It's all been boilt away."
Ezra's expression didn't change as he savagely slammed the Colt's hammer into cock, but he had to use two hands to steady the pistol trembling in his grip.
"No!" Mary cried, her paralysis disappearing in a rustle of petticoats and flying skirts as she thrust herself in front of Chris.
Ezra's false calm shattered, flaring into a hatred so intense it hit Mary like a wall of heat, blasting her into shaking, throat twisting fright. Even so, she held her ground, using her dress to shield Chris from Ezra's view, stumbling a little as Larabee tried to trip her into safety.
"Step aside, darlin'," Ezra said. "Because if you don't, I will blow your pretty head off your lovely shoulders and drown him in your blood."
Vin did what Ezra would want him to, taking his sight on Chris's Colt. At this range, he knew he would probably take the hand that held it as well.
'Where there's life, there's hope,' he consoled himself.
"He's helpless," Mary reminded Ezra, her voice trembling. "Shooting him would be murder...."
"Call it 'parity'," Ezra suggested, his smile as cold as his voice. "If mah boys had t'play by Yankee rules, he does, too."
Mary's chin lifted. "Weren't your 'boys' fighting this war because they didn't want to play by Yankee rules?" she challenged.
"God damn you, Aunt Peggy..." Ezra laughed raggedly. "You get more and more like mah real mother every damn day."
"If you murder him, you'll become him."
This time Ezra's laugh was full and genuine. "Good Lord, darlin' - look around you! Ah am him! Now step aside, or die."
"Please don't do this," Mary begged him, furious with herself for the terror shaking her body. "Please, Ezra - please don't...."
He tried. Lord, Vin had never seen a man try so hard to do something in his life as Ezra tried to make himself kill Mary Travis. Finally, his arms gave up for him, borne down by the weight of the gun. Letting the hammer relax, Ezra hung his head with the shame of failing his sergeant-major one more time.
"Tie her up, Tannah," he said, his voice thick and low. "And don't spare the gag."
"Yes, sir," Vin answered, having to work to get the words out of his dry mouth. He went to Mary's side, helping her sit down before she fell down.
Ezra looked at Chris, smiling at the fury in his eyes and the red stains on his gag and the cloth binding his twisting wrists.
"You've got Lincoln's own gall callin' me a skirter, suh," Ezra informed him, spitting in Larabee's face with an accuracy as impressive as it was unexpected.
"Don't move, Chris!" Buck commanded, taking advantage of being a dead man. "Just hold still, and maybe we'll get outta this without anybody dyin'." Wilmington knew he was asking Larabee to grow wings and fly, respecting the man for reining in his own nature as much as he admired Standish for being unable to betray his. 'Sweet Jesus Christ, Ezra, how many times have we danced a jig on your graves?'
"You all right?" Vin asked Mary.
"I will be," she whispered.
A spasm of pain pinched Ezra's face, and he pressed a forearm against his gut to stave it off.
"Maybe you'd best sit down, sir," Vin suggested from where he knelt behind Mary, securing her wrists together as comfortably as the need for veracity allowed.
Ezra shook his head and shuffled back to Buck's bedside. He was putting his back to the others, Wilmington realized, recognizing the characteristic gesture that for once he was on the 'wrong' side of. It was no wonder Ezra preferred to show the world the discipline of his straight back and squared shoulders, or the shadow of his hat brim. He could control his body, his voice, his words, but his eyes bled with his soul.
"You dumb son of a bitch," Buck murmured, wishing he could make a miracle happen for Ezra.
Standish looked at the gun he held in his hand, his jaw muscles working as he considered it. He spun the chamber, the dried blood on his finger flaking off with the pressure. He caught the spinning cylinder to stop it, popped the chamber into his hand and emptied it of ammunition. He put the bullets in one pocket and the cylinder in the other, and then he turned and chucked the Colt into the full chamber pot, still waiting in its commode for J.D. to empty it.
