Mankillers

Simon shook his head. “You seem to have forgotten the Book of Proverbs. He who digs a pit will fall into it, and he who rolls a stone, it will come back upon him.” He stood up. “Now, get out of my office.”

For a moment he thought his unwelcome visitor was going to strike him, but he didn’t. The coward turned on his heel and stormed out.

“Chester,” Simon called once the door to the street had closed, “take this message to the stagecoach office immediately and give them instructions that it’s to be delivered upon arrival.”

#

Everyone was sitting around the dining room table in the Grayson household. The mood was somber one minute, filled with humor the next as they recounted stories about Emma.

“I remember the day your parents got married,” Miriam said. “Your momma was as nervous as a chicken before di

“Her biggest job was minding you and Clay,” Gus commented.

Buck chuckled. “We could hide from our parents, but we could never fool Emma. She knew all our secret places.”

“Did she have any children of her own?” Sarah asked.

“Certainly not after she came to our house,” Buck replied, “but she never talked about herself. I believe she had family of sorts over near Gadsden. She even mentioned her sister’s girl nursing Job when he was an infant. And of course she delivered him as she had so many others.” He paused. “I’m ashamed when I think about how little I knew about her. I could always count on her, yet I was never interested enough to ask the most basic personal questions.”

“Everybody loved her,” Miriam said. “She was one of those rare people who devoted herself to others and took her consolation in making them happy.”

“Unfortunately I got to meet her all too briefly when she was old and ill,” Sarah said, “but listening to y’all talk about her, I feel like I’ve known her all my life. I wish I could’ve spent more time with her.”

“The salt of the earth,” Gus contributed.

“Beg your pardon, sir,” Quintus said from the doorway. “They’s a letter for Miz Sarah.”

“For me?” she exclaimed. “Who’d be sending me a letter here?”

“The delivery boy’s outside and won’t give it to nobody but her personal.”

Sarah shrugged. “Very well.” She rose from her chair which Buck eased out from behind her, and proceeded to the foyer.

A moment later everyone heard her gasp. “It’s impossible,” she exclaimed. “He can’t be.”

Buck rushed out to her. The others, equally disturbed, followed. They found her sitting on the small chair by the front door, the yellow paper clutched in her right hand. Her face was pale white.

Without asking permission, Buck took the paper, unwrinkled it, sca

“What is it?” Gus and his wife asked simultaneously.

Buck placed his hand consolingly on Sarah’s shoulder and turned to the others. “Randolph Drexel is alive and on his way here to Columbia.”

#

The next two hours were spent in speculation of how a dead man could be alive.

“I was told he was stabbed to death and buried in a mass grave,” Sarah explained. “The camp commandant even showed me his name written in the death ledger.”

“Were you given any of his effects?” Gus asked.

“No. I asked about his gold watch but no one remembered having seen it. Under the circumstances it didn’t seem unreasonable, and I didn’t really care about it. I would have given it to his father, had I received it.”

“So you had nothing but the word of a stranger that he’d been killed?” Gus asked.

His wife glared at him. “What else was she to do? She had no reason to suspect he wasn’t telling her the truth.”

“I meant no disrespect,” he replied. “My point is that she could have been deceived, intentionally or by accident.”

“What’s important,” Buck remarked, “is that Randolph Drexel’s alive and no doubt out for vengeance.”

“Well,” Miriam told Sarah, “you certainly can’t go to Jasmine tomorrow. It’ll be much too dangerous for you to be out in public.”

“I’ll send word to my bank guards,” Gus offered, “and have them come here and protect her while we’re gone. They’re good men. I can assure you, no one will get past them.”

“No,” Buck decreed. “She’s not staying here alone. She’s going with us so I can protect her.”

“That’s very noble of you, doctor,” Ruth remarked, “but I don’t see how you can protect her on the road. The last time—”

“Mother!” Sarah stopped her.

The older woman bowed her head. “I’m sorry.”

“No apology necessary, Mrs. Greenwald. I fully understand. You have my regrets and my sympathy.”

“What do you have in mind?” Gus asked, clearly as interested in learning Buck’s plan as relieving the tension that had developed.

“According to the dispatch—” he stretched it out on the table in front of him “—Randolph is in Charleston and will be leaving in the morning to come here to Columbia. Whether he already knows Sarah is staying at this house isn’t important. It won’t take him long to find out once he arrives. That’s why Sarah and her mother have to go with us to Jasmine. I don’t want him to find anyone here.”

“A good plan,” Gus concluded. “By the way, I meant to tell you earlier. Rexford asked to go with us. Like you, he has fond memories of Emma and wants to see what’s left of Jasmine. Says he spent as much time there as he did at his own home.”

“He still shoot?” Buck asked.

Gus gri

Buck had thought he’d retired his guns permanently. Obviously not. He would fire ca

#

Buck returned to the hotel that evening in a state of agitation. He’d thought the crises in his life were behind him, that he could go forward with the woman he’d grown to love without having to take on more enemies. Once again he was confronted with the ugly fact that the world he’d grown up in, a world that seemed so genteel and orderly, so refined and sophisticated, was no more—and perhaps had never been that way to begin with. Nevertheless he missed the façade of civilization and decorum it had presented.

In his sitting room, he went to the corner where he’d stored the saddlebags he’d brought with him from the battlefields of Virginia. In one pocket were his medical supplies, his bone saw, his scalpels, needles and sutures, bandages and bottles of chloroform and laudanum. He had no use for them, but long habit required him to check that they were intact. He wouldn’t leave them behind—just in case . . .

In the other pocket of the saddlebag, he found what he was looking for. His brother’s Colt pistol. The cartridges were there as well, along with his binoculars. Clay’s Henry rifle was propped up in the corner.

He stared at the firearms. How much he wanted to abandon them. But that apparently was not to be. He loaded the Colt, leaving one chamber empty and lowered the hammer on it. He also filled the magazine of the rifle. Would Randolph Drexel hide in trees, as the redheaded assassin had? Would he be as accurate a marksman as Rufus Snead?

Would Buck have to take his life too?

The thought made him shudder. But if that’s what it took to protect Sarah, he would once again become a mankiller.