Disclaimer: The characters and concept of The Magnificent Seven are not mine (I'd treat 'em better) and no copyright infringement is intended; no money-making in it nor intent thereof. Story takes place about 2-3 months after the Seven agree to serve as regulators for Four Corners. Endless thanks to Jo for insightful beta reading and posting this for the author.
Warnings: This story contains harsh language and is rated PG13.
Tanner hadn't come back by next light, and no one expected otherwise, but the undercurrent around the breakfast table was the deciding factor to Chris. A sullen rain had begun in the night, and lightening stalked the distant mountains. Nobody mentioned him, but silent inquiry passed around their eyes - had he been seen, heard from, said to any of them what was going on? It was early enough that everyone was reasonably sober and had the most wits about them they'd have for the day. Chris didn't like feeling that what he didn't know was more dangerous than anyone realized. He cocked his head back with the intent to pick every brain at this table so clean he had all the pieces of the puzzle he could get without Tanner himself. Damned if he wouldn't make some sense of this before somebody got hurt from not knowing.
"When did he first start actin' odd ..." A musing rasp sawing the silence and five pair of eyes met his, needing no further explanation and as ready to have the mystery solved, maybe even relieved to be doing it together.
"Two weeks after all those folks started comin' in." J.D. said promptly, dark eyebrows winging upwards at their dubious glances. "It was, nearly to the day!"
"Ah, the certitude of youth ..." Ezra muttered, and J.D. felt their attention going like he was a puppy barking in a wolf pack.
"Dang it, it was, I remember it!"
"J.D., why don't you fetch us a pitcher of beer ..."
"Now just a darned minute here, Buck: First off, it's too danged early for beer, and second off, nobody else has the faintest idea what set 'im off, when or what or why, so how come you're not the least bit interested in my recollection? Bein' young don't impair my memory none." Insistent and getting agitated, Buck opened his mouth, but J.D. jerked to his feet with that stubborn set to him they all recognized.
Then suddenly he hesitated, realizing he had no real way to prove his point without looking like an immature idiot. After a moment of frantic thought, inspiration struck, "Alright, alright, then, you just sit right there, I'll just tell ya everything that happened that whole dang time, I got records, you know. A sheriff has to keep records, and I keep records of what happens, who passes through, and what crimes are reported and such ... I mean, suppose somebody was to be looking for somebody who passed through? Someone has to keep track, and I reckon ..."
Yammering away so they could still hear him outside as he took his saddlebags off his horse and came back, squatting down by the table and yanking things out onto the dusty wood floor with furious energy as Buck rolled his eyes helplessly and tried very hard not to laugh.
"Damned if you'll treat me like I'm a kid all the time, damned if y'will, I'm worth a lot more'n this, and you're gonna find out right now ... if I can find the damned ... Aha!"
Lofting a fairly new leather journal like a first place prize, and though they were used to his ebullient nature, as Ezra dubbed it in all charity, the edge of a man's temper to be slighted held their comments off. Even Chris seemed willing to see what he might have - he'd take help from any quarter right now.
"Okay, okay ..." J.D. nearly overset his chair backwards as he sat down, frantically ruffling pages and running his finger down closely-written lines. Josiah peered over his shoulder, impressed by the scholarly hand and warmly inclined toward all living creatures in the state of bliss that was Marie-Laure. She had kissed him last night, laid the satin warmth of her lips against his, and breathed the intoxication of herself into him. How her eyes had shone in the moonlight!
"Yeah, here!" falling silent as he scanned.
"Out loud, J.D. ..." Buck backhanded him across the back of the arm and he protested, "Cut it out, Buck, you almost made me lose my place!" "J.D., read it out loud, you might not make the same connections one of us will ..." Chris's eyes warned Buck off his teasing.
J.D. ..." Nathan's elbow caught him gently in the ribs, and he started from the pleasurable sensation of Chris defending him to find them all watching him; he nearly dropped the journal again.
"Yeah, yeah ... um ... here's the week ... Monday 7:52 a.m., Potter's store got a bushel of apples stole as she was setting out the day's stock ..." His voice cracked, and he studiously kept his head lowered to the page. Nobody laughed, but he felt Chris' impatience like cactus spines. "Report of five head hereford cattle stolen off Mr. Reginald Plum's property ten miles east of town, n' a later note that Buck retrieved them by 4:00 p.m."
"That's it?" Buck said with a vaguely appalled grin, craning around in disbelief to see the page himself, "Retrieved? Hell, J.D., I nearly got my neck broke, and got shot at, too!"
"I only put in what I know for a fact, Buck, it ain't a dime novel!"
"Well, I told ya what happened, kid, that's a fact, ain't it?"
"Maybe, maybe not, you like to embellish, Buck ..."
"Embellish? What hell's that mean?"
Their bickering was so normal Chris didn't have the heart to stop it, particularly since he suspected Buck was doing it to calm J.D.'s jitters.
"Under arrivals for that whole 3 weeks, not countin' all the normal cowhands and peddlers and itinerant traffic, of course, I got Mr. n' Mrs. Johnson's nieces and their chaperone, a bunch of banking officials and businessmen, some with families, couple three parties of surveyors, one camped outside of town, twenty-odd drifters, Mr. McHattie's party of touring politicians. Nothing much more happened past the usual bar brawls and burglary ..."
J.D. worried in their somber adult regard that nothing seemed to provide the answers they needed, thinking desperately how he might not end up losing this moment of their respect by reciting useless minutae out of a stupid diary so he wouldn't have to say what it really was he remembered so well. Golden eyes in a slant of morning sun scanned their faces anxiously, so young and vulnerable in that light to the weathered and seasoned men around the table.
"And you're sure it was then he started actin' odd, J.D.?" Soft, Chris's voice, pale eyes intent on J.D.'s face, and the younger man could only nod.
"Musta been somethin' pretty memorable to stick in your head so clear... you know, that Vin started actin' out of sorts." Expecting honesty because this was as serious a matter as any gunbattle and knowing he wasn't getting it all.
"Well ..., " Uneasy with that honest answer, but unable to do anything else with Chris's eyes boring into him.
"Vin yelled at me ..."
Buck smacked him again with a cackle of a laugh, "Shit, J.D., we all yell at you all the time!"
The boy was deeply embarrassed, but dug his heels in, determined to make it worthwhile for once. He was certain that Vin was in terrible trouble and very glad they were finally talking about it, doing something. "Not him, he'd never yelled at me before, never heard him hardly raise his voice at anyone, and he never once before minded me comin' with n' asking him stuff. Never swore at me.," He said, realizing how petulant that sounded and feeling like he was shrinking down to kid-size again, but in actuality they were all realizing what he said was true. Vin taught the kid anything he was serious about learning, and let him tag along whenever he wanted with a patience that Josiah declared bordered on saintly.
"Well, then..." Ezra mused, doing an intricate pass-through with the deck in his fine hands that left every card in exactly the position it started in, "Logic dictates a regressive look at events preceding the uncharacteristic outburst that so impressed our young Sheriff, thereby pinpointing the provocateur of Mr. Tanner's current disgruntlement."
At J.D.'s blank look, Ezra relented with a flicker of a smile, "Exactly when did he yell at you, J.D.?"
"Remember, he left for two days, n' when he came back he was acting sort of bothered ... He was headin' out before daybreak, you know he's always out early, and I was ready and all, and asked to go along ..," J.D. said, recalling uncomfortably the surprised hurt he'd felt when Vin had snapped at him with that cutting edge on his voice he'd never heard, hostility in his eyes he'd never seen.
"What, pray tell, can anyone recall that Mr. Tanner may have found so upsetting?" Ezra drawled, leaning back casually but his eyes scanning every face sharply for any give-aways.
"Maybe he knows one of them folks that came to town that week?" Buck wondered.
"Maybe one of them knows him," Ezra commented, getting a look from Chris that could've peeled paint. Near enough accusation to make the rest of them fall quiet, realizing there was something going on between Chris and Ezra they didn't know about.
Chris eyed Ezra, knowing he had made a connection from J.D.'s recitation no one else had, and his patience ran out. "Standish, I'm gonna ask you to tell me the names of them who're so interested in us," clearing his sidearm casually as he said it, and Buck slowly came upright with uneasy alarm. Josiah uncrossed his legs, but nothing more.
"Chris, that ain't ..." Buck's voice faded.
Rowels chimed softly as Larabee's long legs braced, fingers loose, that flat, utterly relaxed look Buck knew so well. Quietly he said, as if he and Ezra were alone in the room, "It's the only time I'm gonna ask." J.D.'s eyes saucered, and Ezra actually paled at the menace in the gunslinger's demeanor.
"Williamson, Vickers, or Gorgani," he said promptly, the shortest answer anyone had ever gotten out of him but not, Chris knew, wholly forthcoming. Standish had ideas which of the three it was and wasn't saying, which told Chris his new business partner was among that number.
Chris almost smiled, but it was too nasty for that. Buck remained tensed, Nathan leaned forward as if to let his distress be seen. Chris spared him a flicking glance that nonetheless seemed to restrain him. He said, "And have you figgered out for us all, in your capacity as an insider, bein' in business with these folks who got the resources n' all, which one of us they're so interested in? Why?"
All their eyes went to Ezra, then, so Chris knew he hadn't mentioned either his business dealings or his knowledge of the inquiry with the rest. The gunslinger lofted his eyebrows unapologetically at Ezra's guilty unease.
"I have not, although Josiah and I seem not to be suspect."
"Josiah?" Chris's attention shifted to the Preacher, who answered because he understood Chris's concern and not out of any fear - that much his level gaze made clear before he spoke.
"I've been keeping company with the woman who provenders Mr. Malcolm Vicker's table, Marie-Laure LeBeau - " unable to suppress the glowing smile that broke out upon his craggy face like the sun emerging at daybreak. "I didn't know anyone was looking for anyone, and the God's truth is that these eyes are glad to see nothing else in her company."
Ezra's eyebrows twitched curiously at the Preacher's choice of words, but Buck groaned out loud, incredulously horrified, "Oh my God, he's gone on some woman again! Batten down the hatches!"
"Gentlemen?"
Nothing but Chris' eyes moved, but the diffident stranger in the fancy brown houndstooth suit who'd appeared behind Nathan took a step back at the blazing force of his irritation.
"My apologies, gentlemen." Hands clasped before him nervously, "I certainly don't mean to disturb your breakfast, but my employer has asked to hire you for a trip to Davis that will set out tomorrow morning."
"We ain't hired guns n'that's a long way from our territory." Flat no.
"Of course, of course." But Orson held his ground under their steely regard, proving he had firm footing. His eyes darted around the room as if he'd suddenly found himself in a chamber of horrors. "The Honorable Judge Travis, however, seemed to find the request a prudent one and agreed to allow Colonel Vickers to offer you ten dollars per day for the added security you would provide."
"Well, gentlemen, there you are!" Ezra beamed with genuine relief at this stroke of good fortune and spread his hands expansively, "The answers to all our questions! Why, these inquiries are so simple a thing as a man checking references on a hire, perfectly logical and ... prudent, as you say sir. Ten dollars per day?"
The silence around the table was noncommittal, and Ezra made an incredulous sound, "Come now, what makes better sense? Nothing in these inquiries endangers any of us, and Mr. Tanner's mood is, after all, his affair, as Mr. Larabee has reminded me upon occasion. Does anyone here truly object to earning a month's salary in a week?"
"Ugly weather for it." Chris was unconvinced, and Orson knew a moment of fear; Mr. Vickers had made it clear what must be accomplished. The cold-eyed gunman in black went on, "One of us is out on the range, what if he ain't back by mornin'?"
Orson gave the answer the Creole woman had told him to give, chilled to wonder how she knew what the question would be. "Six will suffice, then, I'm sure. Perhaps he can catch us up on the trail? The Judge advised of outlaws and suggested we make the trip before they reach this territory, as it appears to lie along their route. Perhaps the storm will abate overnight." He smiled respectfully, smart enough to make no show of the advantage he knew he had in Judge Travis' word, and scared enough of the savage impatience he sensed from the black-clad gunslinger, too.
To do justice and judgment is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice.
Proverbs 21:3
The lights from Nettie's farmhouse attracted his eye, as Peso's memory had been attracted in the absence of any real guidance to the warm stable he knew was there. Cold and silvered with rain, trees torn and tossed as his thoughts, he couldn't focus beyond the flood of bitter memory, and he was so tired of struggling with it he felt crazy and numb at the same time. He kept coming back to himself miles from where he last remembered being without knowing how he'd come so far, and now he sat slumped, still horsed, in the pouring rain for he didn't know how long before Nettie, cracking the back door, made him decide to get down.
"Vin?" She called, peering out into the violent darkness, "Boy, get in out of the wet! What are you doin' so far out in such nasty weather?"
Not minding Peso taking a step up under the eves of the low side porch and reaching for Vin as she spoke, taking hold of his arm and pulling him into the house. He stood there, dazed in the sudden soft golden warmth and muted drum of the rain, dripping and blinking.
A deep shaky breath from him made Nettie turn from her track toward the coffee pot, then stop in surprise. She saw a great anxiety in the tight high set of his shoulders, exhaustion in the slight uncertainty of his knees, and the look of his face ... tormented and bewildered as she'd never seen him. She took a few steps back toward him and quickly asked, "Everything all right in town?"
He nodded his head, obviously all he could do, and she saw that and let him be. Nettie could be ears to listen or hands to provide comfort if a man couldn't speak of what weighed his heart, and since comfort for Nettie was feeding and fussing, she set to it.
"Come on, then, set down here at the hearth and get that wet coat and hat off, stand yer boots on the bakin' stone there."
Vin took comfort in mindlessly obeying her while she bustled about the stove, quick hands slicing fat-back and potatoes into a skillet with a critical glance back at him.
"Yer gettin' t'be skin and bones, Vin Tanner."
A smile surprised the corner of his mouth, and his eyes fell closed. She always said that, and the smell of her cooking was the first time he'd felt hungry for longer than he could remember. Surprised again, more profoundly, to feel shaky inside as well as out. He sat down and leaned forward as if to get nearer the fire, elbows resting on his widespread knees and his hands knotted together in front of him, flexing restlessly, thoughts blind darts like a stranger's battering to get out of him. Nettie kept him in the corner of her eye as she worked, chattering a quiet homey litany of the farm to sooth nerves too close to the surface. What was going on? Normally laconic and tranquil no matter what he was about, but now ... Lord, he was wound so tight he was nearly vibrating. Gentle as it was, welcome even for the regard Nettie always managed to convey with a touch, her hand on his shoulder made him start, and she clucked her tongue to see it, pressed an enamel cup of steaming coffee into his cold hands so he realized how long he'd been just staring into the fire. His glance was both apology and thanks, and she recognized the effort he was making to relax, but his shoulders crept up again, and he ended up hunched over with none of his usual loose-jointed grace. With a sigh, she settled into her treasured Hepplewhite chair on the other side of the hearth, taking an occasional glance at the pan simmering on the stove, and letting the silence grow.
