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"Abby, love of my heart, I think long ago I was condemned to a life of ineptitude. It's time to say good-bye."
Before she could reply he walked quickly into the side yard and out into the street.
Right into a group of seven mounted men, all of whom had either black or white robes draped over the cantles of their saddles. Each of the robes was sewn with an ornate, pink-scrolled camellia. In the middle of the group, mounted on a buckskin gelding, was the man whose colorless eyes had witnessed the burning of Lawrence, Kansas.
"You was sassing me today, wasn't you?" he said.
"Wouldn't dream of it, Captain Jarrette," Willie said. He looked up and down the street. There was no one else on it, except an elderly Frenchman who sold taffy from a cart and a little black girl who was aimlessly following him on his route.
Another rider leaned down from his saddle and bounced a picked camellia off Willie's face.
"It's the wrong time to be a smart ass, cabbage head," he said.
"Get about your business and I won't tell your mother the best part of her sunny little chap dripped into her bloomers," Willie said to him.
The man who had thrown the flower laughed without making sound, then wiped his mouth. He had black hair the color and texture of pitch and was tall and raw-boned, unshaved, with skin that looked like it had been rubbed with black pepper, his neck too long for his torso, his shoulders sloping unnaturally under his shirt, as though they had been surgically pared away.
He lifted a coiled rope from a saddlebag and began feeding a wrapped end out on the ground.
"You were one of the convicts on the burial detail that almost put me in the ground," Willie said.
"I wasn't no convict, boy. I was a prisoner of war," the tall man said. "You sassed the captain?"
The summer light was high in the sky now, the street deep in shadow. Willie looked between the horses that were now circling him. The yards and galleries of the homes along the street were empty, the ventilated shutters closed, even though the evening was warm.
"Where's a Yank when you need one?" the convict said.
"Get on with it," Jarrette said.
The convict tied a small loop in the end of the rope, then doubled-over the shaft and worked it back through the loop.
"You listen-" Willie began.
The convict whirled the lariat over his head and slapped it around Willie's shoulders, hard, cinching the knot tight. Before Willie could pull the rope loose, the convict wrapped the other end around his pommel and kicked his horse in the ribs. Suddenly Willie was jerked through the air, his arms pinned at his sides, the ground rising into his face with the impact of a brick wall. Then he was skidding across the dirt, fighting to gain purchase on the rope, the trees and picket fences and flowers in the yards rushing past him.
He caromed off a lamppost and bounced across a brick walkway at the street corner. The rider turned his horse and headed back toward the cottage, jerking Willie off his feet when he tried to rise. Willie clenched both his hands on the rope, trying to lift his head above the level of the street, while dust from the horse's hooves clotted his nose and mouth and a purple haze filled his eyes.
Then the convict reined his horse and was suddenly motionless in the saddle.
A Union sergeant, with dark red hair, wearing a kepi, was walking down the middle of the street, toward the riders, a double-barrel shotgun held at port arms.
"The five-cent hand-jobs down in the bottoms must not be available this evening," he said.
"Don't mix in hit, blue-belly," Jarrette said.
"Oh, I don't plan to mix in it at all, Captain Jarrette. But my lovely ten-gauge will. By blowing your fucking head off," the sergeant said. He lifted the shotgun to his shoulder and thumbed back the hammer on each barrel.
Jarrette stared into the shotgun, breathing through his mouth, snuffing down in his nose, as though he had a cold. "How you know my name?" he asked.
"You were with Cole Younger at Centralia. When he lined up captured Union boys to see how many bodies a ball from his new Enfield could pass through. Haul your sorry ass out of here, you cowardly sack of shit," the sergeant said.
Jarrette flinched, the blood draining out of his cheeks. He rubbed his palms on his thighs as though he needed to relieve himself. Then his face locked into a disjointed expression, the eyes lidless, the jaw hooked open, like a barracuda thrown onto a beach.
"That was Bill Anderson's bunch. I wasn't there. I didn't have nothing to do with hit," he said.
"I can always tell when you're lying, Jarrette. Your lips are moving," the sergeant said.
"Hit's Cap'n Jarrette. Don't talk to me like that. I wasn't there."
