DISCLAIMER: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by ah… various corporations and television stations whose names I can't recall at the moment. I think CBS may be in there somewhere. No money is being made and no offense is intended.
Fandom: Magnificent Seven (Old West)
Main characters: Ezra, JD, Nathan.
Warnings: This still PG-13-ish section of "Another Fine Mess" contains an unflattering portrayal of law enforcement officials, defamatory remarks about the U.S. Army, yet more Nathan-torture (now with accompanying Ezra torture!), and ex-ConfederateSoldier!Ezra, and does not advance the plot. At all. It’s basically fourteen pages of conversation porn (and, sadly, “conversation porn” means “gratuitous dialogue written for the author’s pleasure,” not “conversations about sex.” There is still no sex).

Part Three:

His head hurt. No, that was an understatement. His head was a source of throbbing, pulsing agony, pain locked around his temples like a vise. Drinking was a bad, bad idea, and surely if he asked one of the other Seven, they would see to it that he never overindulged again. Ezra groaned, the sound echoing through his head and if anything making the pain worse, and reached up to feel at his skull. A matching—but far, far less intense—ache in his ribs woke to life at the movement, and he groaned again, recognizing the aftereffects of a beating of some kind.

“What hit me?”

“The sheriff.” JD’s voice came from somewhere above him, and Ezra, having satisfied himself that his head appeared to be intact—albeit with a swollen bruise just below his hair line—opened his eyes to find a slightly-out-of-focus JD bending over him. The younger man was tilted weirdly sideways. Ezra blinked, frowning, and then realized that he was lying on his right side, not his back, which explained why JD appeared to be horizontal.

Wait, he was lying on the floor. On a hard, dusty wooden floor that desperately needed to be swept and scrubbed. Why was he on the floor?

“What sheriff?”

JD frowned, looking worried. “You don’t remember? You were breaking us out of here, and Sheriff Aiken clocked you over the head with his shotgun. You were out all night long. Nathan was really worried.”

Nathan. There was something about Nathan he ought to remember. Something bad…. Ezra closed his eyes, blocking out the harsh glare of sunlight so that he could think. The memories came slowly, filtered through the sickening headache. Playing poker in the Morning Star. The red-headed deputy, boasting about arresting JD and Nathan. Getting the lawmen out of the jail by telling them about the saloon brawl…. The last thing Ezra recalled was kneeling to pick the lock on the cell door, though he was more than willing to take JD’s word for what had happened afterwards. Something had certainly hit him. Hangovers didn’t leave bruises. Whiskey didn’t kick one in the ribs and reawaken the ache in just-healed bones.

He realized belatedly that his rescue attempt must have failed, and that he must be in jail, too. Nathan and JD were no better off than they’d been before he showed up, and Ezra was a whole hell of a lot worse off. Nathan needed medical attention, and he wasn’t getting it here.

“Nathan,” Ezra croaked out. He forced his eyes open again and tried to sit up, regretting the attempt instantly when the jail cell lurched around him. He let himself sag back down to the floor, shutting his eyes tight and concentrating very hard on not being sick. The brief glimpse he’d gotten of their prison flashed against the back of his eyelids. Bars, grime, a dusty and worried JD, and Nathan slumped on a cot in the corner, leaning against the wall in a way that implied that he might not be able to stay upright on his own. “Is Nathan all right?”

“Better than you, at the moment.” Nathan’s voice sounded sharp, exasperated, but there was an undercurrent of tiredness to it. “Head wounds and drinking are bad things to mix. You might not’ve woken up.”

And wouldn’t that have been the perfect way to die, compounding his failure to help his friends by expiring on them. Could he do nothing right these days? Ezra took a deep breath, fighting down the urge to vomit, and managed, “You have my complete and utter agreement on that, Mr. Jackson. I assure you, I shall do everything in my power to avoid such a combination in the future.” There, that sounded nice and coherent. Rather impressively so, actually.

“Right,” Nathan said, his tone conveying less than perfect belief. “Your head’s got to be hurting. Do you feel sick at all? Is your eyesight blurring any?”

“Ah, that would be a yes, and a yes.” Ezra kept his eyes closed, lying very still and taking stock of himself. In addition to the headache, he was thirsty, his side and arm hurt, and his jacket and derringer rig were both gone. On the other hand, Nathan was clearly awake and well enough to be fussing over other people’s injuries, which was reassuring, especially since one of the confused memories he had of the previous night seemed include Nathan being left to rot in jail with a untreated leg wound. Other memories seemed to indicate the presence of a substantial amount of money, possibly won at the tables, though it was all mixed up with the Stutz money, and thus possibly not an entirely reliable memory—he also remembered leaving money behind in the saloon, which certainly couldn’t be correct. “Where’s my jacket? It had money in it, I think.”

