Days of the Dead.pdf - Upgrade Systems

thrashed.
The dark bandit wheeled, plunged into the dust, shouting "Vamanos, toros!" to his men. One
unhorsed ban­dit tried to mount a fallen comrade's horse, and Dillard coolly shot him in the back; the
animal whinnying, back­ing, reins tangled in a thicket of creosote-bush in the ditch beside the road. As
the bandits rode off, the Tennessean swung himself up through the coach window and went to get the
horse; January ducked down into the coach again. Strange, he thought, that one of the first men of African
blood that he'd seen in this country had been trying to kill him.
Then he smelled blood down in the coach and saw Rose with the breast of her dress all crimson with
gore.... She was knotting one of her hat-veils around a wound in Padre Cesario's wrist and the blood
clearly belonged to him-or to the poor valet Da Ponte, crumpled in a hud­dle-but the sight of it nearly
stopped January's heart.
It could have been Rose.
Like that, in a second, everything we could have had to­gether, all the years of our happiness, gone...
He began to shake, as if with malarial chill. "Are you all right?" He hoped his voice didn't sound as
hoarse to her as it did in his own ears.
She nodded. Her hands were black with powder and her long hair-beautiful walnut-brown and curly,
more like a white woman's than a black's-stuck with sweat to her face and hung down in strings where it
had escaped chignon and hat.
We're going back to New Orleans and to hell with Hannibal. ... YOU’RE going back to New
Orleans and Ill join you there after I've wrung his neck for him.... We’ll open the school on Rue
Esplanade and live happily ever after forever unless you get kidnapped by slave-traders or die in
another cholera epidemic or in childbirth. . . .
He drew a deep breath and looked around. "Anyone else hurt?"
The two merchants shook their heads. One of them bent over Da Ponte, tried to straighten him;
January and the other merchant opened the coach door above them like a trap-door, and gently helped
out first the priest, then Rose, then lifted out the valet's body. He was old and frag­ile and had spoken
only Italian; January wondered what he'd been doing in Mexico, and if he had family back in Locarno.
He'd been shot through the throat.
It could have been Rose.
Dillard and the guard came back, each leading a ban­dit's horse. The bandit January had shot lay
sobbing some distance from the coach. He'd been dragged, and then trampled, by his terrified mount.
Blood bubbled from his mouth and spread over the crotch of his thin, ragged peas­ant breeches. His
unshaven face contorted with agony; January fished his rosary from his pocket, knelt beside the man and
twined the blue glass beads, the battered steel cru­cifix in the filthy hands.
The bandit couldn't speak but brought the rosary up to his lips and kissed it.
"Your sins are forgiven you," whispered January in Spanish, and made the Sign of the Cross. Standing,
he took from his pocket the pistol he'd purchased in vera Cruz. "Go with God."
And shot him through the head.