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.
Vin came slowly into a growing list of discomforts that suddenly included an urgent nausea.
When Chris got back to the cell, the tracker was on his knees beside the bunk, doubled over with one arm twisted viciously in the manacle around his wrist as he retched like to turn himself inside out, his other hand pressed hard to his chest like the jarring was causing him considerable pain, and Chris rattled the bars with the heel of his hand.
"Open it." Not for a second did the young deputy think about disobeying the cold-bitten command or the pistol that flashed snake-bite-quick from its holster to the end of his numb and bleeding nose.
Two pale eyes every bit as deadly as the single black eye of that gunbarrel, two men in the outer office hammered to the floor with savage efficiency, so quick he was all shadow and motion. Oh no, he'd do whatever the gunslinger wanted, and as quick as he could! The deputy fumbled with the key, dropped it with a pale apologetic look as he scrambled to pick it up again. Chris directed him with his chin to precede him into the cell and he did, almost falling forward from the shove that sent him into the far wall away from the door.
"Where's the key to this manacle?" Chris snapped, laying his hand on the hard bow of Tanner's back without taking his eyes or his pistol off the deputy, "N' what in hell did you do to him? What's wrong with him?"
"I don't know, I swear to God, mister, I don't know, the key's wherever the Sheriff is, he keeps it on him all the time, and nobody's touched him, he's been passed out every time I laid eyes on him, I swear to God mister, please ..."
Cold as death coming those bright glacial eyes, and the deputy closed his own eyes against it, raised trembling hands in gruesome anticipation.
Chris swore viciously. Only one option then; with his free hand, he grabbed the thin blanket and bunched it over the manacle chain stretched across the bunk, then pushed down on Vin's back to keep him still as he shoved the pistol barrel into it. The report was still too loud and the young deputy jumped at the sound, so amazed to be alive that he hardly objected to the blow upside the head that laid him unconscious on the floor.
Chris wrapped his hand urgently in the collar of Vin's coat and hauled him to his feet, balanced him against a violent sway and very unsteady legs, his face pale and sick; Josiah had left him a nasty bruise upside his left temple to go with that sore chest.
"Come on, you better be able t'walk, 'cause we're in a damned big hurry now." He manhandled his reeling charge down the narrow hallway to the back door, snagging his hat and gunbelt on the way.
"You goin' up in the saddle or across it? What in hell's wrong with you?" A hard shake when he got no answer and Tanner struggled to stay upright, managed to nod. His head ached and his chest hurt in every move and breath and he didn't know how he'd come to be hurt like that, or why he was dizzy and disoriented and really needing a moment to just suck in the cool night air. But Chris nearly tossed him up into the saddle, pale eyes piercingly urgent. Despite a creeping panic, Vin's legs tightened on the horse automatically, fingers gripped at rein and horn and the body, by instinct, fell into balance with Peso as the big beast burst forward into a hard gallop. He held the line through the back alleys and out into the spangled darkness of the foothills where Peso could run flat out, and he could finally work on breathing.
Chris kept an eye to him, unsteady in the saddle, but he'd never seen him lose his seat on a horse, even dead asleep - it usually bein' Peso, that was saying a lot. As the miles passed, Vin seemed to regain some equilibrium, though he'd press the flat of his hand now and then to that spot on his chest where Josiah's shoulder had hit him; big damn shoulder, hard as a rock, too, made Chris wince himself to think about it. By the time they reached the others hiding in the thin wood, he was pretty steady, but still Chris watched him, wondering what could have unbalanced him like that. Liked his whiskey, Tanner did, but he wasn't one for getting drunk despite having been there enough times with Chris. Not a hangover ... maybe Josiah'd hurt him more than he'd thought, but something about him was off.
The fire was deserted when they arrived almost two hours later, but the rest came out of the darkness holstering their guns hesitantly, except for Josiah. He went at a hard walk straight for Vin with such a look on his heavy-boned face that Peso shied hard away from him. Instinctively, Vin kept the horse moving where the slew of haunch and shoulder kept Josiah away, confused by the big preacher's hostility. What was going on that had their eyes all goin' slip-away from his? What had been going on for the last - God, he didn't even know how long it was since he'd felt in control of himself, of his own mind. He hadn't quit being scared since he'd waked, because he felt with a sure forboding that Vickers had taken him somehow, and maybe all of them with him. Sure nothing hear eased his mind on that score.
"Josiah, back off, man's got a right to tell his side, dammit, you let 'im tell it on his own!" Chris rasped with angry impatience, "I've about had enough of this shit to last me a lifetime ..." Gripping Josiah's sleeve and jerking hard, "Back ... off." And if it'd be fists, Chris could deliver no matter how big you were, had a punch like a horse-kick.
Reluctantly Josiah did so, directing a look at Vin that could've skinned a buffalo. For a second, it looked like Vin might just bolt. He didn't, but he stayed horsed and looked at each of them in turn as Peso danced, aggressive in the air of threat, while Vin tried to read what was going on in their expressions.
"Get on down, Vin, nobody's gonna touch you."
"Well, now, why the hell would they want to?" Edged in anger himself now, bristling at their uneasy looks and very nervous to feel hostility and suspicion turned his way. Didn't understand a lick of this and wasn't sure he wanted to, scanning escape routes by long force of habit, hackles high.
"Why?" Josiah shouted, leaning forward aggressively with such an expression of hatred that Vin barely recognized him. "Why? As if that good woman's life means nothing? As if you didn't play us all with your pretendin' to wait, as if you didn't lie when we were tryin' to help you and instead violated her honor and her flesh to get what you wanted from her ..."