“Andy took it off you to search you for weapons,” JD said. “He handed your winnings over to the sheriff as evidence.”

Ah, so the money had been real. That was nice to know, even if it had been stolen now. “Which one is Andy?”

“The red-head,” JD explained. “The big one is called Harnett. He’s a real sonuvabitch,” he continued, sounding disconcertingly like Buck Wilmington. “Andy, I mean. I asked if them to send a doctor in to take a look at Nathan, and he said that if Nathan was a really a doctor, he could fix himself, and wouldn’t need anyone to come in.”

“Physician, heal thyself,” Ezra muttered. “When we make our daring escape,” he said, more loudly, “I suggest we shoot him on the way out.”

“You do realize the other deputy’s right across the room listening to us,” Nathan said.

“He’s probably delighted by the idea,” Ezra said. “Sitting in a saloon with the man was bad enough. Lord knows what it must be like to work with him. He’s loud, and the most appalling braggart, and I think he’s a Republican, too. Or, wait, no, that was someone else. He got thrown into a table for defending President Grant. A deserved punishment, but a trifle excessive.”

There was a moment of silence. Ezra considered opening his eyes to check on JD and Nathan, but since keeping them closed really did seem to be helping with the headache, decided against it.

“Ezra,” JD asked finally, “what are you talking about?”

Ezra sighed, and reached his right hand up slowly and carefully to rub at his forehead. “In the saloon. I was playing poker—and winning—and this Andy came in and started going on about how he and his fellows had arrested you and Nathan. So I left and came to get you. Which didn’t turn out very well,” he finished. Explaining further was simply too much effort at the moment. Suddenly, Ezra realized that on top of the nausea and headache, he was intensely tired.

“No,” Nathan said dryly, “it didn’t.” There was a rustle of cloth as he shifted position, and the faintest of indrawn breaths, as if said shift had hurt him.

“That’s okay,” JD said, with forced cheerfulness, “when Buck and Chris and everyone else gets here, we’ll be out of here right away. And Chris will probably beat them all to a pulp for us, too.”

Ezra hated to put a damper on his enthusiasm, but, “How is Mr. Larabee going to know about our predicament? We’re not due back into town for at least another day, and much as we all like to credit Mr. Tanner with prescience…” something about the quality of the silence his words were falling into prompted him to let the sentence trail off, and he opened his eyes to see both Nathan and JD frowning down at him, wearing twin expressions of disappointment and surprise.

“You mean you didn’t send Chris a telegram saying we’d been arrested?” JD asked.

“No,” Ezra said, “I came straight here.” Even as he said it, he realized, with a stab of self-disgust, that wiring home to ask for help—or at least apprise everyone else of the situation—would have been by far the smarter thing to do. Had he done so, Chris, Vin, Buck, and Josiah would already be on their way to Julestown, arriving in only a day or so to explain to the local law that Nathan and JD were not, well, were not whatever they’d been mistaken for, and should damn well be let go. As should Ezra. As it was, it would be at least another day before anyone in Four Corners would begin to suspect that something might be wrong. The thought made the exhaustion dragging at him even more powerful, and seemed to make his headache pound harder. “Sorry,” he added. “I didn’t think of it.”

“Didn’t look like you were doing much in the way of thinking at all last night,” Nathan commented, frowning. His words were a reproach, and the bloody bandage tied around his thigh, even more of one. Ezra had, indeed, not been thinking yesterday. Intentionally not thinking about his fellow peacekeepers, and his—utterly deserved—loss of their trust, about his own shortcomings, about keeping an eye out for trouble, which was what he ought to have been doing. No wonder no one had trusted him to go off to Ridge City by himself; he couldn’t even be trusted to hold up his end of things tagging along to a stupid medical auction.

“Ah know,” Ezra mumbled. His head really did hurt, and his mouth was dry enough to be closer to painful than annoying. “Sorry. Ah don’t know what got in to me.” He closed his eyes again, feeling sleep creeping up on him. The miserably hard floor was barely a hindrance. “Unforgivably stupid. Ah keep living down to everyone’s expectations.” If anyone said anything after that, he didn’t hear it, drifting off into a doze that still didn’t quite manage to let him escape the ache in his head.

