Before the gun bellowed from the roadside brush, Will had been lost in thought, wrestling with the same questions that had hounded him over weeks of grueling travel.
Who had taken Rose? Why? Where was she now? Was she okay?
He’d been wondering about these things for weeks, ever since leaving Denver City, riding mile after mile after mile, dawn to dusk, switching mules to help them last.
But now, with only a few more miles to home, someone had taken a shot at him.
Will dismounted, putting himself on the other side of the mule from the shooter, and hauled his .56 Spencer carbine from its boot.
As the unseen attacker fired again, Will dropped to a prone position with his rifle at the ready, scanning the brush.
His mules trotted off, spooked by the attack but too tired to run. And that was good. Because he needed those mules and had a year’s wages in a secret compartment at the bottom of one saddle bag.
There was movement in the brush further down the road, but before Will could pay it any real attention, the shooter in the brush fired again.
This time, Will spotted the muzzle flash back in the piney gloom. He stared hard and made out the shape of a man and put his sights at its center and pulled the trigger.
The bandit cried and crumpled into the brush, and then a skinny man dressed in rags burst onto the road and rushed toward the mules.
He was fifty yards away, maybe sixty.
“You touch those mules, you die,” Will warned him, but the man had apparently committed to his plan of action because he grabbed the dun mule and mounted from the right side with a desperate leap that made the mule kick and spin, jerking the man around so that Will had just enough time to see his gaunt, terrified face before he fired again and knocked the thief from the saddle.
And just like that, it was over.
No more shots. No more movement. No more bandits.
For the first time in two years, Will had killed men, a thing he’d never expected to have to do again.
It didn’t bother him. They had tried to kill and rob him.
It just surprised him was all. Surprised him and sobered him.
He watched the brush across the road for a time. The mules cropped grass another fifty yards down the road. They weren’t going anywhere. Not without him. They were plum tuckered out just like he was.
He finally rose up and crossed the road, ready to fire again but not particularly concerned. This might have been his first combat in some time, but four years of war had acclimated his mind to such situations, and he sensed that his enemies were dead or disabled. There had been no further action, no more hollering, no cracking of brush, nothing.
He approached the man in the brush from an angle, just in case. Seeing the man’s posture and open eyes, however, he understood this scoundrel had ambushed his last traveler.
As he drew closer, he was surprised by the man’s ragged attire and emaciated features—then surprised all over again when he realized that he knew the man.
Not by name. But he knew him, all right. They’d fought together when the 5thTexas Mounted Rifles had joined up with the Magruder’s forces in Galveston.
In a flash, he remembered the man carrying cotton bales onto the steamboats, helping to convert the ships into gunboats; remembered him laughing and telling funny stories about picking cotton—a job Will knew all too well—and later still, fighting alongside Will and the other “horse marines” as they recaptured Galveston from the bluebellies.
What had happened to this man?
Why was he so starved down? What had turned him from a valiant, good-natured soldier into a black-hearted, murderous highwayman?
How bad had things gotten here?
He’d seen the signs of trouble as soon as he’d crossed into Texas.
Twice since then, he’d ridden off the road to let bluebellies pass, watching them from cover.
One group went on by, a bunch of soldiers that looked and marched like the closest they’d ever come to battle was drill and ceremony.
The other time, it’d been a cavalry unit, and those boys looked like they had some bark on them.