Finally he said with a sidelong glance, "That roof holdin' on the stable?"
Her chuckle was wry, "Course." A shrewd turn of eyes that he was too honest to avoid, "You come all this way t'check on my stable roof? Pfff. Cows'll sure be impressed." With a twinkle that made him smile, and made her smile to see, "Come on over t'table now and take that shirt off. It's puttin' up enough steam t'curl Casey's hair."
He flushed to realize he hadn't even noticed Casey's absence, but Nettie ignored it; "Sent her t'Nichols place t'help with sick kids n' I'm glad of yer company on such a night."
Nettie's food gave him something else to think on, and he tucked into the plate of ham and potatoes flavored with onion and herbs, tomorrow's bread and plum jam. He couldn't remember what or when he'd eaten last. Nettie resisted the urge to coax his worry out, he was a man long ago no matter how young he was and used to bearing his own burdens, so it worried her to see him anxious.
"So, what you seven rascals been up to? I hear town's crawlin' with carpetbaggers n' ne'er-do-wells."
He shook his head with a dry little laugh, "Had t'get away fer a spell. Been out two or three days, weather caught me." He sipped his coffee, unable to remember if it'd been two days or three, feeling his spine tightening back up with heartsick resignation, though his voice betrayed nothing. "Judge asked us t'look out fer 'em. Dang fools carryin' strongboxes fulla gold and not bein' shy about flashin' it around, buyin' up land anywhere they even think the railroad might go."
"No accountin' for common sense, or the lack thereof."
He started to say something but didn't, uneasily contemplating the fragrant black brew in his cup, eyes grayed with trouble and on the verge of telling her everything, easing himself in her simple affection. But when he looked up into her eyes, her face calm as a summer lake, steady and enduring and true-hearted as his Ma had ever been . his throat closed up, and he had to look away. He was glad his Ma had passed without ever knowing what evil her son had done, nor the shameful price he'd paid, and the thought of Nettie knowing, the other six ... Once was a time he wouldn't have hesitated, would've done what needed doing and just moved on, disappeared. Now he had people and a place he didn't want to be driven off from, and his wanting it put it all at risk.
She saw with real surprise the hint of that shame pass in his face and sighed inwardly, reaching across the table to give his hand a reassuring pat. "You go get that crazy horse off my porch n' into my dry stable with that nice sturdy roof you're so all-fired worried about, lay yer bedroll out by the hearth." Holding up a weathered hand as he began to demure, "Won't hear of nothin' else, boy, you ain't ridin' on in this storm, don't make me take you t'task over it. You're so tired you're fadin' before my very eyes, Lord my witness."
For a long moment he only looked at her, an indecisive longing plain in his eyes, round and boyish in the angular secretive young face. Nettie could only look back, unjudging and willing to hear whatever, whenever, or respect his silence. Finally he did as he was told, and when he came back into the empty room and his bedroll with a pillow and an extra quilt laid out on the hearth, he stripped down to the skin so his long johns could dry with no more embarrassment than he would in his Ma's kitchen. He lay down before the fire and sought a sleep that came without rest.
Nettie lay in her bed thinking, as she so often did these days with the frost of years aching in her bones and sleep too wasteful of the time left. Wondering tonight about the young bounty hunter resting on her hearth, orphaned and brought up so hard on the cruelties of the world. Nettie was a realist and knew the fate of unprotected children. Dwelt among Indians, too, and it had always been telling to her that he'd found his balance there, sensing how dangerous a man he had to be without it altering her affection for him, the deep, true heart he had. Wandering the badlands and wild frontiers aimless and impermanent as the wind, but so clear the noble voice in him that he heard and followed so diligently. She'd often wondered what sort of woman his Ma must have been to put so much heart and honor into a boy only five years old that it had lasted him all his life. A remarkable woman, certainly, and one she would have liked very much to know.
That long-dead mother would be proud of the man her boy was coming to be, but Nettie knew him for lonely no matter how at peace with it he was, brave with the sad invulnerability of something already broken beyond repair. She remembered a certain melancholy she'd seen in him not long ago when the seven had come to work on that stable and the weather had been especially fine, surprised to see that expression on a face so young. That poignant sorrow . times when the joy of life was sweetest was when she missed her John the most, wanting to share it with him and aching after him a moment amid that joy. Oh, she'd seen that shade before in men's eyes - that Larabee fellow for one, surely only Vin's steadfast presence kept him from exploding or abandoning them or both. But Vin was too young for it, and she had a mother's hopes for the boy - for he still was so young no matter how ancient he sometimes seemed. A woman he could let into his scarred and secretive soul, children to coax out his rare sweet smiles. He was an important number among the seven who were finding redemption in defense of this dusty frontier town, though she thought they little knew it.
Her head lifted at a thump from the main room, then a scraping sound, but she didn't move until she heard a ragged moan. Quietly she rose, padded barefoot across the hooked rug, and cracked the door. He was curled up tight as a harness knot, and his face, when she crouched beside him in the red-embered light, was a torment. He trembled, held himself close and hard against whatever he was reliving, and she couldn't help the mother's instinct to touch him, alarmed when he quieted but did not, as she fully expected, awake.
Normally a body couldn't move for ten feet around him that he didn't wake at, and that he was this exhausted was worrisome indeed. When she made to rise, though, her old joints crackled, and his hand jerked in a quick snatch to the mare's leg on the planked floor by his head. Because she feared the nightmare still gripped him, she set her bare foot on the deadly gun and quickly spoke his name softly so he would realize where he was. A taut hard-breathed moment he stared at her before his eyes fully focused, too damned long for a man's survival in the life he led, the work he did. That far had he driven himself beyond endurance, and Nettie's temper went. Ignoring the protests of her aging body, she squatted down again and let her snapping eyes catch him like she had him by the scruff. "Vin Tanner, you got a weight needs sharin', and I aim t'see it done right now."
He started to shake his head, but she only shook her finger at his nose, and her chin dimpled as it did when she set her teeth; "Right NOW." Immovable as a mountain, and there was nothing he could refuse her. "I'm brewin' a pot n' fetchin' the whiskey, and then we're gettin' to it, you n' me. Yer path led you to this door for a reason, n' I don't aim t'fail you, God my Witness!"
He closed his eyes as she rose and went about it in the dark cabin, needing no more than the firelight. Sat up and laid his head into the shadow of his forearms across his knees to hide how unable he felt to express this to her - how unwilling to sacrifice the friendship that meant more to him than he could put to words.
Nettie glimpsed the fear in his eyes and for a moment did not understand it, but when she did, she came to him directly and touched the crown of his bowed head.
"Vin, ain't nothin' would turn me from you. I know you like you was my own ..." When he shook his head, she snapped her fingers with a surprising sting on his skull, "Oh, maybe not what paths you walked, but the man it took to walk them."
His upward glance was grim with a disbelief that made her heart desolate - what could have so undermined his faith in himself? Iron-gray eyebrows rose expectantly, her jaw tucked back.
"Nettie, I done things in my time I'm not proud of ..." So soft she could hardly hear him, his averted eyes ancient with it.
"So has every man walked under the sun," she replied gently. "Hard bein' upright, but men not bein' perfect is God's way, lessons got t'be learnt somehow, souls forged."
But her confidence didn't ease him. He scrubbed his hands across his face with a frustrated growl, trying to figure a track through this, a way to go lightly enough to come out of this bloody thicket with Nettie still his friend.
She went to the pot on the stove to give him the time he needed. Obviously this was not a small matter, nor was he a man comfortable with confidences. Resolutely, she got the whiskey and laid a tray on the kitchen table.
"Say a man thought he was doin' right ." His voice was so soft she hardly heard him, and she listened without looking at him as she got on with what she was doing. "Thought his cause was just ..." He fell quiet, and she didn't urge him, deeply uneasy to feel how careful he was being. She brought the bottle back and set it on her little sewing table, poured a generous amount into his coffee and a ladylike finger in hers, watching him drink half like he needed it. Her worried frown deepened as he bent his head and dug his thumb and forefinger into his eyes, frustration and reluctance brittle as glass around him.
He couldn't look at her, and his voice was a soft pale rasp; "It was war n' there were orders, but he didn't ask. He never asked," tucking the blanket around his narrow hips, suddenly aware he was naked under it. Scars Nettie had seen before and some she hadn't marred the hard houndish weave of his body, bullets and knives, the ragged tear of arrows. A history and a testament. She waited, agelessly patient.
"He went where he was told and killed where he was set like they were meat for the table." The words like poison in his mouth, "And he didn't have no conscience over it, he never asked ..." He checked himself, refused to lie. "Didn't care." He looked up at her with those deaths glittering in his eyes, merciless as a wolf. It mystified him that she never looked away, even seeing that man that still lived inside him. Indeed, her proud-boned face never lost affection, even somber as it became. She said nothing, though she leaned forward and laid her cool hand reassuringly across his knotted fists. In taut silence, he looked down at that hand, and it was a hard minute to keep himself in, breathing high and tight in his chest so she held still for his pride's sake. She had to listen close to hear him when next he spoke, and sensed he needed her so near. "I thought I was doin' honorable deeds of war. I was eighteen and been on my own for eleven years, run off from the orph'nage after two n' ran the streets of Kansas City for a couple before I lit out for the mountains. Buffalo huntin' with the Kiowa, then ran with the Comanche awhile. Livin' like them ... thinkin' like them ..." Wide eyes rose to her face thinking she wouldn't understand and needing her to almost desperately, that one white person should understand so he would know he wasn't crazy. What life and death and that wild logic of nature was to a man outside his own society all his life, what whites never understood despite being more savage than any Indian he'd ever known. That he found the brutal directness of the Comanche the most honesty he'd ever known.
Tranquil eyes blue as a summer sky answered him otherwise, and he realized in that one rich look that Nettie's time on the frontier was longer than his. A woman who had killed, on her word, critters four-legged and two, and who had co-existed with Kiowa and Comanche and a dozen other tribes when this land was a true wilderness without another white face for a thousand miles.
He caught her fingertips between his knuckles with true grateful affection, and she wondered with a sorrowful twinge how long it had been since he'd touched anyone so honestly.
"My Ma was a slave to the indenture, and she never lived past it, can't abide slavery for her sake. The war between the states came and the Comanche elders wanted me to go out from among them so they wouldn't be drawn into the white man's conflict," a rejection that had hurt him profoundly.
"Nettie, it felt like I was supposed to ... it felt like I was doin' honor to her memory standin' for what was right. I was a Tanner, and that name was to be stood for. I had nothin' else." So he had stood for her, because alone, he'd no longer had heart for anything but dying of emptiness and disillusionment.
A long shaky sigh, an almost inaudible moan. He opened his mouth, stopped, and finally said in a flat monotone, "I thought I was doin' her honor, n' instead I was sometimes only riddin' one evil man of other evil men for no reason but profit n' power. Sharpshootin' 'is rivals, men who'd cheated him, wranglin' around t'power . none of it had nothin' t'do with the war. I was blind and stupid and didn't feel nothin' for 'em that died from my hand. I knowed they were low-down n' that was enough. Turns out I was even lower."
Nettie said nothing, stunned. Oblique or not, she did not misunderstand him, knowing how mortal he was with that long rifle. To excuse him was to deny the significance of these acts, and though those he had killed might have been sinners, taking their lives was a sin as unexpectedly heavy as ever sin could be, by a merciful God. Of course, her heart wanted to take him in her arms and tell him men were all fools in war, that those dead men had deserved it for the true crime of using so brutal and costly a thing as that war for their own gain. Lord knew how many noble souls had perished. But comfort was not what he needed of her. She felt the ghost of his Ma looking over her shoulder, waiting on what she could do, and finally she shook her head, sympathy strong for his quiet, self-condemning anguish.
"Vin Tanner, a man such as you believe yourself to be wouldn't feel the sorrow for it you do." Low and fervent, "There's no wickedness in you, only hurt n' ignorance n' a boy's foolish conviction."
He didn't look up, didn't speak, the weight too old to be easily relieved.
"A person's both their birthin' and their livin', Vin, we're made of what happens to us as well as the choices we make - most of all, how we reckon with the consequences of both. He's an understandin' God, I'll witness, and He don't never mistake a man's heart. What bad choices you might've made came of bein' orphaned, bein' too young and sufferin' more than a child was ever meant to, hard-used and lost. Bein' amongst savages in yer comin' t'manhood, God's mercy, settin' sparks t'risin' sap, that was. You repented that sin in yer heart, Vin. You may have an Indian's pragmatic way through the world, but you got a Christian soul, n' don't have evil in you. Hell, you don't even understand it in others, though I know you've been hurt by it."
To his dismay, his eyes unexpectedly filled, and though he ducked his head down, she saw them overrun his face and was moved to slip one arm around his rangy shoulders, pressing her forehead to his. He went against her with pitiful willingness and a wordless gasp, and she let him collect himself before she said softly, "Son, why's this troublin' you so hard after all these years?"
For a long time he couldn't answer. Finally, he flicked his fingertips across both eyes, and took a deep breath, set her back to arms length with a grave expression.
"Nettie, ifn' I tell you, you can't say nothin' of it, can't do nothin', I gotta have yer word on it."
"So y'do, then." Easily but honestly given, and she would be true to it. Still, he held her with eyes and hands both, the moment's weakness gone.
"These are dangerous men, Nettie, smart, got money to get anywhere, anyone. I'm bein' plain with you - do you know what it would do to me should you come to harm on my account?"
More emotion than he'd ever shown her outright, his eyes blazed and she felt tears of her own start for how dear he held her, but she kept them back; he didn't need her any way but strong right now.
"I understand, Vin, I do, and you don't have to say anything more about it if you don't want to. It don't matter t'my opinion of you."
"But it does matter!" He let her go as his hands became too rough, passionately distressed "He's here, I thought he was dead, but he's here ..." As if her stalwart friendship gave them permission, the terrible agitated memories burst up like rotted ghosts out of a grave. "I shot him myself like a rabid dog had t'be put down, I had t'kill him for what he done, the dishonor he'd done me, all those men dead from my hand cryin' out for justice ... damn me, Nettie! Everything I thought was right was dead wrong from the start, and everything I did to make it right just made it more wrong. Now he's here, and he knows I am, too, both of us alive and neither thought t'be. I was tryin' not t'make the same mistake, tryin' t'keep my distance n'keep the boys out of it ... but I know what I have to do! I just don't know how without losin' everythin' . dammit, God dammit."
Nettie patted his hand with a hiss of sympathy through her teeth; "Don't blaspheme, boy. Unless I miss my guess, you're gonna be needin' Him," thinking herself now. She'd never heard him say so much at once and never to the bone like this. She sat back and rocked, thinking. "Ain't there no way you could bring him t'justice legal?"
"It's his word against mine, and I got a price on me in Texas ..."
He hadn't meant to say that, but to his wonderment, it was obvious she knew already. Had known all this time and not scorned him; he rubbed the sudden sharp ache in his chest.