* * *


Nathan's leg hurt, he was thirsty, and, despite having slept through most of the night, he was tired, the unnatural, bone-deep tiredness he knew came from loss of blood. He was also deeply, intensely annoyed with Ezra, who should damn well have known better than to sit around getting drunk and gambling when he ought to have been keeping an eye out for Nathan and JD. It was difficult to be annoyed with Ezra when he was expending so much effort being pitiful, but not impossible. It helped that a good part of his obvious suffering was due to the hangover the gambler had more than earned.

At the very least, the man could have stayed sober enough to organize a more effective jailbreak.

Being annoyed with Ezra was much better than worrying about Ezra, which was what Nathan had been doing until he had woken up and spoken to them, erasing that nagging fear that he was going to die quietly in the night from the effects of a blow to the head made worse by whiskey. He was far, far luckier than he deserved to be; had the sheriff's shotgun caught him on the side of the temple rather than the forehead, he’d likely still be unconscious, and it was a minor miracle that Andy the thug’s kick to his ribs hadn't broken bones already cracked from Stutz's failed assassination attempt.

JD had been the one to determine that, carefully unbuttoning Ezra's vest and feeling at his ribs while Nathan, cursing the leg wound that kept him from kneeling down next to Ezra and doing it himself, told him what to look for.

JD himself didn't look as if he had slept a wink all night long. There were dark circles under his eyes, and his too-long hair was a mess. There was dried blood around his fingernails, and a streak of it across his face, where he'd rubbed at his eyes. Most of the blood was Nathan's own, but some of it was probably Ezra's. The rough treatment Ezra had gotten from Sheriff Aiken and his deputies had started his half-healed side and arm bleeding again, though Nathan's stitches had held. The two small spots of blood on Ezra's white shirt had only strengthened Aiken's conviction that the three of them were his robbers; apparently, one of the thieves had been wounded during the hold up. The ‘evidence’ against them just kept piling up. The thought that perhaps, if he were white, the ‘evidence’ might not be so forthcoming had crossed Nathan’s mind a time or two, but he tried not to keep thinking it.

"What are we going to do?" JD asked. He was staring at the floor, not looking at Nathan, and his voice sounded very young.

Nathan was silent for a moment, trying to think of something reassuring to say to him. Nothing came to mind. "Sit tight and wait for everyone back home to come looking for us, I guess," he finally said. And hope nobody tries to lynch us in the meantime, he added silently. Oddly, the thought didn't summon up much fear. Maybe he was just too tired to be afraid. Or maybe annoyance and worry were drowning the fear out. Annoyance over Ezra, worry over Ezra, worry for JD, worry over his leg, which didn't seem to be infected as far as he could tell, but had all too high a chance of ending up that way, despite attempts to clean it with the contents of Ezra's flask.

Of course, if they were all hung for robbery and murder, it wouldn't have time to get infected.

Nathan shifted position, trying to find some way of sitting that would make the hot ache in his thigh lessen. Apparently, there wasn't one. He sighed, giving up, and then a nudge from JD made him look up, to find the deputy on guard coming toward the jail cell, the key ring in his hand and a pistol in the other. The same pistol, Nathan suspected, that the man had shot him with.

"When I unlock this door," the deputy said, "one of you—one—is gonna come along with me to the privy. And then I bring you back and the next one comes along. Any of you," and he gestured with the pistol, sweeping its barrel across the three of them and finally letting it rest on Ezra, who was blinking blearily at him, "tries anything, I'll shoot you. Behave, and I'll see you get some breakfast."

It was the longest speech Nathan had heard out of the man yet. Harnett had previously been willing to let his boss—or Andy—do the talking for him.

“You first, mister.” Harnett pointed at Nathan, and Nathan glanced down at his leg, which he just knew was going to hurt like hell the moment he moved, and which would take that much longer to heal if he over-used it. Visiting the privy, on the other hand, would be a very welcome thing, and breakfast of some sorts would be even better.

He sighed. He didn’t really have much of a choice in the matter, since Harnett was the one with the gun—and had already demonstrated his willingness to use that gun.

Nathan braced his hands against the cot and prepared to push himself to his feet. Then Ezra spoke up, heading him off.

“Mr. Jackson has been shot,” he said, speaking slowly and distinctly, as if to a dull child. “He can’t walk.”