'Oh, Chris is gonna love that,' Buck winced, warily watching Ezra approach him. Much to his astonishment, Ezra began to straighten the bed covers, pulling the sheets and covers up with a flair and efficiency that spoke of much practice.
'What the hell is he doing?' he asked himself, even as he called out to the observers in the adjoining room: "Josiah, Nathan - Ezra's busy with me. Go out the window, clear the street, and get Yosemite and anyone else outta the livery. Warn Mrs. Heidegger to clear the lobby and get them kids outta sight."
Buck shivered as Ezra folded the bedclothes into a neat, narrow bundle resting at the foot of the bed. Whatever he was doing, he was totally consumed by it, as if it were the only thing in the world.
After making sure Mary wouldn't choke on her gag, Vin rose to his feet and walked over toward the beds, frowning in puzzlement at Ezra pouring water from the wash pitcher into its basin and carrying the big bowl over to sit it down on the floor beside Buck's bed. The pillowcase from his own abandoned bed provided Standish with the raw material for washrags. Watching Ezra tear the cotton fabric apart, Vin shook his head, suddenly realizing that the promise he'd once heard to tear a man apart with his bare hands was no idle threat.[xvi] When he had reduced the pillow to squared rags, Ezra sat them in a neat, precise pile on the bed beside Buck's head.
"Oh, Goohhddd," Buck moaned as Ezra straightened his legs, his eyes unfocused as he did the work of laying Wilmington's body out by rote. He was as quick and efficient, as practiced at this as he had been with folding the bed linen. It was over in a few minutes, Buck's body washed and his arms crossed over his chest, the white sheet pulled up to his chin.
Ezra had saved Buck's face to wash last, and he did it with a tender thoroughness that made Wilmington shudder. Standish paid special attention to the cuts he'd made, making Buck curse under his breath as the cold water stung him. When he was done, Ezra dropped the washrag into the basin and sat down on the bed beside Buck, finger-combing Wilmington's hair into order.
"Colonel?" Vin asked.
"I don't suppose.... We couldn't - take him with us?" he asked wistfully, looking up hopefully at Tanner.
Vin shook his head, wanting very much to throw up.
Ezra nodded, accepting the answer he had known before he'd asked the question. He made no move to rise, continuing to stroke Buck's head.
Vin reached out and touched Standish on the shoulder.
"Come away, sir," he urged.
"Not yet," Ezra protested, his fingers twisting into Buck's hair. "Not just yet...."
Forcing his body to lean forward, he pressed his lips to Wilmington's forehead in a final farewell.
"Deo Vindice,"[xvii] he whispered, the hypocrisy of the promise breaking his resolution into shuddering, silent weeping.
Vin turned his touch into a firm grasp on Ezra's elbow.
"Come away," he said again.
"Ah can't," Ezra murmured, pulling away from Vin. "Ah gave mah word...."
Shoving himself off the bed with a stifled groan, he knelt on both knees beside it.
"In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus..." Ezra began, lifting his right hand to touch his forehead, then his waist, before bringing his hand to the right side of his chest and across his body to his left. He had almost completed the cross when he realized his mistake.
"Ah, hell..." he muttered. "Wrong God...."
He tried again, forehead to waist to left breast to right breast: "In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus sancti...."
He spoke in a monotone, the words speeding up until they ran one into the other. When the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church had been said, Ezra forced himself to his feet and took one last look at his sergeant-major before pulling the bed sheet over Buck's face.
"He didn't want the Devil to think he was Episcopalian," he explained to Vin, his voice breaking with a hurt he almost managed to hide in a laugh.
"That kinda thing matters to a man," Vin agreed, forcing himself not to flinch back from Buck clawing his way out from under the sheet with the fervor of a drowning dog.
Ezra gave Vin a sideways look.
"What faith do you follow, Tannah?" he asked with a casualness that made the hair stand up on the back of Vin's neck.
"Whatever preacher's handy, I s'pose," he answered, shocking himself by asking, "What about you, sir?"
