Bound By Honor: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot by W.J. Lundy

Author:W.J. Lundy [Lundy, W.J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Phalanx Press
Published: 2017-03-31T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

Crabtree, West Virginia

Free Virginia Territories

Gus sat watching the strangers leave the store. He snapped his fingers, calling back the men who’d been waiting in the shadows. Both were hard types and well-worn. Cousins from Indiana. They’d been with Gus since the door to door fighting in Cincinnati. He trusted them and knew them to have his back. Faces tanned and bodies calloused from living in the wild, Clyde was fat chested with a thin waist, a long scar running from his thick neck up to his cheek. Chris was gaunt, tight skinned, with bright green eyes and greasy hair. Like his cousin, he wore a pistol in a canvas shoulder holster.

The men moved to the table, and after sitting themselves, the fat one looked up at Gus. “You sure about these strangers?”

Gus hesitated, then looked across at the fat man. “We need men, and those two seem capable.”

“Yeah, but why them?” Chris asked. “They seem awful eager and cocky.”

“I might’a said the same about you a year ago,” Gus retorted. The cousins were wild cards when he took them in—two hungry and scared boys caught stealing from a supply wagon. Instead, he gave them a chance, where any other captain would have had them shot on the spot. It wasn’t that he saw ambition, talent, or any of those admirable qualities in the cousins. It was more that he saw them as a blank slate. Two youthful men that survived the fall, living off scraps and boot heels. They’d been spared the cutthroat backstabbing that Gus had went through to reach his position. He took them under his wing because he could shape them. He reached across the table and filled his empty cup from the pot. “We’re moving fast and losing men faster than we can recruit. If we want to stay on schedule, we’ll need folks to go out and do the… the dirty work.”

Clyde’s face soured. He was a hard man, but Gus knew that Clyde was still holding on to a whimsical fantasy that he was somehow doing right by the world. That he was more than a thug. “Dirty work… I get Texas, but why is this other thing even necessary? There’s plenty of country out here for us. And if word gets out, the people are going to turn on us.”

Gus chuckled to himself. It was one of the drawbacks of taking in smart men; you spent as much time debating as you did getting things done. It reminded him as much of his time being a school teacher, as it did of being the captain of a rogue army. He could be hard, but he still had to take time to listen to his people or they would turn on him. There was no such thing as blind loyalty in this world; a place where any may could turn his back and attempt to make his way on his own. Gus, having done the same thing several times since the fall, knew this better than most.

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