“So long as his leg isn’t broke,” Harnett said flatly, “he can. What’s it to you, anyway?” He frowned slightly, as if truly curious. “You didn’t look all that friendly with those two when you rode in. I could’ve sworn you weren’t in on things with them.”

“None of us are in on anything,” JD protested, yet again. “We’ve told you and told you, we’re lawmen.”

“Mr. Dunne speaks the truth,” Ezra said. “We are, indeed, lawmen, unlikely as it may seem, and I assure you, both Judge Travis and Chris Larabee will be most displeased if you don’t let us out. You may have heard of Chris Larabee. Tall, unpleasant temper, likes to wear black?”

Harnett just looked at them for a moment, his skepticism plain on his face. “If that’s so, why did we find you picking that lock last night?” He nodded at the cell door, then shook his head. “This story just keeps getting harder and harder to swallow. You, come on.” He waved at Nathan again, still gesturing with the gun. Nathan hoped the weapon wasn't cocked, or the man might just shoot one of them by accident.

Nathan pushed himself to his feet, gritting his teeth at the pain in his leg. The moment he tried resting his weight on it, it buckled beneath him, just as he’d suspected it would.

JD grabbed him by the arm, keeping him upright, and then Ezra was there on his other side, silently offering support. Nathan took a deep breath, blinked away the patches of grey that had formed on the edge of his vision, and then straightened up. “I’m fine,” he said. He had a feeling Harnett would decide that the two of them helping him over to the bars counted as ‘trying something,’ and the man seemed just impatient enough—or jumpy enough—to hold true to his promise to shoot them for it.

Nathan’s statement didn’t seem to have made much of an impression, so he repeated himself. “I’m fine. You can let go now.”

Ezra and JD obediently let go of his arms and stepped back—both clearly still holding themselves ready to lunge forward and grab him should it be necessary. It wasn’t. Somehow, Nathan managed to keep his feet, and even to take a step toward where Harnett waited outside the cell doors. And then another step.

Pain lanced through his leg every time his foot touched the ground, and he was sure he could actually feel the bullet in his thigh shifting as he moved, but he gritted his teeth and ignored it. There were times when a man just had to endure things.

JD, he noticed, with that part of his attention not fixed on keeping his feet, was glaring mutinously through the bars at Harnett, as if he wanted nothing in the world so much as to launch himself at the deputy and beat him to a pulp. He kept still, though, likely more because of the gun Harnett had trained on them than because the man was nearly twice his size.

Ezra was blank-faced, emotionless, but his face was pale, making the bruise on his forehead stand out sharply, and his eyes bloodshot, and he was in all likelihood no happier to be upright than Nathan was.

Nathan stopped at the cell door and waited to Harnett to unlock it. He grabbed hold of the bars with one hand, using them to hold himself up for a moment while he waited, trying not to be too obvious about it. The deputy worked the lock one-handed, keeping his pistol aimed somewhere between Ezra and JD, silently warning them not to ‘try anything.’

“I’ll be right back,” Nathan said, when the lock clicked. “Don’t nobody escape without me while I’m gone. And, Ezra,” he added, “sit down before you fall down.”

JD smiled wanly, and Ezra shook his head, winced, and stubbornly stayed on his feet. “I’m not the one in danger of pitching over,” he said.

Nathan made it out of the jail and to the privy out back just fine, Harnett one step behind him with the pistol pointed firmly between his shoulder blades, as if he honestly though Nathan might try to run for it. He didn’t manage the trip back quite as well; by the time they got back inside the jail, Harnett was dragging him along by the arm, half-supporting his weight. Nathan did his best to keep up, sending up a silent prayer of thanks that at least he had the somewhat more decent deputy dragging him around. Andy, he had a feeling, would have made him crawl rather than give him even that limited amount of help.

Andy seemed like the sort of man who liked watching people crawl.

Nathan nearly collapsed onto the floor the moment Harnett turned loose of him and pushed him back into the cell. Luckily, Ezra and JD were there to catch him and haul him back over to the cot. Nathan sat down hard, closed his eyes, and waited for the agony in his leg to subside. When he opened his eyes again, he was lying on his back with JD peering at the bandage on his leg, and Ezra was gone. He’d lost some time; how much, he couldn’t be sure.

“Where’s Ezra?” he asked, feeling a fuzzy sort of alarm start to spread through him.

JD gave him a funny look, and said, “Out back, with that deputy.” He frowned uncertainly. “You were out of it for a good quarter-hour. You okay, Nathan?”

