Bone's Country 14

The next day, they met up with a stagecoach headed in the same direction and rode the last stretch of the day with them, afterward sharing a fire. Bone noticed that while the shotgun messenger and the whip came off the stagecoach to share in the beans and bourbon, whoever was actually making the trip stayed in the mud wagon.

Frenly sullenly ate his beans in silence and Sophia wasn’t much louder, but the shotgun man—he introduced himself as Ennis—made up for both of them in verbiage. He was a big man, wearing a deerskin shirt, fringed except where rubbed raw from the friction of a shell-belt. Bone noted that he’d worn quite a few in his time; the tracks across the broad expanse of his shirtfront were varied as a mosaic.

“Hell, this is godless country. Country devoid of worth,” Ennis grunted, shifting in his seat like he didn’t like having even that part of his anatomy touching it. “Don’t know why the gub’mint so hell-set on taking it from the Chiricahua. Let ‘em have it, I say. Who else wants it?”

“The Mexicans,” Sophia said. “This land was ours first.”

“Now is that the Spanish side of you talkin’ or the Injun?” Ennis asked, laughing and elbowing Fred, the reinsman, in the ribs.

“Bésame el culo,” Sophia told him.

Ennis stopped laughing. “What’d you say me, Mex?”

“If you don’t know, I can’t see how it’d bother you,” Bone interjected. He reached for the campfire to serve himself more beans from the pot. “Thanks for the share,” he told Fred.

“Thanks for the bourbon,” Fred replied. “Shotgun’s right, though. I don’t see why we can’t get along with the Chiricahua when the Comanche and Kiowa manage to.”

“They don’t manage to,” Bone snapped at him. “They raid and war on each other like brothers with only a momma to watch ‘em. And if one of them had the means to wipe another out, or cart ‘em off to a reservation, they’d do it quick as a skeeter with a hand coming at it.”

Bone disliked debate about the Indian. It seemed to him they were people, not a problem. No more solvable than horse thieves or bank robbers. You hanged the ones who did wrong and left the others alone. But everyone thought they were smarter than that. Everyone had a plan.

“You’re mighty free with your opinion there, friend,” Ennis said. “You and your Mex.”

“It’s America,” Bone replied coolly. “If you don’t have a strong opinion, you’re wasting a perfectly good amendment.”

“I’d be feeling my oats too if I were riding with a filly like that,” Fred opined. He gave Sophia a look before Bone shot him one.

Ennis didn’t notice. He was looking at Sophia himself, long and hard. When Bone blazed eyes at him, he only laughed and kept looking.

“Right pretty miss ya got there. Familiar-looking, I must say. You a Harvey girl, missy? Can’t be.” He turned to Fred. “Would they let a Mex be a Harvey girl?”

“Reckon they’d let a pretty thing like that be anything she want,” Fred said. And, noticing Bone’s glare, coughed then ducked his head.

“Ah lordy,” Ennis moaned. “Lordy, lordy, lordy!” He slapped his knee. “You ain’t no Harvey girl—I recognize you now! You’re a girl of the line from back east, one of those teensy ‘dobe towns without ‘nough people to run you ragged! Damnation, I think it was called. Right on the border and half-Mexican!”

“Think you’ll find a mistake in your recollection,” Bone said, his voice as low and deadly as a rattler’s shake.

Ennis clapped his hands, laughing louder as he scrutinized Sophia to refresh his memory. She pulled her quilt tighter around her and buttoned her lips close.

“Were you there, Fred? Can’t recall—was a while back now—nah, if you’d’a been there, you’d’a had her, you always were a sucker for the gals! And I don’t remember her being had. Charged an arm and leg for her cunny—”

“Watch your mouth,” Bone interrupted.

“S’whore, feller. If she sells it, she should be able to say it.”

“Think you’ve bought yourself an apology to the lady.”

