4

Joe looked toward the barrel of his own gun, and then past it to the small hand that fit so poorly around the grip. In his thoughts, he saw a different image. He saw a knife held to Adam’s throat, blood blossoming bit by bit as the blade was pulled across the exposed flesh. The sight had terrified him; there was nothing he could do to stop that deadly edge from digging deeper. A knife held like that could seem to act all on its own. Any wrong movement, whether made by Adam or the boy, could force the blade to skip across flesh or slice deep enough to make the final, killing cut. Intent or accident, it wouldn’t matter. Adam would be dead.

But guns were different. The threat they posed was not as direct, or even as obvious. Facing his own gun now, Joe had no sense of fear. Thoughts of his own death had no place in his mind. All he knew was he did not have a blade pressed against his throat; his life was not balanced on the edge of a finely honed piece of steel. An explosion would sound, or it would not; and if it did, he probably wouldn’t be alive long enough to hear it. No, Joe gave no thought to dying. He thought only of Adam, and the blade of a knife held in a careless boy’s hands. It was a thought that filled him with enough anger to push away pain, exhaustion, and probably even good sense.

The boy’s eyes made it clear Joe should stay where he was, waiting for decisions to be made on his behalf. Instead, Joe pushed himself slowly back to his feet, part of him daring the boy to pull the trigger, another part expecting him to.

Rising wasn’t easy. The world threatened to go black around him. He inhaled sharply, and then, when the boy was looking up at him rather than down, he asked a simple question as he expelled his held breath. “What’s the point of all this?”

The boy probably didn’t understand him. His expression remained unchanged, his eyes holding the same glare as before.

Frustrated, Joe decided, “You’re gonna shoot me, then shoot; I’m not playing along anymore.”

He turned slowly, seeking out Cochise and then catching sight of the pinto deeper in the trees as a splash of black and white flickering in and out of patches of green and the swirls of gray that were starting to eat away at Joe’s vision. He tried to will himself to move forward, but his feet stayed locked where they were. He needed more strength than he had. In fact, he realized he didn’t have any strength left at all. It was all he could do to avoid shaking…shaking like a hungry, frail, crying baby.

A baby? The thought spurred more than an image; it brought him the faint sound of crying in the soft breeze. Curious to know whether or not what he’d heard was real, he focused his attention in the direction they’d been headed. Yes, he was sure of it, then. He could hear a baby crying—until the now familiar voice of the boy in charge said something behind him.

The words, spoken in the boy’s native tongue, were not shouted this time. And then, “Soon,” he said next in English. “We come. Soon.”

The unexpected softness in his tone pulled Joe around. He looked toward the boy and immediately saw something that had been absent until that moment. He saw…sadness.

XxXxX

The sound of crying was louder, Joe realized—as though the baby was close, almost within reach. He opened his eyes, confused as to why they’d been closed, and then discovered he was lying on the ground. He could feel dirt beneath the fingers of his left hand; his right hand was still tightly secured to his chest. Had he fallen?

He pushed himself upward, fighting against the black spots that threatened to pull him back, and had to blink several times before his vision cleared enough to enable him to look around. What he saw then confused him as much as waking up on the ground. He was alone at the outskirts of a clearing that gave way to a small lake. The woods were behind him. In front of him, the clearing was littered with debris, mostly soot-blackened twigs and bits of cloth.

Scanning the area, he finally caught sight of people far to his right. Children. They were moving in and out of what looked to be hastily constructed wickiups made of twigs and grass rather than hides. He couldn’t see his pa or brothers, but he did notice a very old woman leaning heavily on a walking stick, her other arm cradled in a sling of sorts. Since she was the only adult he saw, he figured she was the one he needed to talk to. But when Joe started to rise to his feet, the searing pain in his arm stole his breath and threatened his vision once more. He dropped back to the ground and then slid backwards to prop himself up against the nearest tree. Several moments later, as the pain began to ease to more tolerable levels, he started to recognize familiar rustling sounds in the woods. Someone was moving toward him.

“Joe!” Hoss’s urgent whisper came as a relief. “Hey, Joe!”

Joe felt a hand on his good shoulder and swiveled around to find his brother crouching low to the ground on the other side of the tree.

“You’d best stay put,” Hoss whispered. “They ain’t too worried about you right now, and I’d like to keep it that way.”

“You got away?” Joe whispered back, encouraged. “What about Pa and Adam?”

“They’re inside,” Hoss nodded toward the wickiups, “with the doc. And no. I didn’t get away. I finally got them to believe I’ll come back on my own from now on. They made it clear they’ll kill Pa or Adam, maybe even both if I don’t.”

“What’s going on?”

“It’s just a bunch of kids, Joe. Some old folks inside, doc’s seein’ to. Their own medicine man will probably be dead come mornin’.”

“Where are the men and women? The parents?”

The look in Hoss’s eyes was both sad and wary. “The men are off huntin’. They don’t even know what happened yet. The women…well, most of ’em got took, includin’ that baby’s ma. Boys say it was white men. Didn’t sound like soldiers. Outlaws, more like.”

“They don’t think it was us that did it,” Joe asked, “do they?”

“No. They know it weren’t us. But that don’t mean they trust us not to finish what those outlaws started. Way I figure it, they were out lookin’ to bring back their men-folk and found us instead. Probably would’a just off and killed us, mad as they were, but they heard us talking about the doc healin’ people and figured they could use his help.”

The sound of shouting pulled Joe’s attention toward the wickiups, where he saw a boy holding a spear and looking into the distance, away from Joe and Hoss.

“I’d better go,” Hoss said, “else he’s gonna come lookin’ for me, and I’m gettin’ pretty tired a’ being poked by that stick of his. Two more trips ought’a do it.”

“Trips?”

“They got me buryin’ folks. Or at least takin’ em’ over to their burial grounds. Lot of ’em were killed in that raid.”

The boy shouted again.

“I gotta go, Joe. You just hold on a while longer. With any luck, they’ll let me come and take care’a that arm of yours soon as I’m finished.”

After Hoss disappeared again, Joe watched that boy with the spear calling out and moving slowly toward the trees north of him until Hoss emerged from right where the boy had been headed. When he reached the boy, he walked directly into another series of pokes. Why doesn’t he just take that spear away? It wouldn’t be any trouble at all for Hoss to…. Joe caught himself and looked again toward the wickiups.

“They’ll kill pa or Adam, maybe both,” Hoss had said.

Joe’s family was being held at the whim of a bunch of nervous, angry boys, any one of whom could hold a knife to Adam’s throat again—or maybe Pa’s this time, or even Hoss’s. Apparently, Joe was the only one they didn’t consider a threat.

“They ain’t too worried about you right now, and I’d like to keep it that way.”

Somehow, Joe was going to have to turn that into an advantage.

Stealing his nerves to do what he knew he had to, Joe set to work ripping off the sleeve of his bloodied shirt and then wrapped it around his upper arm, using his teeth to pull it into as tight a tourniquet as he could. The next step was going to be a lot harder.

XxXxX

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