Nathan was tempted to say yes, to keep the boy from worrying, but it would have been a lie. “No,” he admitted flatly. “I’ve got a hole in my leg, Ezra’s all bruised up, and the three of us are stuck here until Chris and them all figure out we’re missing. Unfortunately, there ain’t much any of us can do about that.”

“No,” JD said softly, “I guess there ain’t.” He sighed, and made a face. “Why won’t they listen to us?”

“Would you?” Nathan asked. “A black man, a gambler, and a kid walk into your town, one of them matches the description of a man wanted for murder, and when you arrest them, they tell you they’re all lawmen.”

“Yeah, well, I know I don’t look much like a lawmen, but they ought to at least check out our story. I mean, any of us would do that right away.”

“The problem isn’t you, son,” Ezra drawled from the doorway. Nathan looked up to see him standing silhouetted against the light, Harnett at his back like a guard dog. Ezra, Nathan noted, had been put in handcuffs for the trip to the privy. It figured. He and JD might actually be capable of running off. “I get the feeling the issue at stake here is myself and Mr. Jackson,” Ezra went on. “Neither of us presents an appearance commensurate with what people expect from an officer of the law.” He strode over to the cell door and stood beside it, waiting for the deputy to unlock it for him, looking for all the world like he was a guest at some fancy hotel, waiting for the staff to open up his room.

Harnett opened the door, shoved Ezra into the cell, and slammed the door shut again behind him. He locked it securely, crossed the room to set the keys well out of reach on the desk, and only then returned to remove the cuffs from the gambler’s wrists. “You got to talk every minute you’re awake?” he asked.

Ezra ignored this remark with an aplomb Nathan figured he’d practiced on purpose to annoy people, and said, “My associates and I would like some breakfast. A hot breakfast, preferably one including coffee. And some water. And if you could see fit to send a telegram on our behalf to Four Corners, that would be much appreciated.”

Harnett rolled his eyes heavenward for a moment. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said. He turned back to the desk, muttering, “Sure will be glad when the army gets here to take you lot off our hands.”

"The army?" Ezra repeated. He slumped down onto the floor and leaned his head back against the wall, rubbing at his forehead with one hand. "What on earth do they think the two of you did?"

"They think we held up an army payroll," JD said. "Haven't you been paying attention?"

"Not really," Ezra admitted. "I think my head is going to come apart." He groaned theatrically, one hand still pressed against his forehead. “I leave you two gentleman alone for one afternoon, and you not only get yourselves arrested, you end up with the U.S. Army out for your blood. As if this dreadful town’s lawmen weren’t trouble enough.” He was silent for a moment, then added, “Chris is going to kill us all.”

“Maybe that ain’t such a bad thing,” Nathan offered. His leg continued to ache, making concentrating on the conversation hard, but he was following it well enough to know he disagreed with Ezra’s pessimistic outlook. The army, unlike the local law, was not likely to lynch them out of hand. “When the army detachment gets here, they’ll see we ain’t the same men that held their payroll up, and they’ll let us go.”

“Because Lord knows the Union Army has never acted unjustly,” Ezra said snidely.

Nathan and JD both ignored this remark. “Maybe we can get their officer to send that telegram to Chris,” JD said hopefully. “He has to be more reasonable than these people.” He frowned then, and bounced to his feet with an energy Nathan could only envy, kicking at the bars to get the deputy’s attention. “Hey, deputy, when are you going to feed us? If this were my jail, I’d have brought my prisoners breakfast by now.”

“And water,” Ezra added, under his breath. “And coffee. And medical treatment.”

“You’ll get fed when the sheriff gets here.” Harnett picked up a pocket watch—Ezra’s pocket watch—from the desk and consulted it. “Should only be a half-hour or so.”

He brought them water, though, which Nathan drank gratefully. Ezra gulped down his own water, completely forgetting to whine about the fact that their captors had stolen his watch, and JD drank his with a stubborn set to his jaw that told Nathan that he’d seriously considered throwing it back in Harnett’s face. Not being Buck or Chris, the kid had fortunately thought better of it.

Nathan’s throat felt dry as dust even after he’d finished the water, and a glance at his leg told him that the walking he’d been forced to do had started it bleeding again, but he couldn’t find the energy to do anything about it. It wasn’t too terrible an injury, really—Harnett’s gun was small caliber, and the bullet hadn’t broken anything or hit anything vital—but unless he could get the bullet out and stay still for a few days, it was never going to start healing. He hoped that when the army showed up, they’d have a doctor, and an interest in keeping their prisoners healthy until they tried them.

