Too Cheap to Buy an Account

It was sundown on the sixth day before Pierce Hastings saw anyone on the
trail. He stood on a rise looking down on the stranger’s head, and
further, down a sheer drop to where the remaining of the man’s company
were camped, in lazily-pitched dog tents, limp little canvases tossed over
rope and staked between two forked branches in haste to be done with.

The nearest of the visible, the original stranger, was through brass
telescope confirmed a Union Captain, jacket-front all unbuttoned and skin
of his gut spilling forth from the harsh girth of his breeches. His
buttons glinted in the last of the sun, and by the look of it, he had only
just been to collect his earning, which now he counted before him, and
which glinted also, sinister, rosy. A little purse of scuffed and
stretching leather lay to the side, gasping open like a hungry mouth.

That was plenty to see, plenty to know, and so Hastings started softly
down the hill up which he’d come, and went aside it to the firs growing up
the eastern foot, such as not to be seen, and if heard, to be mistaken for
a climbing animal or bird in the branches. He was some feet from the end
of the cover when he halted and strained his ears, for there in between
the beating of his own blood was a muted clinking sound, and the Captain’s
drink-roughened voice at its lowest and softest as he counted:

“And two, three, five, seven, eight…” and a groan as he stooped, then a
sloshing sound before resuming: “Nine, ten, one-two-three thirteen,
one-two four—fourteen…”

From between two further branches, Hastings could see the captain sway,
and reach twice for a canteen some feet to his left, and then, having
missed his mark, catch his soft self with an arm, in a valiant display of
reflex in combat against a proportionately vast amount of alcohol.
Hastings took this moment of certain unbalance to his advantage, and swift
as a pickpocket—though he was very certainly a bandit, and no lesser kind
of thief—sprang from the trees and knocked the pretty rifle another yard
away from its Captain, regretting a moment the noise of fine mahogany on
rock. It took the lurching fool some seconds to glance upward, and another
at least to gasp. When he did, it was momentary, rather more of an alarmed
belch before his watery eyes narrowed like crows’ and the rest of his body
took on the stance of a maddened, short-legged boar.

He spoke:

“Graceless cowards, you. A battle lost and that’s as much a man as your
General is, sending the unwounded ‘round all masked like men of the hills
to spring upon the Union camps at leisure, with no talk on the pipes of
anything like it, and don’t think I won’t scream, so you can shoot me if
you like.”

“Is that all? Hastings said. He hadn’t bothered to cover his face; the
Captain’s drunkenness and four miles between them by morning tomorrow
would be a swept trail enough. “I haven’t come to shoot you, but if you’d
like it better—“ he paused, and brought his hand to rest at his hip,
inside his coat.

“No, no,” insisted the captain, in an entirely unconvincing try at
sounding gathered, ready to negotiate the terms of his own release, which
seemed to the bandit something funny, as he was hardly captured yet. “What
you’d thought due will quite suffice. You want information, I’m sure, and
you may have it. All is over for your petty companies; be assured, this
war is lost. To whatever end my intelligences may aid you, I beg you, let
them do. The gracious winner gives his foe a something, and though I never
meant to give you sorry lot a sliver, circumstances are so arranged that I
might with little inconvenience to myself. I beg you, ask; do.”

But the bandit only smiled a patronizing smile, and drew two inches of
steel from inside his jerkin at such an angle as to catch the last of the
light. He stood so posed for as long as he felt he could afford before he
drew.
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