"Maybe someone else could do somethin', then."
Like a hawk, his look came to her, and his hands as fast in an unforgiving grasp before she could move, "not you, Nettie, you give me your word, and I'm holdin' y'to it."
His fingers were painful around hers, and she shook their hands so he'd let loose. "Alright, alright, boy, don't get all lathered. I'm just tryin' to help y'think is all."
He barked an edgy laugh, "If you only knew how much I need that kinda help, Nettie. I ain't never been able to figure a way outta folks' plottin' but t'run, makes my head spin ... "
Neither of them spoke for a good long time. Vin was so exhausted, and so grateful to have a wiser heart than his considering the problem that he let himself go numb. He poured more whiskey into the cooling dregs of his coffee and drank it for the false warmth as much as the buzzing distance. When Nettie had examined the soundness of her instincts, and sent up a prayer of hopeful thanks to God, she leaned toward Vin into the firelight so he would look at her.
"Vin, you're a simple man, and there ain't no shame in that, but there are things here you can't even see the edges of. A rich man, like you say, powerful. Nothin' t'do but admit it's too much for you alone, and I have faith you've been brought to this reckoning now for a purpose. Ain't no accidents in God's plan." His eyes didn't dare hope beyond the warmth of her smile.
"Boy ..." Her face so gentle in the golden glow, eyes so deep-seeing, "God brought you down from the mountains you'd been hiding in for too long to this town that needed you, and He gave you men to stand at your shoulder, and maybe help set right some wrongs in this world - maybe set right your own. He gives us such chances, such choices." She sat back and rocked, deeply comforted by the beauty of His work, nodding with a quiet joy. "Brought now for a reason, your enemy delivered to you, and friends to stand with you. Now you got to have faith in the blessing those six men are intended to be, as you are yourself to them and all of you to this territory."
He said quietly, with respectful doubt, "Nettie, faith in the Lord comes easy t'me, but in other folks ..." Shadows of the wounds such faith had brought him silenced him, and she shook her head.
"Men can be so stubborn in their penance. Ain't but one place for a man to put his faith, Vin Tanner, and it sure ain't another man. Hmpf . one day yer Josiah's gonna figger that out, too, n' save himself a whole lot of grief. " He didn't ask what she meant - she had insights to each of them that sometimes came out in such odd declarations.
"T'ain't faith in them six you need, fool, it's faith that you deserve such friends as are given into your hour of need, faith in He that give 'em t'you. Tell me without thinking on it, should any of them come to you, even so little as you know them now, and need your help to right such as this, would you?"
He would, and she knew it with a sage nod.
"You figger them six are so much more deservin'? Or less able t'judge as mercifully as you?"
He dropped his head, half afraid to show the merciless intention that burned so urgently in him.
"They will help you, Vin. I've seen their hearts as well as yours, God bless 'em for bein' as lively a pack of scoundrels as I've ever seen, n' every one a heart noble n' true, in their ways. Use the resources God gave you."
So he let her see death in his eyes, showed her all he knew for sure he had to do; "Bible says 'Thou shalt not kill', Nettie. I been tryin' a lot of years not t'let myself call that shot again."
She was unflinching, not surprised he knew his Bible, but correcting him with firm authority; "Good Book says Thou shalt not murder. Boy, you be doin' a mite more studyin' t'find the truth in the Word. Lord uses us as He will, n' sometimes it's bloody deeds. Joshua killed many in His name, David did, women and children and oxen and ass to the last thing that breatheth. God has His warriors, and that's a soul needs deliverin' up t'the Father before he takes more innocent lives. Send them forthwith to God for judgment, those proven to have done murder."
"Even by one who's done murders himself, Nettie?" guilt and shame indelible on him, a fear of her answer in the drawing in of his wide-boned shoulders.
"Vin Tanner, you were a weapon in his hand, you didn't know, and when you did, you tried t'make it right, n' you repented as sincerely as ever a Godly man could. Yer repentin' still, n' the Lord only asks for once. You got a choice t'make here, now, n' I reckon you gotta make it, n' then live with it. Have faith yer instincts are true. Leave it to God to sort out on your passin'. He'll judge them men you killed n' your heart when you done it. Do what yer heart tells you needs doin' now - I'll warrant it ain't led you wrong in many a year."
He thought for a long time, examined the utter conviction in her face, and found no point in fighting anymore what he knew had to be done, one way or another. Too tired of it, too crazy from it, it would kill him, and those he'd come to care about, if he didn't kill it first. He knew for sure he had a better chance with Chris and the others than he did alone. "Have faith, Vin - but be sure whose vengeance you're really doin'." That had already proven to be hardest of all, and was the heart of the doubt that had held him helpless thus far.
"Amen." He finally sighed, then grasped her hands and dropped his head to kiss her gnarled knuckles, laying his whisker-rough cheek on them for the barest moment of unabashed love.
"I don't know if I'm that good a man, Nettie."
She wasn't sure what he meant, sensing there were things he was keeping private about this old enemy, but of his tension eased and his shoulders had squared as of under the yoke of a task finally undertaken. It had to be enough.
He was gone when Nettie woke, the fire thoughtfully banked, and everything restored to order, as she prayed he was himself.
He rode, studying hard all the way, studying for their lives and his own, yet by the time he crested the ridge over Four Corners, the only thing of plan he'd decided was that he had to have faith in Nettie, and tell the others, trusting her eye to folks' hearts as he couldn't his own. That she believed they wouldn't judge him harshly was a revelation made ironic in the fact that probably only they, with their own demons and sins, could understand. God had His reasons . his Ma had always said that, too, with the same sort of mysterious certitude Nettie had. Faith. He was trying hard to hold on to it, because he knew his personal grievance drew the fine line between service and sin. It was a mighty struggle to keep that demon silent.
He slipped into town as was his habit, unnoticed through the prairie-side paddock into the stable, dismounted, and stopped. All six horses and tack were gone. With faint alarm, he left Peso saddled and went outside into the dusk, fox-eyed and nervous. Noticed some of the fancy rigs were gone, too, but when he moved into the street, he immediately recognized one of Vickers' retinue in front of the saloon, and another in front of the jail like he owned it.
Spooked, he retreated to the alleys and back out of town until nightfall, then made his way to Mary Travis' back door. A light burned in the parlor and wavered through the curtained kitchen in answer to his quiet knock.
"Who is it?" Mary's voice firm and level, probably holding the Colt Chris had given her.
"Mrs. Travis, it's Vin Tanner, Ma'am, I'm sorry to be callin' so late, I'm just back t'town ..."
After a moment the bolt was thrown, the door opened, and she stepped back with a confused smile to allow him in, lamp in one hand and the pistol on the table.
"Sorta worried me none of th'boys are in town."
She was a little flustered to be standing in her darkened kitchen in her nightgown with him, but not distressed in any real way, so he relaxed. "The judge asked them to escort one of the parties to Eagle Bend, and then Davis." His sandy eyebrows flexed together.
"All of them with one party?"
"I understand Mr. Vickers asked for the loan of them as a favor. He was quite insistent based on a report of outlaws venturing near that area, and I guess a couple of the Judge's friends exerted a little pressure in his cause." Bewildered by the horrified expression on his face, she went on, "Mr. Larabee told them you were out on the range, but he wouldn't wait. He left a few of his own men to watch the town until they come back. Mr. Tanner, are you alright?"
Wondering at how pale and sharp his face became, eyes urgent as she'd never seen. Mary liked Vin Tanner, mannerly and shy and very capable, he was a solid, if enigmatic, presence among the seven, and his uncommon anxiety was alarming her as much as the haggard appearance his moving into the light revealed.
"When?"
"Two days ago, they should be in Davis tonight or tomorrow morning, if the weather slowed them down, but the worst of it has pretty much stayed in the mountains. Looks like you know that better than I do. What is wrong, Mr. Tanner?"
But Vin didn't answer. Two days was all it had taken for Vickers to have begun machinating ruin, and not just his. If he took the boys out of town, it was because he wanted them out of familiar territory and away from their allies, an old tactic that meant they, too, were in Vickers' sights.
The Colonel couldn't be sure Vin hadn't told them everything, and he was too careful not to know they'd be stubborn and smart if something happened to him. Impediments, he'd call them. Collateral losses.
"Thanks, Mrs. Travis, I'm sorry for disturbin' you so late," Trying not to frighten her needlessly, but deeply frightened himself, "I'll be goin' now and ... Ma'am, I know you don't know me that good, n' got no reason in particular to trust me or do me any favors, but I'd sure be grateful if you wouldn't tell anybody you seen me."
The sweetest smile bloomed on her face, prettiest natural woman he'd ever in his life seen, and that smile warmly proclaiming herself his ally. It hurt to see such loyalty, and he knew it confused her.
"Mr. Tanner, I know you well enough to have entrusted you with my life on at least one occasion. The favor is a small one and I'm glad to do it for you."
To his surprise, she reached out for his arm and pulled him toward the table, setting the lantern down there. "Now you're going to have a cup or two of strong coffee for the ride I know you're going to start tonight, and a minute or two for me to pack you up some food. Take my mare as a spare mount ."
He wanted to refuse, wanted to light out like his ass was on fire, but Mrs. Travis could be an intractable woman, and he would need what she offered if he wanted to go through the night without falling off his horse. She asked no questions, but her speculative glances said she'd be investigating come morning. He didn't want to think what her opinion would be of him when she learned the truth, so he just refused to. It would take him 'til tomorrow night to catch them, and he'd need another horse, so while she packed a burlap bag, he went to the cold task of laying out the hunt in his mind as best he could, knowing how it had to end, but not how he would get there.
It all came back on that hard cold ride, and since he was helpless to stop it, he just let it flood.
Deep in Confederate territory, near what had been home when his Ma had been living, and far behind the battlelines, hunting by the Colonel's list. He'd heard of his own legend with blank disinterest; once his eye set on you, it was rumored, whether in the field of war or safety of plantations and businesses far into civilian territory, you were as good as dead. Fear in his enemies was a thing he encouraged, and his enemies were not only officers or artillerymen, but the wicked wealth of the south who funded the Confederacy, Vickers said. In his own mind, they were cowards hiding from the stink and blood of their own defense and profiting by the mortal prices paid by others. Remove them, the Colonel said, and the Confederacy would fall. Kill them, and slavery would end, and it was all the honor he knew how to do for her, who had been a slave herself and still the freest spirit he'd ever known.
More than half crazy, in one deep mortal part of himself he'd known it without being able to change it, disconnected from the world everyone else lived in that his life had convinced him he did not want anyway. Like a shadow through the Old South he went, picking off targets with merciless precision, purely a hunter of men, and he did it well, and he saw no pattern because he moved on as soon as the kill was done. By the time he did see, it was far too late.
One sultry night, he'd lain on a gabled rooftop of a stable in the moss-draped swamps of Louisiana, gauging a shot that would kill the fourteenth on a list of twenty through the open breezeway. His target sat, oblivious, sipping something tall and making his way through a sheaf of papers on the desk beside him. Quiet but urgent voices came unexpectedly from the dusty richness of stalls right below him, a woman's, angry and frustrated, a man's answering, deeply fearful.
"Ten men in the last two weeks, Delbert!" The woman hissed, "Assassinations and murder! It does not matter that they were corrupt and dastardly at their hearts, what matters is that these men aren't casualties of war! They die, and someone buys up their mortgages at the banks, takes up their businesses, my God, is no one seeing this? You men, you have eyes only for the honor and nobility of your war for independence. You never see the dirty war being plotted and carried out in secret to own the south when all this is over! Plantations and shipyards, mills and rail stock, all taken over so fast no one knows it 'til it's done! There've been widows turned out or even dead themselves!"
Vin cocked his head curiously at the passion boiling in the woman's voice.
"Someone is building an empire on the blood and bones of these men of the south, Delbert. Someone is moving apart from this damned war, looking past it ... it isn't enough we're going down to bloody defeat? Must these damned yankee criminals have everything?!"
He never knew why, he wasn't really listening, focused on the target, but he couldn't fire until they left and something ... made him bring her words to focus from out of the hissing chirp of her voice. It was odd enough to feel interest in anything at all, and his numbed mind seemed to rush at the sensation, throwing up in one unexpected moment all the questions unasked and answers unwanted.
Building an empire. Political assassinations. Deep in his vitals a terrible coldness took root, a tremble of awful portents that he bluntly refused to acknowledge without more information. He brought the rifle down, slowly dropped and locked the tang. Glanced almost indifferently across the way at the lucky man who sold rifles that blew up in the hands of soldiers on both sides, but who would not die for it today.
It was a moment he could point to still. There, that's the moment everything went to ruin.
Peso went through the darkness without stumbling, a horse that liked to run under the moon, and his rider let him go at his own pace without interference but direction.
That was the first time in the entire conflict Vin had come up out of the safe emptiness and moved to his own designs.
Nobody had paid him much attention, even rough-dressed as he was, there were enough wolves around the lions forging the machine of war to make buckskins and back-slung rifles common. Philadelphia was the biggest city he'd ever seen, and his hackles wouldn't lay, surreal choking miles of it and the whole bustling with rail and road traffic, guns and supplies and horses and replacement regiments moving through nearly around the clock, and a sense of inevitable victory that had oppressed him. Like a ragged veteran, he had moved through the pale new ranks of soldiers, younger himself than many of them. Too few of those young men eager to reap their share of glory before the south went down to defeat noticed, past his savage costume and weaponry, the terrible vacancy of his ancient eyes. Easy enough for him to be a shadow after a lifetime of being prey and predator both. Men's eyes could be bent around something that wished to be unnoticed, made to pass over what did not want to be seen. He went unremarked into the lobby of the fine hotel despite being a stranger there simply by looking as though he were expected. No one thought to question him. These days, gunslingers and ne'er do-wells were common. He'd learned in the last two days, to his deep unease, that the war to end slavery disguised many more potent struggles, both private and political. Smuggling, murder, intrigue and sabotage, he'd heard things, come to understand things, that iced the marrow of his bones. Things he was mortally afraid to find himself in the middle of.
Some far-sighted men understood how this war would end, no matter how long it might take or how much ruin it might cause. Some were positioning themselves for that day even to the murder of their own nefarious partners and rivals, and if what he suspected was borne out, the Colonel was among the more prominent of that bloodless cabal. If it was true ... he refused to think on that until he had to. He made his way up the broad curving stair at the edges of the flow of folks, walking on carpets so thick they made his feet uncertain under him. Enough candles in ornate bronze sconces to light a cabin for a month. No one questioned him nor would really remember seeing him, and he made the roof-stairs unremarked.