Nathan closed his eyes, trying to ignore the fire burning steadily away in his thigh. He opened them again what felt like moments later to find JD shaking his shoulder and thrusting a tin cup full of beans into his hands.

“Here. They finally gave us food. It’s lousy, but better than nothing. Ezra and me were going to jump Harnett when he opened the door,” this in a lowered voice, “since he couldn’t pull a gun with his hands full of plates and things, but he passed everything through the bars. That’s why it’s in a cup and not a plate.”

Nathan wasn’t hungry, but he would have made any patient in his situation eat, and the fact that the patient was himself this time didn’t change things. “He hand you any spoons to go with it?”

“Oh, yeah.” JD looked sheepish, and handed over a battered-looking spoon. “Here. There’s cornbread too, but it’s all dry and stale, and I think it’s left over from yesterday.”

“Why waste good food on prisoners when buying yesterday’s leavings from the restaurant across the street is so much cheaper?” Ezra asked acidly. Privately, Nathan thought his assessment of their meal was likely spot on. The cornbread was indeed dry, and the beans, when he dug into them, were cold.

Ezra handed his beans to JD, with an ostentatious shudder of disgust. “Feel free to help yourself to my share. The mere thought of eating this substance is enough to make my stomach revolt.”

JD pounced on the food eagerly, but Nathan intervened before he could polish off Ezra’s cornbread as well. “You know damn well Ezra don’t eat anything when he gets to playing cards. He’s gonna finish what’s left of his breakfast whether he likes it or not.”

Ezra obediently ate, glaring at Nathan the whole time. When Harnett collected their spoons and empty cups, he handed his back over accompanied by a demand for fresh bandages, and then, upon receiving them, set about changing the dressing on Nathan’s leg.

It was not a pleasant experience, and Nathan suspected Ezra didn’t enjoy his part of the thing much either, going by the pale, faintly greenish look he had on his face by the end of it. He made a decent job of it, though. Better than JD, though Nathan would never tell the kid that; Ezra was used to doing careful, finicky things with his hands, after all, and JD wasn’t.

Still, it hurt like all get out, especially when Ezra splashed the last of the contents of his flask onto the injury. After the gambler had finished, Nathan lay with his eyes closed for a long moment, waiting for the cot to stop swaying beneath him and the hollow sound in his ears to go away.

“Is he okay?” JD’s voice, concerned and a little scared.

“I’m not sure.” Ezra’s voice, cool and emotionless. “He’s not bleeding too badly, but I have my misgivings about that bullet in him. I don’t think he has a fever, but it’s too hot in this damnable cell to be certain.”

Hot? Nathan had thought it was kind of cold, the early morning chill lingering on oddly. He was about to disagree with Ezra, and to protest that there was no need to speak about him as if he weren’t there—he’d never before realized how annoying it was when people did that, and determined to avoid doing that sort of thing in his clinic from now on—but JD was talking again before he could.

“What if his leg goes bad? I mean, we don’t have any medicine, or, or anything, and if it gets infected we won’t be able to do anything at all.” The last bit came out in a rush, more forceful than the rest.

“We must sincerely hope it does not, then.” A sigh. “Gangrene takes several days to develop, JD, and you can smell it starting to form. If worst comes to worst, I’ll know before it gets too serious, and can explain in detail to our friends on the other side of the bars exactly how much they don’t want to witness the edifying but highly unpleasant spectacle of their prisoner dying of gangrene. Trust me, they’ll get a doctor in here then.”

“What does gangrene smell like?’

“You don’t want to know.”

“Yeah, but if Nathan gets it, I might have to.”

Nathan had been trying not to think about gangrene—the sickly, rotting smell, the dark color of dead flesh, the speed with which it spread to leave a man dead or maimed—ever since he’d first woken up in the jail cell and heard that his leg was going to go largely untended. He opened his eyes and pushed himself up onto his elbows. “Could y’all two talk about something else?”

“Gladly,” Ezra said. There was silence for a moment, and then he shrugged. “I’d offer to engage the two of you in a game of chance, but the deputy over there is playing solitaire with my deck.”

“They stole my hat, too,” JD offered, as if Ezra might take comfort in knowing that he was not the only one whose things had gone missing. “And Nathan’s medical bag.”

