Death Rattle

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Damn, if this dead mule didn’t smell like a month-old grizzly-gutted badger!

Titus Bass swiped the back of his black, powder-grimed hand under his nose and snorted with that first faint hint of a stench strong enough to make his eyes water. Without lingering, he spilled enough grains of the fine four-F priming powder into the pan, then carefully raised his head over the dead mule’s still-warm rib cage.

The sonsabitches were gathering off to the left, over there by big Shad Sweete’s side of the ring. Really more of a crude oval the two dozen of them had quickly formed around this collection of ancient tree stumps when they started dropping every last one of their saddle stock and pack animals with a lead ball in the brain.

“Dun’ shoot till you’re sure!” Henry Fraeb was bellowing again.

He’d repeated it over and over so many times it was beginning to nettle the gray-haired Bass. “We ain’t none of us lop-eared pilgrims, Frapp!” he growled back at the trapping brigade leader.

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