Trader had always been hard. That went without saying. You could walk into a frontier gaudy and say you rode with Trader. Folks might not love you for it, but they would, by the living God, show you respect!
But the hardness had been tempered with wisdom and with a sense of what was fair and what was not. Nobody looked to cheat or lie to the Trader and get away with it. At the least you’d crawl away from a good smacking. At the worst you lay in the dirt with rain pounding into your open eyes.
Now it was different.
The man still had the same hardness, but now it seemed to Abe to be overlaid with a brutality that was at best casual and at worst considered.
“Want another helping, Abe?”
“No. Yeah, thanks. I will. Good meat.”
“Better than rattler?”
“Yeah.”
Trader nodded. “Better than the baked tongue of a baby puppy, Abe?”
“I guess so.”
The older man lay down, staring up into the moving branches. “Better than better than the earlobes of Mex virgins, slow-boiled and served on a bed of saffron rice with young peas and a cream and butter sauce?”
Abe laughed. “Can’t recall ever eating a dish like that, Trader.”
But there was no answering laugh from the other side of the fire. “I thought you was with us when we raided them horse thieves in Juarez, Abe.”
“No. Don’t believe I was, Trader. You mean you” He picked his way through the potential mine field. “You telling me that you ate that food you said?”
This time Trader did laugh, throwing back his head and roaring out his merriment. “You triple-stupe sucker, Abe! Guess you fall for any dead trap I lay.”
“Yeah,” Abe agreed, wiping grease from his long mustache. “Figure I do.”
THEY GOT AMBUSHED on the way to the lake. Two skinny old men, wearing a mix of rags and filthy furs, each carrying an incredibly antique flintlock pistol, stepped silently out behind them from the cover of a huge tumbled chestnut, taking Abe and Trader by surprise.
“Move them blasters and get to be dead,” said the taller of the pair in a thin, reedy voice.
Trader had the Annalite across his shoulders, and Abe’s big Python was holstered. In Deathlands you didn’t look too much at the age or pedigree of the blaster that threatened you. The man or woman holding it was far more important. Both the ancients looked like they knew how to handle their pistols.
Abe and Trader turned slowly around, taking care not to make any sudden moves.
“Smelled your smoke a couple of days. Seen you got pretty blasters. Figured we’d have them.” The muzzles of the flintlocks looked as big as railroad tunnels.
“Never met a man yet able to take my blaster away from me,” Trader stated.
“But you ain’t met Mick and Pat. We’ll do that. Pat and Mick’ll do it quick.” He giggled at his little rhymes. “So you best lay the blasters down and then strip off them fancy clothes and you get to walk away.”
“Yeah, two naked jaybirds danglin’ off into the woods,” Mick cackled. “Don’t take too long to decide, strangers. Or old Liza here might bark at you. And we might think about takin’ us some funnin’ with you before you go.”
Abe was waiting for Trader to make a move. He was as certain as he could be that the two old bastards would chill them the moment they put down their guns. They’d have done it from cover, but this way was safest of all. Trader himself used to say that when you killed someone you tried to get two hundred percent of the action on your side.
“Quick,” warned the shorter of the pair.
They were only twenty feet or so apart. Safe range even for unreliable flintlocks.
“No,” Trader said.
“How’s that?”
“You deaf as well as stupe?”
Abe felt his balls struggling to climb back into his body with terror. Any second and the pistols would show him a burst of flame and black powder smoke.
“Lay them down, outlander, or”
“Know who I am?”
“Don’t give a midnight fuck with a flyin’ squirrel, mister. Just know you’re cold meat.”
“They call me the Trader. Heard of me now? I got two war wags with fifty armed men and women within a mile of here. They know me and Abe are camped out in the hills here for a day or so, getting us some fresh air. They hear a shot and they’ll ring the place. Give you a hard passing.”
“He’s bluffin’, Pat.”
“I reckon so, Mick.”
But Abe could hear the doubt, riding herd on their voices. The initial boasting confidence had slithered away from them in twelve seconds of talk from Trader.
“Then do it.” Trader spread his hands wide.
“I figure I did hear of the name of Trader, Mick. Around and about.”
“He tellin’ us the truth, stranger? You with the hair trickling down your chin?”
Abe nodded, swallowing hard. “You guys better believe it. I’ve ridden with Trader for fifteen years and never known him to call a bluff or tell a lie.”
Now the doubt was so strong it might have been tattooed across the low, brutish foreheads.
“Easy to make a mistake. Damned shameful thing is to leap into eternity on account of a foolish moment.” Trader’s voice was low and intense, kindly and filled with honest trust. Now Abe saw the old Trader. Saw the man’s unique power.
“Mebbe we’ll let them go, Mick.”
“Mebbe we can, Pat.”
“Nobody gets hurt this way.” Trader pointed at the flintlocks. “Those are beautiful blasters. Man like me could take them away from you, but I won’t. Sun’s shining and the day’s filled with promise. Ease down on the hammers. Shake hands and we all go about our business and make believe that this is just a half-recalled memory of a midnight dream.”
Abe thought it was like watching rabbits hypnotized by a weaving rattler.
The callused thumbs took the pressure off the ribbed hammers and let them slowly down to nestle snugly in the pans. The pistols were tucked into belts, and there was an instant relaxing and a surge of friendliness.
Mick stepped forward and shook hands with the Trader and Abe. “Sorry about the misunderstanding, Mr. Trader,” he said. “Glad it got sorted.”
“Sure,” Trader agreed. “Sorry business to spoil a fine day with blood.”
Pat shuffled his feet. “Me and my cousin here are sure glad we got the mistake sorted. So long, boys.” He paused. “There’s good beaver to be had up at the pool, yonder. Though I guess you likely know that already. So long.”
“So long,” Trader called as the two old men turned their backs and started to walk away from them, along the trail. They were ten yards off.
With unhurried, practiced ease, Trader unslung the Armalite and raised it to his right shoulder, winking sideways at Abe as he did so. He squeezed the trigger twice, the flat snap of the explosions muffled by the surrounding forest, putting a bullet through the back of each of the old men’s skulls. The exiting full-metal-jacket rounds blew most of their faces into a mist of blood, bone and brains.
Trader looked across the clearing at the twitching corpses. “Like a couple of stupe rabbits,” he said to Abe. “Let’s get on. Day’s wasting.”
Chapter Six
“You sure you don’t want to come along with us, Michael?” Dean was astride a little pinto pony.
The teenager was sitting on the swing seat, a foot trailing on the weathered boards. The baby dozed in his lap, wrapped in a swaddling patchwork blanket. “Guess not, Dean. Thanks. I’ll stay here and play man of the house. Milk the horses and walk the pigs, or whatever it is. Look after Christina and Jenny. It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it.”
Over the past day and a half, Michael seemed to be making a serious effort to pull himself together.
He’d joined them at the table for all the meals, obviously trying to enter into the conversations and the plans for the hunt.
But the strain was clear.
There was a tightness across his cheeks, and the youth seemed to have lost a startling amount of weight since their arrival in old New Mexico, though he hadn’t appeared to be eating any less than usual. Dean had told his father, a day earlier, that he’d seen Michael out behind the smallest barn, on his hands and knees, finger down his throat. He’d puked up the entire eggs-and-ham breakfast he’d just eaten.
Now Christina stood next to him, wiping her hands on her apron, a smear of flour on her right cheek.
“You don’t want to make a real expedition of this?” Krysty called from the back of a speckled roan. “Could still take a picnic and all go.”