“I know.” Ezra sighed. “It was most inconsiderate of them to take that medical bag. I could have used one of the probes to pick the lock. In the future, remind me to keep a selection of lock picks in my vest as well as in my coat.” He leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes.

Nathan started to drift off again, comforted in some strange way by the familiar sound of Ezra complaining. Ezra had been sullen and standoffish ever since the whole mess with that money, and Nathan had begun to worry that the friendship the gambler had struck up with the rest of them might have died along with Stutz, or, worse, never been more than a façade to start with. He’d been even more prickly and less reliable than usually, lately. The fact that he had tried to break them out of jail—admittedly without much success—and was now talking with JD in just the same way he always had, went a long way towards easing those worries. Then JD, who never could leave a thing alone once he was interested in it, started back in on gangrene.

“Where you learn so much about gangrene?” he asked Ezra. “I mean, you’re not a doctor or anything.”

“It’s a long and unpleasant story,” Ezra said. Nathan was pretty sure he was going to leave it at that, but he went on, adding, "Let’s just say we could have used a man of Mr. Jackson’s talents at Sharpsburg.”

“I was at Sharpsburg.” Nathan said the words quietly, swallowing hard at the memories even the name alone dredged up. Men said it had been one of the worst battles of the entire war. Nathan couldn’t really give a judgment one way or the other. He’d seen little of the fighting, spending most of the battle behind the lines in a surgeon’s tent, but the aftermath alone had been enough to provide a lifetime’s worth of bad dreams. There had been piles of severed arms and legs nearly waist high outside the surgeons’ tents by the end of the day, and the field had been covered with so many wounded and dead that men had gone untended and died of their wounds where they fell, on earth dyed rust-red with blood. The Maryland soil had turned the color of Georgia clay.

“Oh. Well, I wish you’d been on my side.” Ezra looked away then, probably realizing how foolish the comment was.

Nathan decided to take it as the compliment it was clearly meant as, and didn’t tell Ezra that he’d rather be shot than fight for the sake of slave owners who thought they could treat other human beings like cattle. The last thing he wanted to do at the moment was start an argument. “I don’t know that it matters which side you were on then,” he said instead. It wasn't entirely true, but the truth would have set them both to snarling at each other. “Seems like both sides did the same amount of dying.”

“If I’d been smart,” Ezra said, “I’d have listened to my mother and gone to Bermuda with her to invest in blockade running. I spent four years going hungry and getting shot at, and she spent four years flirting with British ship captains and making money.” Put like that, Nathan wondered why exactly Ezra hadn’t gone with Maude. Smuggling was of a piece with just about everything else he’d heard so far about Ezra’s past, and seemed much more likely to be up the gambler’s alley than soldiering.

Of course,” Ezra went on, “she did make the mistake of accepting payment in Confederate dollars.” He grinned, gold tooth glinting briefly. “Probably the only time she ever let sentiment get in the way of making a profit.”

“I never knew you were in the war,” JD said. “How come you never said anything about it before?”

Ezra shrugged, winced, and closed his eyes again. “I prefer not to dwell upon losing.”

In point of fact, Ezra always dwelt upon losing. And harped on it. And went back over whatever game or wager he’d lost in tiresome detail, trying to figure out why he hadn’t won and how he could make sure such a thing never happened again. However, there were some things no one liked to talk about, or think about much. Nathan wasn’t all that fond of talking about the war either. Holding down a terrified sixteen-year-old while his arm or leg was sawn off was not an experience that improved in the telling.

“Oh. I thought maybe you just didn’t like talking about it.” JD shifted position, and reached up to adjust a bowler hat that wasn’t there, looking momentarily crestfallen when he recalled its absence. “Buck doesn’t like talking about the war either, except for that story about the two girls in Vicksburg.”

“You mean the identical twins with the affinity for military uniforms?”

“You know half the things in that story ain’t physically possible,” Nathan pointed out. JD looked faintly disappointed.

"They are apparently possible for Mr. Wilmington," Ezra groaned. He waved a hand in a gesture probably meant to indicate disgust. "Working girls talk to one another, Mr. Jackson. On occasion, they also talk to Inez. It's one of the drawbacks of living over the saloon."

"What kind of things did they say?" JD asked, eyes suddenly alive with curiosity.

"Trust me," Ezra said, "hearing them the first time was traumatizing enough. I'm certainly not going to repeat them."