There he bode his time, pretending to look for a room number until the opportunity presented itself to slip out the window and climb onto the roof, where he took a quick circuit for the lay of the alleys and surrounding buildings. It always amazed him how careless folk were about being overheard above ground floors, like only the birds could witness upstairs. Then he tucked up in a deep-shadowed corner between an out-thrusting wall and one of the gabled windows outside the sitting room of the Colonel's suite. Became invisible in stillness and the tattered outline of buckskins and tendriled hair among the ivy, back pressed close to the bricks for the meager warmth of the day releasing into twilight. Hadn't been warm since that stable roof, and the terrible premonition remained, calm as he kept himself, of riding full out toward a cliff. Could be shot for doing what he was doing, even if his suspicions were wrong, and he'd been wrong before from being unable to trust a living soul. Only way around it was know for himself, his own eyes, his own ears. Still as a gargoyle and unnoticed in that stillness, he waited through the early evening, ears keen to the cadences of the street below, the alleys around, the room behind him as the maids moved about laying the evening's fire. He glimpsed a tray bearing a fine crystal decanter and big-bellied glasses being set on the table centering a grouping of leather wing-backed armchairs. His thighs ached from the position he was in, but he never thought to move. He noted as windows came alight in the buildings around him, what passed in the street below, located folk by their sounds and their doings and their smells.
Lost himself in the listening and watching, and put his nerves away in that business.
Immersed in these rhythms and patterns, in the smells and sounds and visual cues, he felt the change before he heard their voices. For the first time in two hours, he moved, just enough for a clear sight at the table. His chest ached, but he ignored it. The Colonel could be here for any number of reasons, could be perfectly innocent, utterly committed to the noblest of causes. He heard the Colonel's voice, and everything came to focus, dark enough now that he could move right to the corner of window and wall for clear sight into the room, narrow enough to stay behind the backdrawn drape. Keen ears heard the murmured smarminess of the departing valet and the chime of the decanter neck on the rim of one of the glasses. Cigar smoke, a sweet blend Vickers favored ... the door opening, several men entering, settling in with masculine conversation that gradually became the self-satisfied businesses of war, political brinksmanship, and a treasonous and criminal treachery appallingly deep and wide.
The smile on the Colonel's face, a feral gleam of teeth around a fine cigar, fragrant liquor warming in his palm .the true face of the man and one he'd never bothered to see. In that instant, all those deaths came crashing down on the brittle heart of him and broke it into a thousand irretrievable pieces. No nobility in the hunt, no salvation in extinguishing men who were suddenly not enemies except to Colonel Malcolm Vickers. He'd been a hired gun, and they changed from being enemies to being victims in that knowledge, whatever their sins. Victims as much his as the Colonel's - God! Might some, might even one, have been innocent? He had not questioned, not cared. Been so deep in lifelong grief, in numb striving for forgetfulness ... he started to shake and couldn't stop it, almost made a sound as his breath choked in his chest on a swell of savagely furious horror. God, my God, what have I done? Bile burned the back of his throat, dizzy and nauseous, wanting to vomit or faint or somehow just die right now rather than know this. And of all the wicked men he'd killed, Vickers was the worst.
He hardly needed to hear the rest of the conversation within to confirm his realizations, but he forced himself to listen, took the words like knife-strikes into a heart no longer numb but agonizingly aware. The truth was a punishment that could never be enough. Too overwhelmed by guilt to shoot them all where they sat, to vomit up the cold bitterness that exploded into his chest and pumped out into every vein. It took all the will he had not to put the barrel of his colt into his mouth and perish where he was of the shame, but he did not deserve to escape that easily. All he'd thought honored her and the Tanner name, all he'd thought would make her proud, nothing but a war between well-heeled and influential outlaws. Surely, she could feel the betrayal from heaven.
Davis was more a city than most this far west, set in a broad valley between low piney mountains on one side and plateaued mesas on the other, veined with gorges and canyons carved by the snowmelts from the higher elevations beyond. It was a prosperous railhead, boasting seven hotels and ten saloons of statures that varied by proximity to the town square and the rail station. There, the storefronts enjoyed glass-paned windows with gilt lettering and streetlamps, roads wide enough for two-way cartage traffic, and neat raised boardwalks with turned and spindled railings. Vickers' men congregated in the glittering gaming hall next to the largest of the three elegant town square hotels, and though J.D. had twisted his head longingly after Josiah and Ezra inside as they passed it, he was content to follow the rest into a more modest establishment several streets away where neither the paint nor the women were quite so fresh, but the atmosphere more comfortable. Buck sprawled out, doing a swivel to see all the women with a grin that said whoever got him first was the smart one, and they passed a companionable evening playing cards and drinking whiskey and beer, Buck with a variety of women on his lap most of the time. J.D. always wondered why women who knew Buck wasn't paying still ended up with him half the time.
Chris saw Vin first, and by the way he kept to the shadows did nothing that might draw attention to him. The hesitant ease Larabee had enjoyed the last two days thinking Ezra might be right evaporated. Thirty long minutes Vin stood in the darkness by the stairs watching everything that moved before his canted shadow came off the wall and moved toward them. He slid soundlessly into a chair at the edge of the lamplight and Chris, who'd laid a casual arm across the back of JD's chair as he approached, gave a warning yank at the long black hair of the kid's nape to quiet his startled questions. J.D.'s kid's mouth closed at the sight of the gunslinger's meaningful eyes.
"Boys," Tanner greeted them softly, eyes wide and quick around the room, their faces, reading everything with anxious attention. Dusty and unshaven and hard-rode but buzzing like a struck wire, and Buck and Nathan shifted forward in their seats toward him with curious looks, cards forgotten in their hands.
"Y'look a mite jumpy, pard," Chris observed quietly, pouring a glass and sliding it across the table to him, shifting his chair as he did to clear his gun to Tanner's back.
"Yeah, well, got cause t'be." Vin took a drink and closed his eyes with a short hiss, head cocked wearily; "You fellers might have, too, n' I'm afraid that's my fault." The rest of the whiskey went down like bitter medicine, but when he looked up at Chris, the directness of his eyes, even so troubled, made something in the gunslinger relax. Vin was in motion now, on the trail and ready to handle whatever had been pricking at him so hard. A gleam to Chris' eye and the shadow of a wicked smile communicated his willingness to step into it with him, but Tanner seemed burdened to see it.
"Where's Ezra n' Josiah?" Vin asked.
Buck waved a hand in the general direction of the hotel down several streets, "An evening of dining and gaming with two little fillies work for Vickers - oh, that's right, you ain't been around much, let me fill y'in on all the gossip, then." Vin took the gentle barb without reaction, meaningless in the speaking of that name.
Buck leaned forward with the relish of a man in the possession of some juicy tidbits and said, "Ezra's got some sort of business arrangement with Vickers, this feller that's hired us all, n' he's . entertainin' one of the maids. Now, there's also this delicious Creole woman Josiah's taken a real deep fancy to." With a lecherous wiggle of bold dark brows, but a hint of wolfish sharpness on Vin that Buck often hid under disarming joviality. Tanner's eyes narrowed around that bit of bad news, and he looked down. He hadn't told them anything, they could've walked blind and stupid into any of a dozen kinds of dead on his account, and maybe Ezra and Josiah had already been drawn into Vickers' web.
"What does that mean, how close are they to Vickers?" He asked Chris. The gunslinger squinted quizzically at him; 'Vickers', and he said the name like he knew it. Everything took on a different meaning in that, suspicions resurrected with the urgency of the prematurely buried along with some startling new ones. Why they were all here, what Vin was worried about. Chris didn't like being ignorant when his skin was at risk, too, and Vin's expression didn't deny that.
J.D.'s dark eyes shuttled between them around the table, their postures all so casual, but the mood anything but.
"Ezra's makin' some money off 'em," Chris said watchfully, "Josiah ..."
"Josiah's in looooove ...," Buck chortled and shook his head,
"Yessir, we're mournin' another free man taken down by the fickle finger of fidelity. He's already lost, boys. Been bathin' every day n' wearing ironed shirts n' everything - you gotta see this woman, Vin, she's sultry and beautiful as a bayou sunset .," Long expressive hands lovingly drawing rich feminine curves in the air, "And spiritual, you know how Josiah likes that in a woman. Spends hours just talkin' to her." As if he couldn't imagine a more ridiculous thing to do with a beautiful woman. "Cooks gourmet for Vickers and looks as delicious herself as any fancy dish I've ever seen - I tell you what, he either marries this one, or Four Corners ain't gonna have a wall left standin'." He and J.D. shared a wincing laugh to remember the last woman Josiah had lost his heart and, it seemed, his sense, to, but Chris and Vin were intent on each other, and Vin spoke to Chris alone.
"Anything bein' passed on there I'd be unhappy t'hear about?"
The bounty? "No." Chris answered quietly, surprising himself by meaning it; he'd always trusted Josiah, but when had he come to trust the gambler? "Standish has guessed somethin's going on, he's nervous - you know how he is when somethin's up he ain't in on n' he's got his money invested."
A mirthless smile from Vin. "Always did spend too much time protectin' his purty self." Poor opinion unhidden, but he trusted Chris' instincts.
"They gonna be along anytime soon?"
"Probably be a few hours."
Plainly not what Vin wanted to hear, impatience sat prickly and strange on him. He was wanting to get at something. Chris read the urge in his glance to have J.D. go get Ezra and Josiah right that minute, but he seemed to think better of it. Vin lowered his head and let out a quiet breath.
"Well." An indecisive pause, confused looks passed among them above his lowered head.
"Then. If it's all the same t'you boys, I'll have another gutwarmer n' bide my time so's I only have t'say what I gotta say once." Like a man resigned to an onerous task, a faintly ominous tone, but clearly all they were going to get from him right then.
"Suit yourself." Chris poured him another drink, and after an awkward minute, Nathan and Buck and J.D. went back to their game, somber and keeping a defensive eye to the rest of the room. Tanner had that drink, and a third before he stretched his legs out with his elbows on the arms of his chair and laced his fingers across his narrow stomach, going to sleep in the noisy darkness with an abruptness that made Nathan's eyebrows rise speculatively.
"Looks like a lot of miles of bad road," he said quietly to Chris, but despite the looming spectre of deep trouble, Chris was easier about Vin than he'd been for weeks, and his shrug was expressive.
"Well, now," Buck drawled quzzically, "why is it I feel like a heap of trouble is comin' t'roost on my shoulder?"
Chris grinned at him, and there passed between them a look of old friends who'd been through trouble, some of their own making, many times together.
"Don't matter, Buck. C'mon now, yer getting' soft as a little girl," Chris said mockingly. "We'll know why soon enough, maybe get some things taken care of been needin' it for awhile. Hell, cowboy, we might bust loose n' have us some fun," which Buck was drunk enough to laugh at.
The game went on around Vin, and in the closed circle of their watchful murmurs, he actually slept for maybe an hour of the three they waited before the knot of his thoughts woke him. Unmoving, resting his aching body at least, he worried at it.
"He's here, damn it to hell!" Vickers seethed, "Slipped past every living one of those fools and just ... appears, according to them, right among his friends, big as life and easy enough to take a nap, I understand!"
Fury ripe and rich in the air, Marie-Laure breathed it in like a fine perfume. The sense of threads knotting at the end of the weave, time reaching confluence. Sloe eyes glittered from the center of the dark calm she was, and a small smile was allowed that the touch of her hand along his arm made soothing.
"We're in the same position we were in Four Corners...," souding petulant, and he knew it, but her eyes glowed with answers - her hot and wicked and endlessly fearsome eyes. Ruling her was a heady authority continually being tested, and never yet had Vickers been sure she worked his will above her own.
"You ev' known Marie-Laure t'be unprepared?" she murmured and led him with soft warm hands and the embrace of midnight eyes to the armchair, pressing him back and settling smooth as a long-haired cat into his lap. "You have taken him out from among d'many. He has no allies in 'dis town, him."
"Woman, he has the same allies here he did in Four Corners, and I hardly think geography influences them much! Why did I listen to you? All your snaky tricks and voodoo falderal. I should've just had him shot no matter who was around him and let the shooter take the fall!"
"Man like you long beyond such crudeness, mon amour." Her chuckle was a throaty purr, her long eyelashes lowered with prideful modesty, and she said, "Seven homme ... Marie-Laure divided t'ree times 'dat number her comin'-out ball."
Which he did not doubt for an instant. Marie-Laure cost him a lovely riverwalk pied a tier and wardrobes and servants. There wasn't a man alive or even half-dead she couldn't ensorcell. And she accomplished impossibilities on his behalf even he could not make her explain - she didn't seem surprised by this apparent shift in her plan and that made him suspicious.
Before he could accuse her, however, her eyes came to his nearly opaque, flat and cold as a cottonmouth and so her spirits were to him, something poisonous and deadly. She became a sudden awful armful he couldn't put off him, though he jerked in trying.
"'Dis night Marie-Laure LeBeau deliver t'you your enemy, mais oui." The loa's voice through her, that quaver he had never been able to prove was her theatrics, "N' f'dis you give a t'ing equal." Not saying what else she would carry from this venture that had nothing to do with him, nor the fact that the tracker's presence here had been foretold and was integral to the plan she worked that would swallow Vickers'. The Preacher - his love was a consuming power. The love of a holy and learned man, he would be another prize she would take back home with her.
Vickers' large fingers tightened. She felt Vickers stiffen and drew her long hand under his chin and up his cheek, examining his face with a more human, if still queenly, detachment. It excited him despite the threat she voiced, patois thick as when her spirits were still near. "Dis one be death f'you wid'out Marie-Laure, wid'dout the juju. 'Dis you know."
He didn't bother to deny it. What she meant was that this would cost him and that she knew her value could not surprise him after ten years of holding her in his thrall.
When she saw this admission in his eyes, she smiled and stood up from him, knowing how the chill would come to where her body had been. "'De Club Pontraine you sign ovah. 'Dis woman's service t'you be done." Her freedom, with a profitable card salon to keep her, and his eyes were as cold as hers.
She allowed him to calculate his risks and losses, knowing them as well as he. Marie-Laure didn't need to know what secrets the Plainsman harbored to know they were as deadly as his weapons or the dangerous comrades he could call to his cause. There would be notice paid of the Plainsman's killing no matter how Vickers accomplished it, and he had to trust her to have conceived a way to dilute or redirect that notice.
Malcolm Vickers never admitted defeat while trickery or betrayal might still prevail, but every moment Tanner breathed, the danger became more urgent. He needed Marie for this as he had never needed her before, and she obviously knew it. He smiled at her, then, gave her a squeeze that might pass for affection. She would end up with neither club nor freedom, but he would convince her otherwise, having as much faith in his own nefarious abilities as hers.
She had the papers signed and warming against her breasts when she left him, but Marie-Laure was never fool enough to believe pieces of paper could give her freedom. No, it was the design burning bright in her soul that would guarantee that, the weapon this plainsman would be in her hand. All coming as the fortunes had told it, all significances leading to her emancipation from Malcolm Vickers, from any master, evermore. She would be a free woman of substance, a power in her community, an open channel for the spirits to work their will in mercy or vengeance upon the earth. Marie went to her ritual bath, every step, every herb and object diamond sharp in the inherited memories of her mothers before her, come down to her through them, and destined to be carried forward through her. 'Prosperity', they whispered, if she ensured the proud and ancient lineage. 'Immortality' in the daughter who would carry the traditions on and harbor her soul with all her mothers before her when she passed.
