Free In the Rogue Blood by James Carlos Blake, J Blake Page A

wound and they thanked the daughters for their kindness too and then they rode off with the rising sun at their backs.

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    West into Mississippi. Days of fierce sunshine and thick wet heat. Ripe lowcountry smells. They meandered over low hills and through dense pinewoods, through forests full of moss-hung oaks and magnolia trees bursting with white blossoms. Some afternoons the clouds banked huge and dark over the Gulf and thunder rolled and lightning branched brightly and wind shook the trees and rain swept in and churned fresh orange mud. Sometimes it rained in the night and the brothers cursed and slept fitfully in sopping blankets. But in the mornings the clouds came asunder and the sun broke red through the trees and the rivers did not top their banks again in the rest of that sultry summer.
    They knew no haste and rarely hupped their mounts to a trot. They sometimes stayed put at a campsite for days. They shot deer and gorged themselves on the roasted haunches and smoked the backmeat in thick strips. They climbed trees to achieve a vista and have a closer look at the clouds and holler their names across the treetops. They swam in lakes and netted catfish from the creeks with their shirts. They napped in the high summer grass. They slept in pastures lit pale as bone by moonlight, under skies black as mystery and blasting with stars. They claimed variousblazing comets as omens of their own bright futures. They told each other of the beautiful women they were destined to be loved by, the great wealth they were bound to amass.
    They were ferried across the Pascagoula by a labor gang working to repair a bridge and with them shared their bounty of smoked venison and from them learned the game of three-card poker which some called monte. The ante was two bits. Edward was incapable of losing. When somebody held an ace he held a pair of treys. When somebody had a pair of queens he held the four-five-six. John thought he’d won a hand when he laid down three sixes but Edward gleefully showed three eights and took the pot. He won one hand after another and laughed as he pulled in the money. The workmen’s eyes went narrow and their mouths drew tight.
    When Edward beat three aces with the seven-eight-nine of hearts to win for the eighth time in a row and increase his winnings to nearly twenty dollars, the aces holder threw down his cards and said, “You cheatin sumbitch!”
    Edward sprang to his feet and kicked him in the throat before the man’s knife cleared its sheath. John quickly mounted up and held the others at pistolpoint, his heart kicking wildly, while Edward scooped up the money and then stepped up onto the sorrell mare and cantered off with the mule in tow. John sat his horse and kept the cocked pistol on the workmen until he was sure Edward was well away and then he reined about and lit out at a gallop to catch up to his brother. They laughed and whooped and rode hard till the sun was below the treeline and then they swung off the trace and into the deeper woods and there made a fireless camp and took turns keeping watch through the night but no one came after them.

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    They came upon a house-raising early one morning as the sun was just beginning to show through the trees. Several families had come together to help a neighbor put up his new cabin in a wildflowered clearing within sight of the trace and flanked by a wide shallow creek. John halloed the folk and asked if they might spare some coffee and the brothers were invited to step down to breakfast. They sat at one of two long puncheon tables and ate their fill of fried catfish and grits with red gravy, cornbreadwith molasses, boiled greens. They drank steaming cups of chicory. The tables were loud with talk and laughter and the children were enthralled by the two strangers, peering at them shyly and then covering their giggles with their hands when John or Edward winked or waggled their brows at them. They were generous workhardened folk, several of the