“Well, where’s the water, then?” King grumbled as he sidled to the hitching post before Ransden’s door and began rubbing his black hide on it.
“I’d thank’ee fer a bucket uv water, as the day’s a hot’un,” said the cunning man. His shirt of homespun wool, gray where it was dry, was black with sweat in the middle of the back and beneath his armpits. As he stood, he lifted his hat and fanned himself with it, smelling nervousness and anger in his own perspiration.
“Cull, what—” called a clear voice.
As both men turned to look over the back of Spanish King, a woman appeared at the open door of the cabin. She wore a gingham dress over a shift, and the body beneath was so youthfully taut that it had shape despite the loose garments. Her hair was black and might have fallen to her ankles had it not been caught up with pins and combs. Amazingly, it was clean and shone like strands of burnished metal when the sunlight past the edge of the porch touched it.
“Well,” she continued, “what do we hev?”
“We got the liar as says he’ll plow Boardman’s newground when I couldn’t,” said Bully Ransden. He glanced back at the cunning man with the eye of a butcher for a hog squealing in the chute. “It’s what he does, milk old women and boys with no more balls ‘n old women.”
“Ransden, leave this be afore—” Old Nathan began, his mind white with the fear of the thing Bully was about to say and what would come when he replied.
“Ye know, Ellie,” Bully Ransden continued, still astraddle the center of the path, “his own balls, they wuz shot off by the Redcoats at New Or-leens.”
“Did your mother tell you that, Cullen Ransden?” Old Nathan said softly. His skin formed layers, hot and prickly on the outside while the inner surface froze against his flesh as hard as the ice on which Satan shivered in Hell. “And did she tell ye besides how thet came t’ be her business?”
The younger man could have been blasted by a thunderbolt without the hair prickling up more sharply on his head and arms. He struck with the suddenness of reflex and the skill of long years’ practice with the blacksnake whip in his hand.
It was a measure of what lay at Ransden’s core that the target his instinct chose was the ton of muscle that was Spanish King rather than the sparse old man who looked unable to stand the very wind of a blow.
The whip, long enough to drive a team of four span, curled out and around Old Nathan as if it were really the snake its braided leather mimicked. Ransden could flick a fly from an oxen’s ear without touching the beast itself, but this time he aimed to cut. The crackling end of the whip touched Spanish King at the base of the tail, where the hair gave way to the bare skin of the bull’s anus.
Rather than bolting like a startled cow or an
ox broken to the whip and yoke, Spanish King reacted as a predator might have. The bull spun, questing for the presumed horsefly with a clop of his square incisors. Old Nathan ducked and lurched sideways to avoid the bull’s sweeping horns. The four-inch hickory hitching post that Spanish King swatted in the other direction with his haunches broke off even with the ground and clubbed Ellie on its way to thudding against the cabin’s log forewall.
King danced back, hooves splaying, as his eyes searched for the horsefly which had escaped him at the first attempt. “When I find her!” the bull bellowed, referring to the horsefly. “When I find her!” His tail lashed. Blood welling from the whip-cut began to dribble along the appendage in dark red streaks.
As the old man and the woman sprawled, Bully Ransden dropped his whip. He lunged for the porch but had to back hastily away as Spanish King stepped between, tossing his head over either of his shoulders in turn.
The cunning man took a pinch of dust between his right thumb and forefinger as he lay on his opposite hand and hip. “Ransden!” he called.