Into the Wilderness
Page 265

"You ready to go?" Nathaniel asked.
Billy raised his head and Nathaniel saw the ruined mouth and the flash of dark resistance in his eyes. It took nothing more than a tap of the rifle stock on the jaw to stop his lunge and toss him down. He clasped both hands to his face, bent himself into a bow and howled.
"Shut up," Nathaniel said. "If you don't want Axel and the rest of them on your tail."
Spit and blood ran down between Billy's fingers as he peered up at Nathaniel.
"Call 'em in," he said hoarsely, his torn mouth working in odd jerks. "Maybe I can strike a deal."
And he reached under the blanket that lay in a heap on the dirt floor and came up not with the knife Nathaniel had half expected, but fists full of gold coin.
"Call 'em in!" Billy shouted. "Where's that treasury agent? O'Brien!"
He coughed and laughed, and tossed the coins in the air. They clinked and rolled on the ground; Nathaniel kept his eyes on Billy.
"The judge will want to see that mine," Billy said, wiping his chin with the back of a hand. "Nice little piece of work it is, too."
"The judge is busy burying his son."
For a moment the certainty in Billy's face wavered, and then it cleared. "You're lying."
Nathaniel shook his head.
"But not in the fire." Billy's voice cracked and wobbled. "That wasn't the idea at all."
"What was the idea?"
Billy just stared at him.
"We'll head down to the village and ask, if you don't believe me."
"You can't afford to take me down there."
"It's you that stinks of fire and spilled blood," Nathaniel said. "Get up."
Suddenly much paler, Billy said: "You'll have to hand that gold over to the treasury."
"What gold?" Nathaniel said. "By the time they get back up here, there won't be any gold. They'll think it's a story you made up, desperate to save your hide."
Billy stood up slowly. "The judge will take the mine away from you."
"And if he did," Nathaniel said, "Elizabeth is his only heir now." He pushed the idea of Kitty and her newborn son out of his head. "We'd get it back in the end. So let's you and me go on down there and ask him what sits worse, the loss of a mine he never knew he had, or the loss of his son."
"You're lying!" Billy whispered.
"Am I? Let's go find out."
* * *
He made Billy shake out his boots and strip down to the skin, losing a few gold pieces along the way. Then Nathaniel let him dress again and he prodded him out of the cave at the end of his rifle. His face was as calm and impassive as he knew how to make it, but his mind was racing. There was no one who could come take the gold off the mountain now; Bears was gone to Albany, and none of the women were strong enough to manage the strongbox. He wasn't even sure he could handle it on his own, half empty as it was.
On the cliff edge Billy hesitated in the first rays of the rising sun. Squinting, he glanced up at the sky, and then over the gorge below. He scuffed with one toe and a cascade of pebbles disappeared.
"Gotta piss."
Nathaniel waited.
"Aren't you going to ask about your brother?"
Billy's head jerked around, surprised. "What about him?"
"You don't know if he's alive or dead," Nathaniel pointed out.
Billy shrugged, pulling his breeches back into order. "I was beat harder than that once a week when our folks was alive," he said. "Never killed me. No other way to knock sense into a thick head, Pa always said." He ran a hand over his jaw and winced. "Anyway, they can only hang me once. That is, if Julian really died in the fire."
Nathaniel blinked at him and said nothing, feeling the rage rising in his gorge.
"Stupid bastard, to go in there," Billy muttered.
"Maybe," said Nathaniel, watching closely. "Maybe there was something worth saving inside."
Billy studied his boots.
Nathaniel's rifle hummed in his hands, speaking to him. He gripped it hard and focused on what he could see of Billy's face, bruised and bloody. To the right the sun was rising in colors of fire. Ahead of him was the wilderness. Somewhere out there his father was living rough, because of Billy Kirby. And there was Liam—alone in the world, except for this man. The world narrowed down to this, everything in the balance because of a man like this.
"Why'd you lock the door?" Nathaniel asked, hearing his own voice low and even and far away.
The shaggy blond head came up slowly. A struggle on his face, the bruised mouth puckered. The expression of a man weighing bragging rights against the little bit of common sense he called his own.
"It's like Pa always said." Billy cocked his head to look out over the wilderness. "If a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing all the way."
"That's damn good advice," Nathaniel said, and his rifle stock took Billy in the gut and shoved him backward. There was an explosive grunt of air, Billy's eyes bulging with the shock of it. Nathaniel watched his arms pinwheel once, twice, and there was a furious scrabble and shuddering of loose rock as his boots skittered over the edge. He flung himself forward to grab at the rifle barrel, Nathaniel's shirt, his legs, the fringe on his moccasins. Then the cliff edge snapped off in his hands with a crack like bone breaking—like Liam's bones breaking—and Billy Kirby fell a hundred screaming yards to strike the cliff face headfirst, fell again, silently now, to strike again, careening down the mountainside until he was lost in a vast sea of juniper and hemlock.