Ennis only cackled more. “Don’t take my meaning from me, she looked like she was well worth it, but it’s a matter of principle with me. I never pay more for a nymph du Prairie,” he affected a vague, bad Canadian accent, “than I would hire a man for. But Gawd, just the sniff of her! Right good medicine for the girl I did hire. I worked between her legs like I was digging a well! Amazing how you never do come out the other side, now ain’t it?”

Bone reached into the fire and plucked a twig from off the firewood. He stood, his height pulling him up out of the fire’s light until his head was doused in shadow. When he put the smoldering twig on his shoulder, it lit up an ugly expression.

“You put it on there,” he told Ennis. “Now knock it off.”

Still snickering, Ennis picked himself up. He was a big man, given to muscle, a head taller than Bone and thicker at the middle with more than just fat. He smiled and rubbed his chin.

“Wouldn’t want you to burn yourself,” he said, flicking the twig from Bone’s shoulder and cuffing Bone lightly on the cheek after he did. Then, instead of waiting for Bone to respond, he threw all of his weight into a swing.

Bone swayed back the six inches that let Ennis touch him with no more than his wind. Then he reared forward like a striking viper. His forearm pistoned ahead of him, jamming into Ennis’s barrel-like belly. The contact crashed into the bones of his hand, ran up his arm, tingled in his shoulder. The big man grunted and bent forward a little.

Bone’s left came up, uppercutting Ennis’s jaw. Ennis flinched, but just as quickly hurled out a right hook that was like a boulder tumbling down a mountain. Bone juked away from the looming fist, ducked under the next. He had to give ground, floating back over unfamiliar terrain. He circled the fire backwards, his fists raised, looking for an opening, dreading if Ennis should get a hit in before he retook the momentum.

Ennis’s fist thundered through his raised forearms and cracked against his jaw. Pain! It was so easy to forget the cost of a fight before you were in it.

But as Bone staggered back, the pain was rapidly overtaken by anger. He slid in recklessly, unleashing blow after blow to Ennis’s midsection. An uppercut snapped Bone’s head back, but hardly stopped him. Tasting blood, he thrust himself back into the melee, driving his shoulder into Ennis’s stomach and almost toppling him.

Ennis crashed a fist into Bone’s side, another between his shoulder blades, making his spine feel like a lariat that’s been cracked. Bone shoved Ennis away and backpedaled, trying to clear away the cobwebs that had suddenly taken up residence in his skull. Ennis was quick to follow through though; he let Bone have it with a haymaker that sent the bounty hunter reeling to the ground and rolling across the sand.

Ennis laughed harshly. “What’s the matter, curly? Saving your Sockdologer for that whore of yours?”

Bone pounded the ground with one fist; with the other, he undid his belt buckle. Coming up, he rushed Ennis like a bull, head down, feet clawing him into the earth to send him at the other man. Ennis braced himself, ready to take Bone’s charge as he had the last, but Bone dug his heels in just shy of him, stopping himself and whipping off his belt to lash it around Ennis’s calf. A hefty pull ripped Ennis’s foot out from under him. He dropped onto his back, the impact pounding the air from his lungs like a whooshing bellows.

Like that, Bone was on top of the other man, raining down one punch after another into Ennis’s already bloodied face. Until finally Ennis got his meaty hands against Bone’s chest and shoved him away, so far back Bone was actually thrown to his feet. Bone scrambled for a moment to stay on them, then came in again. Running up to the fallen Ennis and kicking into his arms as he picked himself up. The toe of his boot landed on Ennis’s elbow and made it bend a way it didn’t want to. Ennis crumpled down against the Chihuahuan Desert.

Bone reared back to deliver another kick, but Sophia grasped him from behind and held him back.

“No acepto! No acepto!”

It was his realization of who was holding onto him, more than the strength of her limbs, that stopped him in his tracks. “What do you mean, you don’t accept?”

“I don’t accept that you’re doing this for me.”

Bone growled out of his throat, but the violence left his body. “Get Frenly,” he told her. “We press on. Not sleeping tonight anyhow.”