This turned out to be untrue. After a few minutes of pressure from JD, Ezra did repeat them. Nathan, listening, decided that either Ezra was lying, or Miss Susan and Miss Betsy had been flat out making things up. Possibly a bit of both.

When he said so, Ezra gave him a flat, expressionless look. "Trust me, Mr. Jackson, Buck does not need my assistance to inflate his reputation. He accomplishes that on his own. I merely repeat what I hear."

"Didn't say you was lying," Nathan said, "just meant it ain't possible. There's no way even Buck has that much stamina, and no woman is that flexible." He shifted his leg again, wincing at the sharp stab of pain. There really was no position where it didn't hurt. "You think the deputy over there will give us more water if we ask?"

JD was on his feet and over by the cell bars in moments. Nathan wondered dully where he got the energy. "Hey," he called to Harnett. "Hey, you. Nathan needs more water."

Harnett sighed, and rolled his eyes to heaven as if asking the Lord for patience, but he did bring the water. "Never had a prisoner tell us how to run our own damn jail afore," he said, as he handed JD the water. He kept well back from the bars the entire time, making JD reach for the tin cup, and his right hand hovered near his gun until the kid sat down again. If they hadn’t been bloodied and locked up, Nathan might almost have thought the man was afraid of them. For the first time, he started to wonder just what this man they had him mixed up with had done when he robbed that payroll.

"I wouldn't have to tell him how to do things if they were doing a proper job," JD muttered to himself. He sounded thoroughly disgusted with the whole thing, a feeling Nathan could only share.

The water was cool on his dry throat, but even after the cup was empty, Nathan still felt thirsty. He hoped the Army got there soon. Surely, when the cavalry commander showed up, he'd tell Sheriff Aiken that Nathan was innocent, and they all be let out of jail, out to where there were cool sheets and clean bandages and someone who knew what he was doing to take the bullet out of Nathan's leg, because there was no way he was going to let Ezra or JD do it. Not that they'd be able to, without a knife.

The day wore slowly on. Nathan dozed through most of it, not able to summon the energy to stay awake. He thought Ezra slept, too; at least once, he woke to find the Southerner slumped against the wall, eyes closed. JD paced back and forth in the narrow confines of the cell, tried without success to get Ezra to tell him more about the war, tried once again to convince their guard that they were all lawmen—Andy, who had replaced Harnett some time while Nathan slept, threw a book at him—and finally sat down between Nathan and Ezra, watching the deputy in resentful silence. After a while, JD reached through the bars for the book Andy had thrown and started to read it.

Dinner never made an appearance, and supper was as unappetizing as breakfast; this time Nathan couldn't force himself to eat. The dull pain in his leg made him feel sick, and the chill that had plagued him earlier had been replaced by heat that made sweat break out all over him. Fever, obviously. Just as obviously, there was nothing to be done for it.

This time, when he closed his eyes, it was to find dreams waiting for him. Aiken, all in gray with the stars of a general at his collar, was insisting that black prisoners were not real soldiers and should all be “strung up like rebellious slaves.” Beside him, Andy and Harnett stood with ropes in their hands. Ezra played cards at a table behind them, the loops and whorls of gold trim on the arms of his gray uniform glittering even brighter than the stacks of double eagles piled in front of him. Pain stabbed through his leg, and then Andy and Harnett were holding him down, while the doctor in the fancy waistcoat approached him with a Liston knife in his hand, grinning evilly. Nathan tried to scream, but his voice was gone. He tried to call out to Ezra to help him, but only a whisper came from his throat, and when Ezra turned his head toward him, a red artilleryman’s sash was bound over his eyes, blinding him to Nathan’s plight. Then it was Nathan who held the Liston knife, and JD who was stretched out on a surgical table with a mangled, broken leg that stank of gangrene. “Hurry up and cut it off,” he told Nathan, the hideous mess below his knee seeming not to bother him at all. “The others are waiting their turns.” He waved a hand to the front flap of the surgical tent, where the rest of the Seven were being carried in on stretchers. Ezra’s eyes weren’t covered by a uniform sash at all, but by a bandage, dripping red with blood. Chris’s chest was a mass of shrapnel wounds, and Vin and Buck had matching saber cuts, gushing bright, arterial blood. Josiah’s arm was gone at the elbow, and a crow perched on his shoulder, pulling loose the tourniquet that bound it. “Hurry,” JD said again. “We all need to be fixed, and they’re going to hang you in the morning.”

* * *



Part One
Part Two
Part Four
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