"Ah am a confirmed Deist, Sergeant," Ezra replied. "Mah God couldn't care less."
"Yes, sir," Vin murmured, his throat aching at the sight of Ezra straightening to his full height and forcing his shoulders to square his body into a parade ground stand-to-attention despite his cracked ribs and the strain on his healing bullet wounds. Tanner couldn't help but do the same, wondering how Ezra managed to discipline his twitching muscles into snapping a salute that made his own best effort seem sloppy as hell.
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!" Buck moaned, reaching out an instinctive hand to catch Standish when the cost of the salute hit him.
Vin grabbed Ezra's arm, holding him straight. The shorter man leaned into the support, fighting to breathe.
'C'mon,' Tanner silently encouraged. 'Let go, Ezra....' He caught Buck's gaze and Wilmington shook his head sadly.
"Ain't gonna be that easy," Buck explained, reading the hope in Vin's eyes. "Winnin' or losin' his war has just come down to whether or not Sergeant Tanner of the 17th Mississippi lives or dies."
Vin nodded, getting his arm around Standish. "Time t'leave, Colonel."
Ezra nodded, pulling away from the embrace.
"Stay behind me, Tannah," he ordered, leading the way out the door.
| End of Act Five |
ST. BARB'S MONTAGES - The whole collection of Act Five montages in a smaller format.
We would love to know what you think... email me
 NEXT CHAPTER OF MONGOOSE: A SENSIBLE MAN
|
[i] Proverbs 26:5
[ii] Matthew 5:39
[iii] James 5:20
[iv] From Hosea 8:7 - "For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it hath no stalk; the bud shall yield no meal: if so be it yield, the strangers shall swallow it up."
[v] The Lenai Lenape, or the Delaware tribe of Southeastern Indians. The Iroquois and other later migration waves into North America called them the Grandfather People. While William Penn was alive, they lived in egalitarian cooperation with the European settlers. Upon Penn's death, the usual rookery and persecution began, and by the 1820s the Delaware were a displaced people, joining with other First Nations as immigration and gold fever continued to push them farther and farther away from the East Coast. One of the Nations that they joined with were the Kiowa and the Seminole. The largest concentration of Delawares live on the Cherokee Reservation in Oklahoma, where they are agitating for the return of their sovereignty, as they are now considered a client state of the Cherokee Nation by that Nation and the United States.
[vi] Matthew 5:10
[vii] Proverbs 18:14
[viii] Mary is referring to Rattle, which incident she has heard about, and a story that is in progress called Errant Sparks. Look for it to come out with Act 7.
[ix] Serpent's Tooth
[x] Serpent's Tooth
[xi] Yes, you're right. This line has been changed since its first posting. I have J.D. as being from Boston, but the truth is, Andy Kavovit does not sound like he comes from Boston. (All the better for his Hollywood career!) The original line ran as follows:
"Stay down, damn it!" an angry voice ordered, its flat, nasal vowels betraying more than a trace of Boston in its uneducated accents. Ezra turned his gaze to the other side of his bed, to a young rowdy shoving his knee into Mitchell's gut.
[xii] Yes, you're right. This line has been changed since its first posting. It has been pointed out to me that yes, if you hang a man by the thumbs long enough, they will suffocate. It will just take a long, long time. The original line ran as follows:
"Hanging by the thumbs ain't never kilt a man," Tanner replied, keeping an ear attuned to the muffled cries of the men in the jail.
[xiii] In Witness, when Ezra comes into the saloon to find Maude playing poker with Vin, J.D., and Josiah.
[xiv] A religious slur against Catholics, particular Irish-American Catholics, having to do with the custom of eating fish on Fridays. Also, besides the obvious reference to bestiality, the Artillery and Infantry referred to the Cavalry as "mules". So, Ezra, in his usual way, is using one word to insinuate MANY things.
[xv] Buttermilk = useless, worthless in Southron slang.
[xvi] Witness again.
[xvii] "God will vindicate"; the Motto of the Confederate States of America.