"Jeez, Buck, we could be here all night, you know." JD was tired and broke, it was so late the saloon was nearly empty, and he just wanted to go to sleep, wished he could learn to do it in a chair or on a horse or draped over a rock like these men seemed able to. One serious card-game went on in the long angle of the L-shaped room in a halo of light, a few customers drifted the bar for the weary girls not already abed, a drowsy bartender, and them.
Nathan chuckled and shot a look at Chris across the table, considering his cards. "Don't think so, J.D."
Buck's grin was slyly satisfied, "Ezra maybe, but Josiah's been actin' the gentleman of honorable intentions n' ain't ..."
He fell silent as the tracker's head came up, and his eyes, alert and wide awake, went to the door. Everybody straightened up expectantly, and when Chris glanced back to Vin, he found him looking at him, grim and, startlingly, maybe even a little afraid.
Josiah and Ezra, making the noise of more than two men, both obviously in high spirits, were raising greetings toward the table as they came in. For the moment, neither noticed Vin still and watchful in the darkest edge of the lamplight, or perhaps they'd become so used to being seven that nothing odd registered in the distraction of their good cheer. Josiah was resplendent in a linen shirt and silk vest that Ezra had loaned him the money for, groomed and clean-shaven but for a rakish bit of beard under his bottom lip and looking more suave than any of them could remember.
"I ask you, gentlemen ...," Ezra said jovially, "Can a preacher conduct his own nuptials? I do believe our good brother here would be returning to Four Corners with a bride ..."
Josiah shook his head, a dreamy gleam in his eye. "Beautiful as Bathsheba, tempter of righteous kings, and a soul more splendid, still. Do you know, I've seldom met a man, and never a woman, who knows the Good Book like she does - and boys, she can cook, Lord, her sauces are like holy manna ..."
"Josiah, that's got t'be blasphemin'!" JD was aghast at the very idea of the preacher marrying, but Ezra was expansively congratulatory.
"On the contrary, Mr. Dunne, the lady is quite worthy of superlatives. Mr. Sanchez rightly assumes her to be a gift from a benevolent and generous heaven! You would probably get fat, though, Josiah, she's ..."
"Brother Tanner?" Josiah greeted the tracker with quizzical surprise as Vin sat forward into the light. Ezra did a double-take and then realized how uneasy the other five were and became so himself. Didn't like suddenly feeling ill winds coming up his back, and suddenly he was quite sober.
Chris thought Vin would get right to it, but he didn't. He only smiled at the pair with a casual nod. Not just putting it off, either, he was a direct man once he'd made up his mind, and this was a thing gnawing a bloody hole in him.
"Ezra, Josiah ... Livin' on the fat side of town? Who are these persuasive females?"
"Ladies, sir." Ezra's elegant finger gently corrected him, and Tanner shifted edgily under his suspicious eye.
Chris wasn't the only one to wonder what he was looking for from Ezra or Josiah that he just couldn't ask outright, but Josiah just flushed pleasantly, head tilting back and a rapturous smile spreading across his face, bright deep-set blue eyes a little bleary, but sparkling nonetheless.
"My Pa told me more times than I can count, brethren, that my lot would never include such bliss," the Preacher said with deep, almost vindictive, satisfaction; "praise the Lord for his wrong-headedness! Marie-Laure, ah, even her name is a song."
"They work for Vickers?" Vin interrupted Josiah's reverie, and Ezra's look sharpened that he knew the man's name. Many unpleasant suspicions leapt to the fore, but Josiah was more than willing to wax eloquent about Marie-Laure LeBeau.
"An angel upon the earth ... a gourmet cook, Vin, from New Orleans, hired to provender the party on their sojourn into the wilderness. God could not have set more perfect a female upon the earth, a sweet mystery, she is, a dark saint deserving heaven on this earth, could I but give it to her. My soul is fixed in the poetry of her eyes."
Ezra kept his eyes on Tanner, trying to determine the source of his unease even as he came into the conversation; "Indeed, she concocted a beef etouffe in a feather-light roux sauce tonight that was the single most divine thing ever past these lips, why ..."
As he suspected, chit-chat wasn't Tanner's goal, thus he was not surprised to be interrupted.
"Don't seem likely they're stayin' in this part of town."
"No, they're at the Prairie Flower with the rest of Mr. Vickers' party," Josiah responded without a suspicion in the world, and Ezra was further disquieted to be able to read Tanner's nervousness, a man who didn't have any nerves he'd ever seen. Ezra's eyes narrowed at Vin, sitting making casual conversation when he had no use for it and never had, so ready to explode under his stillness it was a miracle he didn't have steam essaying out from both his ears. Everybody else at the table was too quiet, not meeting his eyes. That there were things going on he was being left out of irritated Ezra considerably when it apparently was going to impact his pockets, so he went fishing with his sharpest hooks.
"Perhaps you'd do us the honor of a small demonstration of marksmanship tomorrow, Mr. Tanner? Apparently, by some dime novel lights, we're a bit of a legend, and there has been some lively interest expressed in yours."
Ezra didn't miss the anxious shift of shoulders. Tanner didn't answer, but his eyes went flat and unblinking on the gambler.
Vin couldn't expect to deceive a master of deceit. Clearly, Standish knew far more than he'd thought and had gone as far as he would without being let in on the rest. He had to trust them, even Ezra, he couldn't get what he needed from a distance anymore.
Chris's look said the gambler would betray anything heard here tonight at his peril. he knew Tanner was being pushed past patience, and he was curious about where it would go. Ezra and Vin were combustible in the best of circumstances. The gambler was the only man he'd ever seen who Tanner couldn't entirely ignore.
Ezra watched the fathomless blue-gray eyes of their tracker, the sidelong glance at Larabee that told him nothing.
"Now then," he said, "shall we elevate this conversation beyond the inane, gentlemen?" With a pleasantly defiant smile that was more teeth than humor, clearly demanding truth. And Vin had no choice but to give it under the expectant weight of their eyes. He took a deep breath.
"I got some things I gotta tell you boys."
Nearly inaudible, but he forced himself to look at them, regret an ache in his chest for having had no faith in them; even if they accepted what he'd done, he still would have laid the insult of his distrust against them.
"That Mr. Vickers that hired you," like the name tasted bad in his mouth, "I served under him in the war."
"On which side?" Ezra asked with open interest, startlement mirrored in the other faces around the table. "Oh come now, I'm sure I'm not the only one curious about Mr. Tanner's affiliations during that conflict."
Vin flickered a slanted look his way, turned his glass in his fingertips, and had a sip, taking his time letting it down. It rankled him to be interrogated by someone he held as low as a gambler, but he reckoned a humbling to be part of his penance. Murder was surely more sin than stealin'.
"Ezra, I'm gonna tell however much I'm gonna, and I ain't invitin' questions." Ezra's eyes narrowed. After a long tense moment in which they all judged the edge of Vin's temper to be mortal sharp, he said quietly, "Union." He looked down, his hatbrim rocked. This was harder than he'd imagined, and the struggle wasn't lost on any of them, his shoulders tight and a fine tremor in his hands that they all felt echoing ominously in themselves. Ezra's eyebrows rose briefly in surprise, having already surmised the tracker was of southern birth, Missouri by the vague remnants of drawl.
"The short of it is that I was behind-lines sharpshootin' for 'is unit, n' it turned out I was takin' some targets besides that had nothin' t'do with war, n' everything t'do with makin' 'im rich n' powerful."
Behind-lines sharpshooting. None but J.D., too young to have been in that war still too recent on their souls, misunderstood the term. Sniper. Assassin. There was a sudden chill as they, who knew him, imagined his skills and practices turned to acts that, outside of war, would be thought murder.
That Vin knew to be murder. He read their faces and never showed how deep their dismay struck. Nettie said God would judge his heart, but he also figured one more soul on his head wouldn't matter if he was already damned. Just wasn't in him to be optimistic - weren't no point. He laid it out like that.
"Never counted how many I killed." He continued with brutally unsparing honesty, "but it was all I done for about five months. I was good at it. Folks were scared t'look at me, and it was the safest I ever felt amongst 'em, but he used me bein' too crazy n' too stupid-young."
Nobody spoke, taking in with varying degrees of surprise and contemplation the unnerving image of the man they knew transformed into the spectre of a cold-blooded killer. Never had he been so forthcoming with them, never spoken so revealingly. His breathing was shallow and quick, his head bent away from their eyes as he toyed with his glass.
"Thought I'd killed him in Georgia." Bitter certain, and nobody asked why, their speculative silence laid hard as strangers on him so his throat closed up, and an uneasy silence grew.
Ezra stretched out his legs and lit a cheroot, making a gracious ceremony of it, and when blue smoke swirled in false contentment around his head, he broke the brittle quiet.
"Well. We can presume that you failed in that endeavor, unless the unsanctified dead walk among us. And I'll wager it a safe presumption from your less than affectionate demeanor that Mr. Vickers was not overjoyed to make your reacquaintance," he said, knowing the answer, but keen to what Tanner might reveal in his explanations. Vickers was a very dangerous man, and a grievance with Vin Tanner could easily sweep them all into unanticipated disasters - to say nothing of jeopardizing the lion's share of his own ready cash. Had the gentleman been conning the con all along, using him to try to find Tanner? Certainly not for any bounty ... not a happy thought for him, nor, perhaps far more personally, for Josiah if Marie-Laure was acting as Vickers' agent. The sympathy he felt to imagine that surprised him. He had come to respect Josiah's considerable self-education and enjoy their wide-ranging conversations; intelligent discourse was important to maintaining an edge. But his new friend had fallen hard, consumed by the woman to a strangely ferocious degree, when he considered it further, as it now seemed he must. A gambler had to study every current of fate.
"No, Ezra, he weren't what I'd call welcomin'." Vin replied with a brittle smile, gruesomely haunted, "You'd thought I was a rotted corpse walkin'."
"If he's trouble, why didn't you tell us from the git-go, Vin, when he first came to town?" J.D. asked with the sincere simplicity of a boy who had nothing wicked to hide, and Vin felt a pang for how long it'd been since he'd felt such innocence. He could count it in decades. But the question was in all their eyes as well, and he looked back regretfully.
"I thought t'keep you all out of it, I give my word to be as law-abidin' as I'm able, and that's a man needs t'be put down like a rabid dog. I was studyin' on it, but servin' two masters, I ended up servin' neither. Hell." He shook his head, took his hand in a hard rasp over his eyes and down his angular face, his tone heavy;
"Didn't know what to do beyond killin' him b'fore he had me killed, couldn't figure how t'do it because there ain't no other way. It was me killed those men even by orders, n' the way things are now ..." Chris understood by his glance that he meant the bounty.
"Hell, he could take me down in a blink if I spoke up n' never get touched himself. Who's gonna believe me? Folk like that got ways outta everything, and it was years gone by. When I come back t'town t'tell you, you were gone, n' Four Corners weren't so safe f'me, either, it was a narrow thing gettin' out agin without being seen. Or kilt, by my shorthairs. All I could reckon was t'follow along, him hirin' you has t'be for no good, but I still don't know why." It was the longest any of them could ever remember him talking at once.
"Maybe he wanted us gone so's he could have you killed when you came back to town?" J.D. so ready to help, looked to the others for support and his anxiety grew at the way they looked at Vin, like they'd never seen him before.
Vin shrugged, having thought of that, too, but finding a logic more like Vickers in suspecting he didn't intend to let any potential danger remain. The only way to ensure that was to kill all seven, and, to his deep distress, he had to acknowledge that a crucial step toward that goal had already been accomplished in taking them out of familiar territory where anything could be fabricated. He didn't say it, though, allowed to himself that it didn't really matter, since he didn't intend for Vickers to ever leave this town outside of a box.
Josiah considered Vin in silence, seeing a different man with his serenity torn away ... had Vin misled them all this time, someone whose self-possession he'd envied? Ezra held him every bit as dangerous as Chris, said both were too simplistic in their blunt righteousness, and tonight a dark light burned in the sharpshooter's eyes that Josiah had never seen there before, but saw every day in Chris Larabee. Rage wanting out, looking with cunning intuition for the opportunity despite every decent impulse otherwise. God save him, he knew that rage well, his own roiled in answer deep inside him to have the joy he was taking in Marie-Laure threatened, and he closed his eyes in a brief silent prayer.
Josiah had found a measure of peace in Four Corners and the penance he'd undertaken there, in defending the defenseless and planting the Lord's seeds lightly, without burden. Now there was this woman, Almighty, a woman he was already lost in, a woman he believed signified a measure of the forgiveness he craved with every breath. Desperately, he did not want trouble spoiling it; love needed peace to blossom and grow and he knew it could with her, a fine deep-hearted woman he could spend a lifetime learning, love the proof against every curse his father had ever laid on his head ...
Ezra spread his hands; "Well, obviously this will require some circumspection on our parts, Mr. Tanner, until we have a grasp of what, exactly, Mr. Vickers intends to do - if anything. A man as diabolical as you describe would surely have pursued similar lines of logic, and must have the reach and influence to correctly conclude that your ... legal status renders you harmless to him." Saying without saying 'bounty', knowing about Tascosa and not saying it.
A startled glance at Chris and his answering shrug confirmed it, he knew Chris hadn't betrayed him, but a cold finger wheedled down the furrow of Vin's spine at Ezra's cagey smile as he said, "Why rock the proverbial boat?"
"Oh, he's already doin' something, Mr. Standish, I ain't got no question in my mind about that, ain't the sort t'leave anything t'chance - this'un could give you lessons in slitheriness."
Ezra's eyebrows crept up in vague affront. "Well, then, I believe it behooves you to share any and all facts that might be germaine."
Trying to force his hand, and Vin countermoved quick as any shark he'd ever played, bluntly removing Ezra's leverage, "If you're talkin' about the bounty on my head in Texas, Ezra, that ain't it."
"I knew." Chris said into their shocked silence, explaining as he knew Vin wouldn't. "A frame to get him off a bounty." Plainly believing him, but Vin got cold at the uneasy distance of too many surprises that he could feel in the rest. Surprisingly, Ezra was the one who seemed to accept Chris's word at face value, and he continued on conversationally.
"In that case, I hardly think it wise for you to do anything confrontational considerin' that your opponent can wield that bounty against you - indeed, your absence seems to cry out as the only logical strategy - one you've been accomplishing quite well, I might add."
Vin was too tired to restrain his impatience, and rendered too honest in it as well, "There's always a way, Ezra, ain't you been listenin'?" And in his face they all saw what he meant, he was being flat truthful with them. "Ain't you been listenin'? I got no time t'be subtle now with all of you in the way, won't take this snake but a minute t'do whatever he likes and be on his merry way without ever raising an eyebrow. So you all ride out in the mornin', n' I'll either be along or I won't. Don't really care no more what he's up to, ain't givin' 'im time t'do whatever he's tryin' t'do, I intend t'kill him."
