This is the chapter the T rating is about. It's a bit bloody.

Ten, morning ~~~

I felt very awkward on the horse's back by myself as Mesa carried me away from mon ami and his partner. We had not gone very far when from behind us there came the sound of an explosion. I turned in the saddle and saw a great cloud of smoke rising up some distance back.

I hesitated, the reins in my hands. Should I return? Would I be of any help to them? And if I chose to return, would I be able to convince Mesa to bear me back? I was still not very sure of myself with the reins. It was likely that Mesa had only carried me this far because Artémus had ordered him to do so.

Only moments later, all my thoughts became moot. From down the trail out of the direction of the explosion came galloping five horses. The sudden appearance of them startled me - so much so, that I dropped the reins. One of the horses reared up at Mesa.

The next thing I knew, I was lying in the road. The other horses were gone, the dust settling from their passage, and Mesa was standing over me, making gentle noises at me and bumping me with his nose. I guessed he was encouraging me to get up again. I would have liked to. But when I tried to stand, my left leg let it be known that it was not in the mood to carry my weight, and I collapsed in the road again.

I sat there for a bit, running my hands over the rebellious leg, finding the spot that hurt the most. If I had been wearing my dress, I could have ripped up the petticoats to make a bandage, but because I was dressed as Fred Wilson, I made do instead with a bandanna Artémus had given me. It was not the best bandage ever, but it was all that I had.

I tried once more to stand up, only to find that, again, my leg did not wish to cooperate. Mesa hovered over me, blowing at me and shaking his mane, obviously concerned that I was not getting up. I sat for a moment, thinking, wishing that I, like my friend, had a walking stick to support me.

Oh, but a stick! His was fancy and had a sword hidden inside it, but no doubt almost any stick would do. This trail ran through a forest; surely I could find something suitable to support myself with so I could stand and walk. From where I sat, I made a survey of the sides of the road, wanting to be sure of my direction before I would set out to reach… Ah, oui, there was a sturdy-looking stick, not too long, not too short. I rolled to my knees and crawled over. Taking up the stick, I bashed it on the ground a few times; it was indeed as sturdy as it had looked. I rolled into a sitting position, pulled out my Bowie knife, and set about trimming the side branches away, wondering as I worked at the additional explosions I had heard while tending to my leg. What was happening to Artémus and to Jim? Were they all right? And what of le colonel and his men? Where were they?

Mesa snorted suddenly, drawing my attention. And a certain part of my questions was answered. "Regardez," said a voice I knew too well. "Look what I have found! Almost I did not recognize you. We have been worried about you, Flambeau."

Louis-le-Maigre. There he stood in the middle of the trail, a horse tethered to some bushes behind him. He rubbed his hands together, then added, "How funny you look, pretending to be someone you are not! Mais allons maintenant, Flambeau. Come along now. Le colonel has been looking for you. With Guidreau dead, the prize of becoming the new leader, he says, falls to whoever brings you to him. And that man is me." Again he rubbed his hands together. "I shall ask him, you know, to give you to me as he would have given you to Guidreau. I will be kind to you, when you have become my wife. I will not treat you as Guidreau would have. I have always been your friend, n'est-ce pas?"

I stared at him. "Are you mad?" I asked. "Do you not know what le colonel said he would do to me if M'sieur Le Grand escaped? He said he would kill me, he himself, lui-même. How then will I become your wife or any man's, when I will be dead?"

"Dead? Mais non, mais non! Le colonel has always favored you. He will not have you killed! Come on, get up on your feet. I will take you to him. You will see." He stepped toward me, one hand held out to me to help me up.

A moment later he stopped dead in his tracks, the end of my walking stick hovering between his eyes. "Not another inch, Louis-le-Maigre!" I warned him.

The look on his face was one of utter bafflement. "Mais, qu'est-ce que c'est? What is wrong? Am I not your old friend Louis? Did I not teach you to cook, eh? Why do you treat me so?"

"Anyone who takes me to le colonel takes me to my death, and is no friend of mine," I told him coldly.

"Flambeau," he said coaxingly, condescendingly. "Do not be so foolish." He caught hold of my stick and moved it away from his face.

I jerked the stick out of his grasp, gave him a solid whack in the ribs with it, then leveled it at his face again. "Back off!" I ordered.

His jaw dropped as he looked me over from top to bottom. "What is the matter with you, Flambeau? I am your friend!"

"Not if you turn me over to le colonel!"

"And when has le colonel ever been anything but a father to you, Flambeau?" Fury began now to take over his face. "It is that man, that spy! He has changed you. He has turned you against us!"

"Turned! There was nothing to turn. I have always been against you!"

"You traitor!" he hissed at me. He grabbed my stick again, this time wresting it from me and tossing it aimlessly away. And in doing so, he managed to hit Mesa with it. The horse made a sound I would not like to hear twice in my life and bolted out of my sight.

Louis now seized my wrist to yank me to my feet. I had dropped my Bowie knife on the ground at my side when I had swung the walking stick up to ward the man off. Now, as his right hand took hold of my left wrist, my right hand took up the knife again. With my protector I nicked his arm, and he sprang back from me.

