For their help and assistance also, thanks to Kerry Kelley, my friend since the eleventh grade, and his Beverly; Tom and Judy Camp, beloved buds who gave aid and comfort; Bobby Horton, for the Stonewall drawing and for being Bobby Horton; Mike Kilgore, for the read; Coach L. C. Fowler, for two years of football practice hell and twenty great games, and my Carbon Hill Bulldogs; the Daily Mountain Eagle in Jasper, Ala., present incarnation and past, where I learned; George Deavours and the Ranch House crew and posse; Brian Seidman and the staff of NewSouth Books, for excellent work; and Kendal Weaver, for encouragement and kind words about the novel for me and to others.
1
Rabe Canon launched his long body from the saddle even before the shrill whine of the ricochet faded into the moonlit midnight mist.
Leaving the saddle, he shouted the code that would cause his huge stallion to execute a wide left circle and return to him. From that point, Canon was no more conscious of thought than was the cordial autumn night that embraced bleak California hills.
He did not recall how he dove, left hand outstretched to break his fall, while one of his twin custom-made .50 caliber Krupp revolvers snicked automatically into his right hand. And if some cosmic referee had stopped the proceedings long enough to ask Canon how he had gotten from the saddle to his position behind a boulder, pistol in hand, he could not have said.
Nor did he remember the way he rolled, first on his left shoulder, then his right. The shoulder rolls added a zig-zag effect to his course, and the initial roll on his left shoulder absorbed the greater impact of the dive from his saddle, protecting the newly drawn pistol.
Canon was not aware the shoulder rolls had taken him behind the one boulder, equidistant of three, that afforded the best cover and best view of the landscape. From the moment Canon heard the bullet’s dark song, grown too familiar, he became the machine that three years of war had taught him to be. His instinct shifted from defense to offense. Person or persons unknown had tried to kill him, had failed. Now it was his turn. And he would not fail. After all, Canon thought with a wolfish grin, he was in the business.
Had the three men atop the adjacent hill seen that grin, they might have nodded silently to each other and gotten the hell out of there. Perhaps not. They had killed before. They were three to one, were being paid to do a job. They had no more compunction about killing than about eating supper, though they probably enjoyed killing just a little bit better.
Nor had Canon compunction about killing. Not this feral Canon. The pampered plantation creature he had been before the war had died even before Mulberry Manor died, with comrades blown to pieces around him and enemy who fell before his guns.
As he checked the loads in his twin pistols, Canon cleared his mind in preparation for the mental drill taught him by the Indian war chief who was friend to his father and companion of Canon’s youth.
The sense of smell was important, Mountain Eagle taught him, and the sense most often ignored by white men. Its importance was critical. In the dark, Canon brought in a deep draught of cool air, first with mouth open, then closed. It bore the smell of dust and light dew; there was the loamy aroma of sere grasses and a faintly tasteable tang of gunsmoke mingled with woodsmoke.
Woodsmoke. Canon cast his mind back to the instant of the shooting, calling on his mind’s eye to reconstruct the scene. He imaged the craggy hillock which bordered the right side of the narrow trail, saw the muzzle flash cut the darkness, but there was no evidence of firelight in the scene.
That meant at least two of them up there; one to tend a covered fire and one to watch the trail. Canon added sound to his recall, mentally deleting his horse’s hoofbeats and the creaking of the saddle rig. He concentrated on the rifle shot, yes, it was a rifle. The muzzle flash and rolling report indicated so. And it was a Sharps, he was sure, though oddly flat for the sound of a Sharps. Could it be . . . yes! It was the new seven-shot repeating rifle supplied only to Union troops besieging Petersburg. The Rebels disparagingly called them “Sunday guns” that could be loaded on Sunday and fired all through the week—one shot per day. But Canon had tried out a captured piece and recognized that it would elevate the death rate in this war and any wars to come.
He no longer had doubts about what awaited him in San Francisco. There would be much death this day, very likely his among them. That was all right, too, so long as he could do what he came to do. He did not mind dying. He felt he deserved it.
What the hell, wondered Canon, is a seven-shot Sharps doing in an ambush ten miles form San Francisco? The answer suddenly snapped into his mind, and with it came the solution to a puzzle that had baffled him for more than a year. The answer filled him with rage. His long-held suspicions were suddenly confirmed, and now he felt a blood lust so strong that a coppery taste tingled on his tongue. The urge to kill was so fierce that he wanted to charge the hill with a Rebel yell that would freeze his enemies to their marrow. He wanted to fight hand-to-hand. He wanted his hands on the throats of any and all who stood in the way of his mission.
The mission. Yes. Must remember the mission. The thought curbed Canon. His blood lust became anger, and he mentally iced it into a cold killing rage.
He thought of the way Indian warriors greeted dawn on the day of battle: It is a good day to die. Canon had greeted many dawns with those words during the past three years, and he silently mouthed them. It is a good day to die. A very good day to die.
Canon sensed movement behind him, dropped and spun to one knee as he brought up the gun barrel, then he grinned again. The horse had returned for him. He signaled the animal to be still, then turned his attention to the top of the hill fifty yards away. The enemy had made a mistake. The moon, though shrouded by the mist, was in front of him. It would offer an outline, however faint, of those who tried to kill him. Like a lion leaving his lair on the veldt, Canon slipped softly into the night.
Atop the hill, the three would-be assassins were hotly engaged in whispered debate.
“Gawddammit, you shoulda let us shoot, too,” said the leader in an injured tone.
“Hell,” replied the rifleman, “they wasn’t no time. He was on us too damn quick. ’Sides, I got him, didn’t I? Ya’ll seen him pitch outa the saddle. Say, ain’t that sumbitch big, or what?”
“He cain’t be big as he looked, but I barely seen anything,” said the third. “It’s too damn dark and it was too damn quick, but I’ll tell you one thing; you better get yore ass down there and make sure of him.”
“Awright, awright, I’ll go,” complained the first outlaw. “But seeing as how I do all the work, I claim the hoss.”
“So that’s it!” hissed the leader. “You took it on yourself ’cause you want the hoss. Well, it ain’t gonna work. We sell the hoss and split the money even.”
“Right,” declared the leader. “But the hoss ain’t no problem. Here he come up the hill. And it be a beauty.”
“First, go see if the sumbitch is dead,” said the third, wearily, “then catch the horse, if it’s still in the territory, then let’s decide who gets what.”
“Gawd, but you said it right,” agreed the rifleman. “Look at the size of ’im. Come here, horsie,” and he stretched out his hand.
Canon, hanging onto the saddle horn and his handcrafted slings on the opposite side of the horse, reached his right hand under the horse’s neck, across the brisket, and fired three big rounds from the Krupp revolver.
The