All of them heeled back at that unvarnished intention, and not one doubted it, Vin's angled jaw set and eyes wide as an avenging angel. Chris felt a cold surprise at the path he'd chosen, but he knew the look and what it meant, that dedication he understood as a kind of necessary madness. It was that important. Vickers would die publicly or privately, whichever came first, and Tanner would accept whatever came of it. That it could easily be his death didn't matter so long as Vickers was gone, and it was the same course he'd be following if the man who'd taken his family, his life, was suddenly before him in the flesh.
But Josiah shook his head, profoundly troubled by this revelation of premeditated murder apparently unaffected by any moral considerations, though he knew Tanner to be a deeply moral man. More troubled still to know there was trouble coming.
Ezra's concerns were too immediate for introspection, "Why thank you for sayin' so, Mr. Tannah, so we can be sure to perjure ourselves outright upon interrogation when the gentleman in question expires at your hands in the middle of afternoon traffic! Killed by a man known to be of our company and, by your attitude, within minutes of our conspicuous departure! So not only my fortune, but my very life, I'll warrant! It'd take Solomon himself to find a way out of that! The wish for revenge is quite understandable, but I might submit that it no longer serves you to good purpose - to say nothing of all of us?! You've got a price on your head, as clearly you've considered, and a wise man would simply let this go. I ask you, sir, what good is revenge if you perish in the accomplishment? Bygones, fortunes of war ..."
"My ass, Standish." A growl and hard blue eyes, but Josiah's quiet voice rumbled between them.
"Will it redeem you, brother Tanner?" Josiah asked, desperate to find a way to keep this from happening, "Will you become what you despise?"
"I already been made into what I despise at his doin', Josiah! Don't consider it no stain t'remove such as him from the world, it's long overdue he met his maker for judgement! He used me to do his sinnin', n' I don't aim t'let that stand!"
With his father's voice tolling deep inside him foretelling deserved disaster, Josiah persisted with almost frantic calm; "But is your quest justice, or vengeance?" Like a man who'd confused the two himself to disastrous result, and Tanner's temper flared, too far past philosophy into grim reality. He was shaking inside, because to tell them only as much as he had to he had to remember it all.
That Vickers had cost him those mortal months imprisoned was a grievance every bit as deep as the one he was telling, but that nightmare was personal and he the only victim, that could have no place in what he had to do, and he'd fought hard to make sure of it. Vengeance for himself he had no right to, but for those who'd fallen at his hand, the responsibility was as clear now as it had been that afternoon on a Georgia hillside with Vickers in his sights.
Vin's eyes were hellish, and he said with a quiet but seething determination, "It ain't vengeance t'set this right, I will set this right, I ain't lettin' such wickedness by me agin. I'm bein' considerate enough t'tell you all and let you get clear."
That he also trusted them not to betray him wasn't lost on Chris. Nobody knew what to make of him, cold as death walking, and showing more of the man from among the savage tribes than he'd ever shown before.
It was only the fear of him in their faces that slowed Vin down, made him take a breath rather than go on in anger and lose their cooperation; "This needs t'be reckoned with. I need t'reckon with it, and these ladies you're so all-fired fond of might be able to help me."
Which Josiah heard for true, once a matter reached Holy proportions in a man's mind, little would change it.
"Mr. Tanner," He said with some exasperation and an anger that suddenly threatened hard, "These ladies are innocents ..."
"They can help me get close enough to kill him." Ruthlessly resolute, he had no compunction about doing everything he had to.
Josiah bristled visibly, "No, not Marie-Laure."
"Josiah, anyone who'll help me get it done."
Which made Josiah's face flush hotly - he could not let this be taken from him! It could not be ruined now!
Ezra, aghast and not hiding it, raised his hands in dramatic disbelief and shook his head at the heavens, keenly aware of the fire growing in Josiah's eyes,
"Plainsmen, God save us from simple minds! Nothing of self-defense much less finesse - the only answer you can come up with is just walk up to him and shoot him without the foresight of considering the ramifications? Not a well-considered plan, sir, and not one I'd be comfortable putting these good ladies in the path of, to say nothing of my own person."
All the bones of Vin's face seemed to rise, his jaw jumped. Fury, anxiety, fear, all at the same time on a face normally unreadable and Ezra laid his right arm open on the table casually, freeing the sleeve gun to quick use and the atmosphere chilled all around.
"I sincerely apologize if you find my frankness offensive, Mistah Tannah. I am well aware of your opinions about the seeming self-interest of my existence, but be that as it may, my concern is for your own well-being as much as ours, and of course the ladies'. While there is some veracity in the suggestion of my business interests, our friend Mr. Sanchez has his heart invested rather substantially in Vickers' company, and you must respect the sanctity of that relationship. Surely we can arrive at a plan of action that will accomplish your rather bluntly stated objective without compromising any but the condemned ..."
"I don't aim t'slide around this, Standish."
"Gentlemen, have none of you an opinion on this foolhardy course?"
Josiah's glower expressed his, and Ezra appealed to the table at large, "Has no one an idea less certain of disaster? Mr. Larabee, I can hardly believe you've no interest in Mister Tanner's ultimate survival ..."
Josiah shook his shaggy head, and Ezra saw uncertainty everywhere else he looked. Vin saw it too, along with the good-hearted determination of some to figure a way out of it, as they'd figured their way out of so many jams in the past few months. Nettie had been right - they would try to find a way to get him what he demanded and spare his life in the doing, and yet much as that meant to him, he just couldn't risk them. So he sat back and shrugged with every appearance of cooperation, pressing his intentions back behind the empty mask he'd learned to adopt in the tribal councils.
"I'll hear any good ideas you got." And he listened to their tentative suggestions already knowing what had to be done, and the quicker the better.
Because he'd closed his eyes, too much a coward to witness his own sin, because he'd seen Vickers down and assumed it done, these men were in mortal danger that would only end if he killed Vickers first.
Charlie searched for that crazy horse through five liveries, seven hotel stables and the paddocks of four boarding houses and three bordellos. Finally he found the big black at the edge of town, and the plainsman, too. Didn't see him at first sitting against the rails of the paddock in near darkness until the glint of a whiskey bottle tipped briefly and then set down between his feet.
Trouble on the plainsman's face, a strange exhausted violence in the very air about him as he pondered the pistol in his hand, slowly turning the cylinder with his index finger as if mesmerized by the soft repetitive click of its motion. He sighed a deep and soul-sick sigh that made Charlie shiver for him, and laid his head back against the post at his back with that gun dangling in his hand, his arms outstretched across his jacked up knees, staring wide-eyed at the night sky.
Significance, Marie-Laure said, when sights and sounds struck that hum in the soul. The Plainsman seemed so tormented and lost that Charlie wanted nothing more than to have him out of this close smoky city, away from the grinding certainty of Vickers' revenge and back safe on the wide plains and shadowed woods where he belonged. Free and wide, like he should be. Safe.
Because Charlie liked him, Marie-Laure had said in bringing him the news of the plainsman's arrival, she would help, and Charlie wasn't deterred by the thought of being in her debt that far. The plainsman wouldn't run, she'd said that too, and he knew it for true. He was an upright man who hadn't come all this way not to stand, but the stubborn nobility Charlie so admired was what would get the plainsman killed. Vickers was easily smart enough to use to use that honorable instinct against him. Marie-Laure could help Charlie save him, she said she would render him invisible until the threat had passed over him like the plagues of Egypt over the Israelites. Assassin or no, Charlie desperately wanted to ensure this man was free, knowing without understanding why that it would matter to him in his dreaming moments under Vickers' heel. It would matter to know the plainsman was out there when he was strong enough, had saved enough in Marie-Laure's promised service, to make his own way free, maybe come back and learn all he wanted to know.
"Mr. Tanner?"
It had been shamefully easy, Tanner tired to his bones and leaping at the chance to talk to Marie, as she'd known he would, to get inside Vickers' suite and get it done. A man of conscience could do no less, that much she could predict. He never suspected Charlie, nor thought about the taste of the coffee the boy fetched out to him without being asked.
"C'mon, it's just a little further, they're lookin' for you, Mr. Tanner, and we gotta be sure they don't find you."
Vin heard little of it, eyes drifting and all feeling far away and cottony except for his skin, which seemed to feel everything with exquisite sensitivity. The soft rasp of cotton on his arms, the smoothness of buckskins, snug clasp of gunbelt, even the lay of his suspenders across his shoulders could be felt with a clarity he wondered at. Too hot, something not right, he hadn't had that much to drink to feel so gone ...
Charlie was scared to leave him for the way his eyes tracked so slow, a thin rim of blue all the color he had left to them and unsteady with a dreamy sort of clumsiness. Scared to bring him here, too, but Marie-Laure said it was best, and he trusted her. Gingerly, he leaned the plainsman against the wall, where he seemed content to stay, and checked the darkened hallway and private landing. No one would pass this way.
Marie-Laure came up the stairs like a shadow and laid her hands on Charlie's shoulders, pleased by his obedience, but focused on what would occur, caught in the energy of the man. The boy went to keep an eye to the streets with a grateful hug that embarrassed him for needing it, then she took a moment in the silent dark to savor what would come.
Silhouetted against the window, narrow hips pressed back against the wall, bent over with his hands on his knees obviously dizzy from Tante's elixir. Marie's smile bloomed warm and satisfied across the lush dark cream of her oval face; no other mating would ever be as significant as this, and it pleased her to like his looks and she relished the challenge of an inaccessible man. Power in him, palpable and enduring, enticed all her senses, created for her and destined, this night fated, and what would come of it. A child of power from this man, and Josiah Sanchez for a husband, a man of God and as much a force in his size and strength as his mind and the faith she led so carefully - it was a strange weakness in a man as wise as the preacher was, and one he seemed utterly unaware of, but it was, and would be, very useful. He wanted to marry her, she knew, and she would agree in the next few days, it would be done quickly, and he would think the child his.
Not big, this Plainsman, but long-boned and lean as if he'd been stripped of everything extraneous to survival, self-contained and vaguely aloof even among his friends so she'd known he had spirits in him. Quiet men, Maman had said, could be so explosive. A hunter's mannerisms in his patient stillness and keen eyes, but the wary edges of prey as well, and she approached slowly, knowing he would sense her. As if he felt the stir of her motion in the air, his head rose, he pushed himself up with his heels braced into the floor, and his right hand drifted to the butt of the mare's leg along his thigh. Wide keen eyes glazed and fuddled now, squinting to make her out in the shadows, blue-gray as a restless and melancholy autumn afternoon. Changeable eyes, she guessed, that would tell his moods in their colors.
"Mon couer, at last ..." Soothing soft velvety tone shimmering like faint music into his disorientation, like warm honey, he had no time to make sense of it before she came against him in a luscious tide of whispering satin and sultry female skin. He heeled up and knocked his hat off against the wall, struggling dumbly to make sense of dusky pale breasts pillowing up against his chest and round sloping female hips settling between his legs, little hands sliding up the outside of his thighs - sensations everywhere all at once on a mesmerizing cloud of perfume and heat ...
His buckskins were soft under her hands, and his legs beneath them sinewy, Charlie's plainsman was wide-chested and long-limbed and wolfishly narrow. A throaty chuckle bubbled forth at the bewilderment of his face as her fingers stroked up the outside of his thighs to his waist, inciting a tremor. His right hand went white-knuckled on the gun-butt while the left fanned out in conflicted want and refusal. Sharp-boned and fine, that face, wide jaw dusted with sandy whiskers and a good mouth, sensitive and expressive. She pressed a little against him, and though he only looked down at her like he couldn't figure out what she was, his breathing deepened and his mouth half-opened, the pace of his heart against her breast accelerated.
In those wild secretive eyes was a troubled anger, the knowledge that he was not doing something he must do, was doing something he must not, eyebrows drawn in and unhappy even if more primal interests were definitely aroused. Hard-willed, then, and that a welcome trait to the spirits, but it meant he was on the razored edge of resistance, and she had to hurry.
Her fingers loosened his bandana, drew it away into her waistband as a keepsake more important than any but she knew. Quickly she unbuttoned the neck of his shirt while holding him with the purposeful depth of her eyes, rubbing herself slowly, sensuously, against him, holding him captive in sensation. Finally, her lips tasted the hollow of his throat, and this time the tremor deepened to a shiver and a soft broken gasp as his head fell back against the wall, aching for the touch. Tante Marie's recipe made the skin sensitive to the least caress, magnified sensation and made flesh burn, Marie had used it for her own pleasure many times. When she ran her tongue across the winged sweep of his collarbone, she didn't have to see his face to know his eyes had closed rapturously, felt the moan pass through the arch of his throat as his breath left him.
Her mouth bloomed on him then, tasting sage and salty dust and leather and man, the novelty heady as her tonguetip traced up the angle of his jaw teased by the soft gold whiskers and her hands stroked up his sides and across the long bones of his shoulders under the caped hide coat. Delicate fingers reached for and tangled in light-brown curls to draw his head down.
He resisted, but not entirely, as her little teeth scraped along his cheek, soft humming lips brushing his face light and off-center at first, then sweet breath warm across his mouth. Couldn't breathe, didn't want, wanted ...
Fuller, wetter, now her hands braced his head and the hot tip of her tongue teasing until he opened his mouth and she sealed hers to him. That tongue stroked across the roof of his mouth and she took his soft hot moan into her, feeling herself growing liquid as he hardened against her stomach and shuddered, unconsciously pressing back and slanting his mouth to allow her greater access.
Vin was a pragmatic and long-thinking man, shy of women, mysterious creatures wielding powers he'd never fully grasped and intuitions that made him uneasy. Vin Tanner never had got pushed up against a wall and taken by a woman, didn't ever get blown so off-balance by anything, but everything was tilted on him worse than his worst drunk and feverishly crazy. There was a deep shuddering in his bones that wouldn't stop, but the flood was his man's body and a man's burning ache needing ease so badly. Too warm and female soft and moving so knowingly, it'd been so long ... a woman's delicious form, a woman's silken lips nibbling and slipping and caressing, the faint scent of her arousal filling him with lust. Never been touched so ravenously, never been so painfully hard, and he got lost in a wildness that scared him without giving him an instant's pause. Wanted her more than he wanted ... didn't remember what he wanted other than this woman's warm hands unbuttoning his vest, sliding his suspenders aside, opening his shirt and pulling it out of the high waist of his pants, he felt every slip and slide of cloth with a sensitivity almost painfully erotic. When her palm came to rest on the thin bare skin of his stomach, it was the only clear thing he knew. Breath he didn't know he was holding left him on a sudden broken sigh.
Marie-Laure's practiced hands brushed warm and sure across his hard latticed belly, and she watched him with sultry eyes, smiled as her fingertips followed the fine tail of hair up to where it opened and winged across the top of his chest. Her pleasure in this was requisite, but they must come together in equal passion.