"You… you cut me!" he protested.

"Oui, and I will do so again if you do not leave me alone!" I assured him.

Suddenly his own knife was in his hand. "You…!" He hissed a stream of filthy insults at me, the sort I do not repeat, and ended with a threat to cut off my nose. He brought the knife close to my face as he said this, and I, naturally enough, blocked it as le colonel had always taught me, then nicked him again.

His face went completely purple as he slashed the blade at me. Somewhere, but it sounded so far away, I heard the sound of cloth tearing as the reflexes le colonel had drilled into me all my life took over: to plunge the blade in so, hilt-deep, then rip up in drawing it back out again.

Blood. So much blood! Louis stared at me as he slowly sagged to his knees. "Flam… Flambeau…" he croaked, and then fell over.

I gaped at him, at my knife, at my hand. Red. All the world was red. All my life I had heard the words, the threat that the red-haired woman in her fury would gut a man like a fish. And now it had happened. Never had I truly understood those words till now, as Louis-le-Maigre, a man I had known all my life, lay before me gasping his life away. And it was my hand; I had done this.

The knife fell from my fingers as I spun away, rolling to the side on my knees as I was still not able to stand. My stomach lurched, and whatever had been in me spilled out all over the ground as I crouched there, retching and retching and retching, until there was nothing left inside. And still I heaved, the tears running down my face. I had killed a man!

The tears froze on my face then as the last voice I wanted to hear remarked, "So! You have taken all the training I gave you and used it against pauvre Louis-le-Maigre, have you, Flambeau?" Le colonel was directly behind me, his voice strangely amused. "Granted, Louis was always a fool and the loss of him is small. But you have been a naughty girl, Flambeau. That spy, he has turned your head, n'est-ce pas? You remember of course what I said I would do if the spy escaped, hmm? He and that friend of his laid traps for us and most of my men they have captured. But I saw that you were no longer with them and guessed they had sent you ahead. And so I took another path through the forest, and Louis with me. I know all the paths of the bayou, Flambeau. What made you think you could ever outrun me, hmm?

"My men are gone now, captured, and my right hand man is dead. And this is all because of you. You have brought ruin upon me, Flambeau. Upon me, and after all I have done for you! There is only one prize left to me now, and that will be the sight of your life blood gushing out upon the ground. But I will not shoot you in the back. I am not such a coward as that." I heard now the sound of the cocking of a gun. "Turn and face me, Flambeau. Turn and face me, and die."

I did not turn, not at first. I lifted my left arm to wipe my mouth on my sleeve, not wishing le colonel to see me with the evidence of retching on my face, and as I did so, I discovered the long gash down the length of that sleeve. There was blood too along the edges of the cut, but that did not fully register in my brain at the moment. I was thinking of other things. For me to turn to face le colonel, with the way my leg was just now, I would have to roll back the way I had just turned away from Louis. That would put me - without turning my head, I shifted my eyes to look - yes, that would put me by my knife again. I fixed the position of the knife in my head. One… I thought. Two… Three…

I spun on my knees, rolling back toward Louis, my hand landing on my knife exactly as I had planned. I gripped the point of the knife and flashed it up by my ear, ready to fling it at le colonel.

At that moment I heard the crash of the gunshot, and all the world stood still.

I was looking up at le colonel as he stood there above me, his revolver aimed at me so that I was looking right into the barrel. I felt nothing. Why did I feel nothing? Should I not feel the pain of wherever the bullet had hit me? Or was I already dead?

I did not think I was dead. The world was so clear all around me: the deep blue of the sky above, the pure white of the clouds, the thousands of shades of green of the thousands of individual leaves on the trees surrounding us. The black of le colonel's eyes as he stared at me, stared at me. The way the muzzle of his gun began to dip toward the ground before the weapon dropped from his hand, just before he himself, lui-même, dropped to the dust of the forest trail, a bright red flower suddenly blooming on his breast where his black heart was.

I did not understand. There was no smoke coming from the muzzle of his gun. There should have been smoke. Where was the smoke?

"Chipmunk!"

I turned to the sound of a voice I very much wanted to hear, and now I found the smoke. There they were on their horses, side by side, Artémus and Jim. And the smoke was coming from the muzzle of the long rifle in Jim West's hands.

Things began to blur then. I had expected there to be pain from le colonel shooting me. But he had not shot me. Yet now there was pain, like a line of fire drawn down the length of my left arm.

Artémus was there, kneeling beside me. "Chipmunk? Serafina, what's wrong?"

"Louis…" I said, being to understand. "He… he cut…"

I heard mon ami's voice calling out, "Jim! She's bleeding!" There was a sound of rending, and then cloth being wound about my arm.

"I'll take care of all this," I heard Jim say. "You get her on to that town. There's a doctor there, Dr Delacroix, and…"

All went black. The last thing I knew was that there were arms around me, strong arms cradling me. I was safe.