Vin wasn't breathing at all, he didn't know where his hands were until his knuckles hit the wall behind him when wet hot lips closed around one flat nipple and bit. Every drop of blood in his body shot straight to his groin in one pulsing strike and a short cry pressed up out of him.
She celebrated his every quiver, the shallow harsh breathing she could interrupt with a lick, a touch, all the cadences of his body suddenly hers and he lay flat back against the wall and let her do whatever she wanted to him. She unbuckled his gunbelt and let it thump to the carpeted floor, and he made no move to stop her, rapt in the brush and press of her knuckles against him as she did so. The surrender proved the trigger to her own desire - she had him, his quiet privacy, the enduring restraint that she was methodically unraveling. Oh, the spirits of her mothers within her craved the sweet torture on his face, eyes heavy-lidded, mouth rapt and wondering ... her ancestors drank the nearly inaudible sounds of his unwilling passion like hot music, remembering ... Men so seldom understood a woman's ultimate power, and Marie-Laure enjoyed teaching it, savored the breaking of his cool distance that rendered him heated and wild and utterly hers.
Meticulously, she called up the savage soul she knew he harbored, invited it, vibrant as the loa itself, to this vital dance of spirits and flesh that would ensure the matriarchy, as her mothers had before her, and theirs.
Finally, one hand cupped boldly between his legs and he jerked with a hoarse grunt into the sweet pressure marking his contours. Insistently she widened his stance, his boots slid further away from the wall bringing him down to where she could pin him against it with her body from hip to shoulders, rocking against him, rubbing up and down and dragging out a satisfying wriggle of his sinewy body. Still he had not touched her, that much of his control he had not surrendered, so she plucked loose the delicate laces of her bodice and then reached for his hands, brought them to her and filled the long calloused fingers with purely female softness.
This could not stop until he mated her and now he didn't care about anything else, not who she was or why he lusted for her or what caused the boiling madness in him. Didn't care, only wanted into her as mindlessly as any rutting beast. Mouth and body remembered he was a man and went for her ravenously, fingers closed around the offered flesh so he felt the rise of her nipples against his palms all the way down to his toes. He plundered the sweet dark recesses of her eager mouth while she went for the laces of his pants with the same driven compulsion, lifting her hips off a bit to get to them, tearing the laces open, folding them down off his pale narrow hips. Yards of fine silk got rucked roughly up to her waist ... "Ahhh ..." breathed together as he encountered exquisitely bare flesh underneath, thighs and flanks smooth and cool.
Ravenously, she drove her tongue into his mouth, intent on the slide and coil of his, teeth clashing, lips bruising as her fingers and palms turned down the narrowing descent of woven muscle across the vertical cradle of masculine bone, flickering through the tail of crisp hair. One master, and one husband would she have, and this one lover, three a propitious number. Then her hand touched his velvet hardness and he shuddered violently, she freed him and came again close and they moaned together this time at the rub of heated intimate skin.
One long sleek leg rose and hooked around the crook of his hip and thigh, tipped her toward him with a wanton slide, and what could easily pass for a growl met the wetness discovered by his questing fingers. Ruder and blunter than Vin had ever been with any woman, he was a tender man and respectful, but her he went at urgently with mouth and hands and body, savage with the need to get this going. Slick silken opening and his long fingers slipped inside, were grasped as she sighed and shivered, her hot soft hand closing hard around him and stroking so he nearly went down.
Instead, he bent his knees and drove them between hers so her thighs were forced wide as he rose up under her, hands clasping her soft buttocks. A jerk to bring her to him, and then he hilted himself savagely inside her so hard and full that she barely kept her cry from being a scream, his echoing low in her ears. Only his shoulders were in contact with the wall as he arched ferociously up into the tight scalding clasp without regard for anything but that.
Oh, he was strong, and yes, wild as a hurricane, Vickers had never made her feel ...this! Light as thistledown in his hands, burning with the awareness of him moving so powerfully within her, commanding her flesh against him in the strength of his hands and arms. Marie opened herself around the lean column of his body, pressing close, moaning deep in her throat and murmuring in silky patois the pleasure of him stretching and filling her. He answered by pulling her hard to him to completely engage her against his pelvic bone and reach an exquisitely sensitive depth that had never before been touched. So few men knew the secret rhythms within and without a woman, her mothers sighed, but oh, he did, whether by instinct or experience.
Marie-Laure flew like a bird, tied to the earth only where they were joined and keening an invitation to the spirits of her mothers to experience with her the delerious male textures, smooth skin tight over strapped and straining muscle, the jar of his fine bones, the flex of his hard quivering stomach against her and crisp hair against her breasts as she catalogued them, enshrined them in her perfect memory.
Moaning with a pleasure bordering on madness, she caught his ear-lobe in her teeth to keep him still and set her nails into the joining of his neck and shoulder, finally making her mark in three deep diagonal furrows down to his collar-bone. Deleriously, she felt him jump and lengthen within her, she tasted the sparking power of his blood like hot, rich lightening. In that moment, with his life's-blood a keen copper tang on her tongue, Marie-Laure abandoned all to the experience. Raptly she clutched his shoulders, threw back her head with a quivering cry and rubbed herself in shameless need of the sensations of flesh as elegantly and elementally as male as she was softly and richly female. All her senses expanded in the loa's explosive greed, the spirits so seldom able to feel, to taste and hear and enjoy the realm of the living beyond the veil. The ragged rhythm of his moans and hers, the slide and jar of flesh driving against flesh, the scents of them mingling like an erotic perfume... Her hands incited from thigh to hip and back again, around the flexing muscles and hollow divot of his hard little buttocks encouraging his growing urgency, hooking fierce thighs around him.
"Oh ... oh ... mon amant, oui, mais oui ..." A breathless chant in what would ever after be the purest lust fulfilled she would ever know, words he didn't understand, words not meant for any to understand. Prayer, thanksgiving, celebration as she rippled around him inside her and he answered violently, consumed.
With a catlike twist he reversed them, pinning her to the wall, burning, breath tearing a harsh cadence in and out of his chest. He bruised the soft skin of her thighs as he slid his forearms up under her hips and held her where he wanted, his hands flat on the wall behind her buttocks, where he could thrust as deeply as he needed to, as hard and fast as he had to, had to ... he climaxed explosively with a sharp rasping cry, and the sensation of him grinding so hard against her, shuddering and pulsing so deep and full inside, triggered her own glory.
Light and sound and sense shattered in the grasping spasms that rendered him blind and deaf to anything but the hammering conflagration of his own laboring body.
Marie-Laure remembered in some primal instinct to say the words that must be said, rejoicing in the fire of life ignited in her body, feeling it take root with a certainty. A child of power born to a free woman, one part more of the rite and all would be as it was meant, her faith proven, the spirits pleased, their design complete and all traditions brought to fruition.
Touch mattered, that sensation he understood, but his eyes, when he became aware of himself again, wouldn't focus, and he couldn't hear through a persistent buzzing that was making him vaguely nauseous. Pressed into softness by softness and lying down, he thought, bedded ... not lying down ... held down - alarm woke with distant urgency.
Marie-Laure stroked his face, let her fingers slip down his throat and chest under his opened clothing, admiring the houndish body that had served her so well, and perhaps regretting that he would have to perish, but appreciating the dark justice of the sacrifice. A gift of equal value, life for life. Of course, he could never be allowed to procreate after this one; some were used, some were users in this life, as the loas decreed, and Marie-Laure had the utmost faith in her spirit-guides.
He stirred under her uneasily, and her fingers trailed down his arm, uncurled his long restless fingers as she smiled a mysterious smile into his vague face, handsome and rough and wild and, just now, utterly hers in every breath.
Crooning to him to ease his restlessness with the words of magic, she reached for his knife, slid it gleaming and razor sharp out of the beaded sheath and into her hand, turning the bright big blade before her own admiring eyes a moment before setting to her task.
A square of white silk, embroidered with her own hands using wisp-fine threads from the hourglass spider, she took from her nighttable and let waft out to settle over his outspread hand. The fingers of her left flattened his out, palm-up.
A kiss on his parted mouth, lips pliable and swollen from the previous passion, tongue already trained to answer her.
A moment more she looked down at him, a glance at the adjoining door, and a smile that was wickedly and deeply satisfied.
"Marie gives you your vengeance, plainsman - d' life of your enemy." All he'd wanted was the opportunity, and Marie-Laure would give it to him - Vickers would be so surprised to find his assassin nesting beside him! A gentle caress down the angled cheek in appreciation of the last service he would do her. Had her master been trustworthy, she might have given him his life, but betrayal and treachery were Vickers' way, and the spirits of her mothers as well as her loa enjoyed this irony as much as she. That the plainsman would die either by being shot at once by the bodyguards or hung for the murder she would tearfully testify to witnessing did not concern her, she rejoiced in her heart. Blood sacrifices were necessary ...
Slicing fast and true through the cloth and deep into the pad under his thumb, she caught his cry of startled pain in her mouth and held him down with her soft weight, humming ritual words against his lips to mingle the sounds as she mingled their blood with her own cut hand pressed hard on top the cloth, gathering them for his child in the spreading pattern staining the white silk square.
But he was more than wild from mountain and plain, as much painfully-learned instinct as conscious will, and fey in ways she had not anticipated. Being held down woke a private terror he had never been able to overcome, and what had been distant alarm became a survivalist's strident clamor.
Blindly, he struck out with his free hand, quicker and stronger than Marie-Laure thought he possibly could, snatched her insensate hand and his knife in it. Not really knowing up from down, he simply heaved whatever it was off him until he could breathe, the weight on him gone.
Ran hard into the wall on his shoulder, and so he knew he was upright, stopped there holding onto it until he could see in a vague watery way, reeling with a dizziness that did not get any better. Out, get out, only get out, the mindless terror of an animal, and of a man knowing he'd somehow been trapped ...
Vickers held her in his arms, roared and wept with all apparent grief, and no one noted the light of fury in his tear-stricken eyes except Orson, standing pale and terrified in the shadows, rigidly unmoving.
She had ruined it in her double-dealing, in the secrets Vickers should have known underlay her acquiescence to this journey in the first place. What she'd done he'd known immediately by the reddened skin on her throat and cheek from a rough male mouth, by the scent, and the look in her scornfully sated eyes. That alone was unforgivable, his rage had been volcanic.
Oh, no matter to her that his plans hinged on Tanner being taken in drugged and helpless silence from under the noses of his friends, out into the desert and an unmarked grave. It would have been easy to pick off the other six when they went looking for him out there.
Yet she had shown no fear in the face of his anger despite having bled under it many times, there was only triumph in her dark molten eyes. And triumph in the hand laid protectively over her womb that told him with a horrified chill what dark cause had been fulfilled. Like a queen, she'd laughed and said with threatening certainty that the plainsman would not be hard to find, Marie-Laure knew he would come for Vickers, he would never abandon that duty.
That had been her mistake, like so many generals before her forgetting in the excitement of the goal within reach that it was not yet quite there. Nothing brought Vickers' cunning to the fore more forcefully than being threatened. Defying him as she had never dared - what cause had she to be so brave? By her state when he'd first come into her room, a cool cloth to her split lip where she'd been hit, the tracker had obviously broken free of her as well, yet she was curiously undisturbed. Which meant what she intended was not lost in Tanner's escaping her ... which meant she intended Tanner to kill him and had given him what he needed to do so for her. In that realization, in that instant, the alliance he'd had such implicit faith in died forever.
She'd had the devil in her smile, secure in her dealings, and confident in her freedom, scoffing at the blood that rose in a choking flood to his face to realize the enormity of her betrayal beyond welcoming his most dreaded enemy into her body.
"You were going to turn him on me, my beautiful, faithless harlot. You hoped my old weapon would become yours against me. Do you think I cannot more easily devise a way to use you, willingly or nay?"
Marie-Laure's smile faltered, vanished, in panicked understanding of her own miscalculation, the hand over her stomach spread defensively. Disaster loomed in Vickers' eyes, triumph stolen from her. His smile to see this realization was deeply satisfied.
"You are cut ... yet I see no knife, so it was Tanner's, and he took it with him. Evidence, perhaps?" A horrible sensation of a bigger spider, a bigger web than ever she had spun enveloping her, fraying the design she had not allowed, in her pride, to be completed. The mothers clamored in helpless fury within her and she frantically tried to think of a way to salvage the situation - a little time was all she needed! An hour, a day!
"Woman," he said in a low cold voice, "You have underestimated me if you believed for one moment that I would not use you - alive or dead - to safeguard myself. Or that I would allow your bastard child to take a breath!"
Nevermore had she smiled, and there was only horror on that face now, and death.
A glimpse was all Charlie had, breathless with running after the sound of the turmoil, knowing as he neared it was Marie-Laure's suite. A glimpse that would never after leave him, nor allow to close the yawning chasm that opened in his heart. He'd believed himself scarred long beyond grief, and he'd been horribly wrong.
The preacher's broad back came between them, and still she was all Charlie could see. So much blood, so savagely her perfection maimed and her elegance gone in a graceless ruin, her clothing torn obscenely, a thousand cuts ... Nothing would move, not eyes or body or lungs or brain or heart, all stopped.
As if from a great distance, Charlie heard the confused babble of the hotel's guests and staff, clotted in horrified fascination in the doorway in their wrappers and night-caps, several insisting they had seen the murderer not long ago, yes, outside their own doors! A savage frontiersman, he was, with his clothes in disarray, his gunbelt in his hand, and a terrible knife dripping blood as he escaped, stumbling and wild-eyed, down their very hall! Their sincerity was too obvious for Charlie to dismiss, their descriptions too much the same, all agreeing he had been drunk and violent, barely able to walk, and yet laying all about him with that bloody blade when they opened their doors to inquire after the noise.
His plainsman would not have. Could not have. Wild and woolly, even Indian grown, he wouldn't have, Charlie couldn't put his mind around it, couldn't reconcile it with the man he so admired. Because of that admiration, Marie-Laure had tried to protect the plainsman. For Charlie, she had gone against her master and put herself in the way of ... this. No, no, he wouldn't have, it had to be a mistake. Yet there were the plainsman's friends, and in their bewildered silence only the youngest voiced denial. The gambler was livid, accusing Tanner of lying to them in agreeing to wait on a consensus and saying so in floridly furious terms that no one refuted.
They knew Tanner, these six men did, and Charlie had to admit with a bitter hot rush of grief that he did not - could he have been so tricked? It seemed the Preacher thought so, there was an enormous rage in his grief and it filled the room like a mighty storm, he took her from Vickers and held her as though she were the only thing in the world of any import, the powerful bones and crags of his face stark with maddened mourning.
There was an unhappy coldness on the tall mustachioed gunslinger's face as he studied a faded blue bandana he'd retrieved from the floor, the gunman in black blank as a statue as he saw it in his friend's hand. The tall black man looked truly pained for her, and though Charlie knew they had admired her, that the Preacher had been infatuated as utterly as so many before him, he wanted them all to go away. Not to see her like that, because she was so proud of her beauty and she wouldn't want anyone to see her like that.
His life lost direction in those few teeming minutes, his dreams died. Marie-Laure was the only way he'd ever seen to the freedom he wanted, the only one who valued him, and though he'd known she had her uses for him, her faith that he could be useful had given him a kind of faith in himself. Now all he knew was that it hurt.
Vin woke in a narrow alley behind several large crates, dusty-mouthed and the sun lancing into his eyes painfully so he closed them again with a bone-deep groan.
For a queasy minute he had no idea where up was, his stomach clenched and his skull throbbed toward what had to be an inevitable explosion of his brains out the top. Seemed to take a month to find his feet and remember how all his bones hooked together, another one to get up, and standing up not a sure thing even then. His eyes wouldn't focus, and he felt stiff as an old skeleton, but he finally figured out how to walk, made it to the corner running a hand along the wall for balance and earning a nice collection of splinters along the way.
But as soon as he reached the street, something huge and furious came barreling at him with the velocity of a train, he barely had time to lift his head before a beefy shoulder slammed into his chest so hard it drove every shred of breath from his body. He got pick up off his feet, and carried back and down so he took the same shoulder just as hard in the stomach as they thumped into the ground, his head cracking on the packed dirt.
Stunned, he could do nothing under the crushing weight, fighting desperately just to breathe and failing, didn't even see the meaty fist that snapped his head sideways into the dust and blasted him back to nowhere.
"Josiah! Quit it, he ain't fightin' back!"
J.D.'s voice cracking with alarm at his ear only annoyed Josiah further, he lifted Vin half off the ground by his collar bunched tight around his throat, and would've hit him again no matter he was bonelessly unconscious but for Buck throwing himself bodily onto his back, levering long strong arms under Josiah's chin and hauling back as hard as he could. It was like trying to move a bear off a kill.
"Little help here, J.D. ... Josiah, you're a reasonable man! Not wantin' t'kill Vin, right? Quit this, now, Almighty, Josiah ... get ... off him ... now ..." Buck grunted with effort, straining with every bit of strength in his rangy body, but even with J.D. hanging onto his right arm like a cat on a bull, the best they could do was keep him from hitting Vin again. Until the blued barrel of Chris's .45 came over Buck's shoulder and planted itself cold and hard against the preacher's temple.
"Josiah ..." Quiet, but implacable. The big preacher stilled, but did not let Vin go, breath rasping furiously and eyes glaring like enraged blue beasts in twin caves back over his burly shoulder at Chris.
There came the sliding click of the hammer cocking under Chris' thumb, stonefaced behind the deadly level of the barrel and his eyes were fierce, his voice a mortal warning, "I ain't gonna let y'kill 'im no matter what anybody said, especially Vickers. Particularly not over somethin' as unlikely as this."
"Unlikely?" Josiah launched himself to his full height carrying Buck on his back, J.D. yelping as he tumbled off his arm and Vin dangling in his left hand like he didn't even know they were there. Chris' aim just shifted bluntly to Josiah's knee, and his head tilted meaningfully. Maybe he wouldn't kill him, but he would make him let Vin go one way or the other.
"Ain't lettin' y'do something I reckon you'll be real sorry for later." Chris said flatly, "Reckon I know this man better'n you do, and I know you, too, Josiah, this ain't a thing you want to do."
It took a long, very uncertain, moment before Josiah dropped Vin like a rag-doll into the dirt, and turned to face Chris, his big jaw set pugnaciously, shaking with rage, but fighting for reason. God, he wanted to howl and rend ...
"He tried to get to Vickers even after he told us he wouldn't," he shouted, "He used his Indian ways on her to do it - and whether he meant to or not, it cost her her life, he took her from me!"
"We don't know that, Josiah ..." Chris insisted, risking the boiling fury that flared in Josiah. They'd all learned the preacher could be made single-mindedly irrational by involvements of the heart, it was a riddle none of them had yet figured out as well as a danger they were all wary of - but this woman had been more than a fantasy or an infatuation, and that made Josiah more dangerous than Chris ever wanted to know.
Josiah threw up his hands, bristled big as a bear with furious disbelief, "Did you see her, Larabee? Wasn't his bandana there? Didn't the witnesses say they saw him leaving? By God, what do you need? The hounds of hell have been at his heels for weeks now over a vendetta that's eatin' him alive, he got himself too drunk last night, and he went searchin' out his revenge, he lied to us, he took her virtue and he took ..." His voice broke.
Chris didn't make him say it, hearing grief so profound that the big man was near tears despite his rage. He hoped he was making the right decision as he holstered his gun and took a step so he was well within Josiah's deadly reach. The preacher quaked, glared hot as fire, and when he made no move Chris, said with a quiet intensity of voice and expression,
"Josiah - does it seem like somethin' Vin would do?" Seeing something in Josiah's grief-stricken eyes he never had before and his eyebrows knotted. He went on, "Sure, Vin lied, but he's a man wouldn't want us involved if he could help it, I understand that, he's as big a damned fool as the rest of us. But killin' a woman ... you ever known him to even speak harshly to a female?"
"Hell, thought he was scared of 'em ..." Buck cracked, his grin going a little sheepish in the stern spear of Chris's glance. J.D. shot pale looks among them, filled with anxiety. In all the time he'd known them - granted, it wasn't that long - there'd been arguments, even some punches thrown, as might be expected from such different men thrown together ... but never like this. And never anyone goin' after Vin, he was like the eye of their storms, he'd walk away from a fight if he could, wouldn't get drawn in ... J.D. stared at the tracker sprawled at his feet, uncharacteristically disheveled and obviously having had a pretty rough night ... surreptitiously he nudged Vin's shirt over his shoulder with the toe of his boot to cover a trio of parallel scratches. Though he remained braced defensively over Vin, a sick doubt tightened his belly. He didn't understand this at all, it tipped everything over in him. He'd felt so safe, had a place he understood with folk he understood and admired. But he didn't understand this, not any of it. Except it was dividing them, maybe permanently.
The commotion had attracted the attention of the Sheriff and his men. Malcolm Vickers was with them, wearing a vicious gladness that J.D. saw focused on Vin, and for the first time since his Ma died, he felt lost.
They sat close around a very small fire five miles outside of town in the mouth of a sheltered arroyo. Shadows flickered low in the thin stand of cottonwoods, and the quiet was the kind that made the hair on the back of J.D.'s neck stand up. He felt a jagged distance between them all with a sort of helpless fright even Buck's reassurances didn't ease. Josiah sat in the darkness with his back to them against a fallen tree, unable to even speak in his furious grieving or look at anyone, frustration and disappointment rampaging in his soul. His father's voice rang loud in his ears, his words reverberating bitterly in the son who believed him no matter how he raged against such faith in a man he despised. Ezra sat near him on the same log, but facing the fire to give the man his privacy.
Matters had been taken out of their hands with the arrival of the Sheriff and deputies, Vickers nearly accused them of being participants in the woman's murder, hints of a blackmail plot gone awry, and Chris had immediately seen the threat that might entrap them all - and he had the keen impression that Vickers would like that just fine. An argument flared back and forth about taking Vin, and all Chris had known to do was get the rest of them out of town before they all ended up in jail. Too much turmoil among them to do any of them, or Vin, any good, and he was too furious himself to sense the doubts in men he reckoned should've known better. He'd spent a long tense minute sizing Vickers, and making no bones about it, Buck and Nathan and J.D. all examining the men behind him, and by the time that minute was up, both men knew where their enemies were.
With a deepening sense of frustration and forboding, Chris ran his hand over his face, trying hard to keep his temper in check, to keep from rising, mounting up and leaving all this mess, had a shitload of his own turmoil to live with day by day and didn't need this. But every minute Vin spent in that jail things got more deadly in his mind. He might've known Tanner for only a short time, but he knew he wasn't a rapist nor a murderer, didn't fit in any way with what he knew of him or what his instincts said, and he was a man who trusted his instincts. Didn't care what anyone testified to or what evidence they had, there wasn't an eyewitness, and rich men could arrange more than most folks could comprehend.
Chris stood up and took his saddle up with him. J.D. launched himself to his feet eagerly a breath behind: "We're gonna break Vin out, right, Chris?"
Ezra was not surprised, but he said, "Do you appreciate the fact that this will make us all outlaws, Mr. Labaree? That they will of a damned certainty be expecting just such a rash action on our part?"
"That's why I'm goin' alone."
"No, Chris, I ..."
"No, Buck."
"...can back you up, you get in trouble, nobody's there!"
"NO, Buck, you can do that here." Stressing the last word to convey in the private language of old friends that he needed Buck where he was to keep the rest together and quiet, "These men are smart, rich, and ..."
"Desperate?" Ezra drawled with a cryptic smile, doing a one-handed cut and slide with thoughtless attention to his own hands, but Chris could almost see the cogs turning behind that bland faÁade and he looked at him hard, his temper going.
"You got anything else t'say, Standish? You ain't said a word in two hours until this minute, n' that ain't like you, free with your opinions and all like you are."
One of Ezra's elegant eyebrows arched, green eyes sparking bland defiance.
Buck grinned at Ezra like a friendly wolf baring sharp and not entirely unthreatening teeth, "Yeah, Ezra, there's somethin' more here n' meets the eye, n' if we feel it, you do, too, bein' a little deeper inside the enemy camp n' all. Seems t'mean you got the best chance of figgerin' this out." A pregnant beat, "If you haven't already."
Ezra faced them full on, taking no offense and even grudgingly impressed that they had also recognized the underlying machinations that had been occupying his thoughts, despite his deep sympathy for Josiah. Aside from his anger at Tanner's lies and the disaster that might draw them all in if they weren't very careful, something bothered him deeply about this whole affair, a sense of wrongness Ezra Standish would never ignore. There was also something truly deadly lurking in Josiah's understandable anger, something that seemed too disturbingly near madness to tempt lightly. He glanced soberly at the preacher and said with as much deference as he was able, "Although I agree that Mr. Tanner's unilateral action after giving us his word is reprehensible..."
Chris stiffened, J.D. sat up straighter and would've interrupted in Vin's defense but for Buck's restraining hand.
"I am also a man who naturally questions an overabundance of coincidence that proves inordinately convenient to one party. Though the logic presently escapes me, too many coincidences have a way of alerting me to larger designs. My burgeoning sense that this matter of Mr. Tanner's is escalating requires answers to some questions only Mr. Tanner can provide. I do not appreciate being moved against my will, and I must acknowledge a deep suspicion that this is the case - whether it is Mr. Tanner or Mr. Vickers who is manipulating us remains to be seen, but that we are being manipulated has become glaringly obvious. One must consider that that Mr. Vickers benefits enormously by Mister Tanner's arrest as well as our ... lack of cohesion on his behalf." Exactly Chris' suspicions.
"A pretty way of saying bein' set at each other's throats, n' too convinced he's guilty to try 'n save 'im." Nathan said, soft with warning against allowing themselves to be manipulated that way.
"You want answers, Standish?" Chris snapped, patience hard-stretched and near to breaking, "Well so do I, and we agree only Tanner has them. And you're obviously thinking the same thing I am - if Vickers has his way, nobody's ever going to know what really happened unless we get him out of there."
Josiah rose from behind the log and strode forward, shaking Ezra's hand off and bristling with all the incipient threat of a big man, a strange fire in his eyes. "I am not willing to carry this sin for any man, nor relieve him from justice! As ye reap, so shall ye sow, and if Mr. Tanner is not to face the hangman's noose in Davis, then he shall face it by my hand! I am not willing to rescue him from justice!"
Chris regarded him across the fire, hard and not giving an inch, and Josiah glowered, leaned forward furiously, "He wanted information and he took it any way he could, he betrayed us ..." He actually felt feverish, so unable to put the grisly picture of his butchered hope out of his mind, the anger expanding like oil over water, redness in the periphery of his sight that he couldn't stop even knowing it was slipping his leash. Demons, his father had said, and those he harbored would forever keep him from finding peace. For so short a time he had dared believed otherwise.
Chris restrained himself with a real effort, he did not want to have to shoot this man to save Vin, but all he knew for certain was that they couldn't leave him to whatever Vickers intended in Davis. "We don't know anything of the kind, Josiah! That woman worked for Vickers, and we know it'd make his life a lot easier if Vin just quit breathin' without no more fuss! Hangin's one way t'kill a man legal-like, and we don't know enough t'say that's what Vin's got comin'."
Suggesting without saying that Marie-Laure might have been Vickers agent, a thing Josiah could not consider, and his rage flared white-hot; "Might make a lot of things easier! Might be God's own justice!" J.D. wiggled past Buck and went right into Josiah's face then with the fearless passion of youth, a deadly dangerous move by the leap of fire in the Preacher's glower. Only Buck's hands on Josiah's powerful chest and a truly threatening eye kept them apart;
"Ain't gonna touch that boy in anger, Preacher, not whilst I'm drawin' breath." Murmured quietly and with a whisper of a smile on his handsomely angular face, but Josiah heard the unshakeable intention though his own rage and fought to direct it anywhere but at this naÔve boy in front of him. What could J.D. know of things that could rip a man's future from him? Take all hope of forgiveness? All expectation of anything but pain and penance ... this time Vin Tanner wore the face of that old enemy, and he fought to keep himself from the unforgivable sin hurting J.D. would be.
"You seen her, Josiah, you really think Vin could do that to a woman? Well I don't! Not for a fuckin' second!" Too furious to be afraid of the madness in the man hulking over him, color high and eyes blazing. "She's dead, and Vin was seen in the hall the next floor down an hour before anybody knew it - that don't make him a murderer! They didn't let us talk to any of the witnesses, hell, they chased us all away before we had the chance, never even let us look at the statements!"
Chris's look sharpened, Buck's and Nathan's as well. This was true - why wouldn't they want them to talk to the witnesses if it was so open and shut a case? A prickly sense of being cornered got bigger by the minute, like the teeth of a trap were closing around them all. About then Chris truly understood Vin's urgency to kill Vickers - here, indeed, was a wicked clever bastard, and they weren't none of them out of this yet. Splintered, they were useless to Vin and to themselves, and he had to keep that from happening.
"It's fair." Nathan said with quiet authority and he looked to Josiah, eyes liquid with sympathy and regret. "Was any of us in this situation, we'd have to look into it, Josiah, you can't deny it. Got enough t'make a reasonable doubt. It don't serve that good woman's soul not to know for sure what happened."
"And what sort of justice will he get at the hands of friends such as this?" Josiah asked angrily, pointing at Chris, "Are you telling me you don't intend to let him run? I want your word, Chris Larabee, that justice is served - if not in Davis, then by my hand, in the name of God!"
"If it comes to it, Josiah." Easily given because he was certain of Tanner's innocence, and for a moment the two of them just looked at each other, Chris challenging any further disagreement with his hand too easy by his gun-butt, and a little startled by Josiah's obvious struggle with his rage. But he got no argument.
"Then I'll be back with him directly, n' you be ready t'ride."
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