"What the hell are you talkin' about, Josiah?" Again his narrowed eyes flew the circle of their faces, demanding answers this time. Men he'd come to think of as friends looking at him like he was something filthy ... then Josiah's impossible words sank in. "Now listen here, all of you!" Standing in the stirrups as he realized what they meant, "I never hurt no woman, never did, never would!"
"You sayin' you didn't touch no woman last night, Tanner? " Josiah cried, his big hands wild in the air, "You sayin' you slept the night away in your own blankets under the stars? You gonna lie that big?"
Pale and furiously bewildered, Vin yelled back, "Ain't sayin' that at all! Hell yeah, got myself too drunk, don't know how exactly how that happened, and had some doxy back me up into a wall and ... "
Josiah had hands on him and yanked him off Peso's back in a breath-taking flash of powerful movement, so fast for someone so big and no one could stop him. They went down in a tangle of fighting limbs the other five were hard-pressed to get close enough to separate. Josiah was a grizzly bear of a man, powerful and swift, but Vin had known bad odds on city streets and wild frontiers. A man who'd fought off adults as a child, then desperados and Indians, learned that a slight man used other means when power was the enemy. Hard to keep hold of as an angry tomcat and remarkably flexible, Vin managed to weasel around Josiah's body and yank him back half on top of him, holding him there with his hunting knife laid to the Preacher's throat from behind before anyone even saw him take it to hand. His fingers knuckled in Josiah's close-cropped hair and he tightened his leg around Josiah's when he struggled with a fervent hiss,
"I would never hurt no woman, Josiah, if I was piss-drunk and crazy!"
Josiah surged against the surprisingly durable grip and the razored edge tipped hard at his chin so he felt it break the skin, felt a warm trickle blood, and heard Vin's broken whisper,
"Ain't gonna let you kill me, Josiah, don't make me hurt you t'keep you from it ..."
Helpless, Josiah snarled, "Then explain away the evidence, Tanner, your own actions!"
For a few seconds only the harsh rush of their breathing could be heard, and then Vin let up the knife and furiously shoved the preacher away from him. He came to his feet sheathing the blade with one angry thrust and was finally forced to admit it.
"I can't damn well remember everything that went on last night, it's all in pieces ..."
He pointed at Josiah, though, in certainty of at least one basic fact, "But I sure as hell didn't force no woman, never, and damn sure not the one I was with last night! That ain't the way that happened!"
The Preacher glared at him, but Vin didn't back down, they faced off like dusty mongrels breathing hard and standing tiptoe on the verge of one of them dying.
"Can't remember? Damned convenient, Tanner!" Josiah shook his head, slapped at his dusty pants in gnashing frustration, but one thing Josiah had never mistook since he'd felt the Calling was the truth in another man's eyes, that light he had never been able to deny even when he had wished to. And Vin was telling the truth about not remembering.
"How can a man forget such a thing, by a merciful God!" He cried, but the truth left him with no altar on which to lay the rage rampaging through him, all those feelings lain so long ago to their unsanctified rest that were now gnashing and chewing inside him. It was so hard to refrain from killing Vin whether he remembered or not just for embodying all those old furies, and Vin blanched to see that barely restrained desire.
But gradually Josiah straightened, and his fists opened with enormous effort, suspicions still clear but knowing Larabee would not allow harm to Tanner until it was proven beyond his doubt. His voice was low and grumbled with passion, "I believe you don't know, Mr. Tanner. But that does not mean that what you are accused of did not happen!"
Striking quick flesh by the tightening of Tanner's mouth. That much Vin couldn't deny, since he had no clear memory of last night or anything up until an hour ago. No one made a move for fear of breaking the fragile truce until finally Vin dropped his head, fighting a lingering dizziness that got worse to realize how truly he did not remember. That had never happened to him, ever, not even when he would've given his soul for it.
"You hurt, Vin?" Nathan said softly, having seen him push his hand into his chest a couple of times now, but Vin half shook his head, barely paying attention until J.D. said,
"Shit, Nathan, he's lucky Josiah didn't bust him into a hundred pieces!"
Josiah? Vin knew he'd been hurt somehow, a fall, maybe, his chest ached and ... he'd taken a shot to the heat from someone's fist ... Josiah's? The furious glare that met his disbelieving eyes denied nothing but the urge to do further harm.
"Somebody please tell me what happened." Vin said, soft and shaken, "It don't make no sense in my recollection."
Nobody said anything for a moment, they looked at each other - how did you tell a man he'd been all but convicted of raping a woman and slaughtering her as horribly as a human being could be slaughtered? Could a man, indeed, ever be drunk enough not to remember something like that?
"According to two witnesses, the lady Marie-Laure LeBeau accused you of rape and murder just before she perished." Ezra drawled coolly, eloquent eyebrows lofting over sharp eyes.
Vin's head shot up, stunned; "What?" He said on a horrified breath, his face growing very still as these words sunk in. Darkness eclipsed his eyes as he looked at them, realizing ...
The shoulder of Ezra's no-longer gleaming green jacket rolled over an expressive shrug, "So it was said, sir, Mr. Vickers and his aide swear she testified to it with her dying breath, no one found it unbelievable. Indeed, there were also witnesses who reported your flight in some detail, blood on your person and threatening further violence upon them as you made your escape. To say nothing of physical evidence of your presence in her room, to wit, your bandana. I notice it's missin'."
Vin's hand drifted to his bare neck as Josiah growled, "Cut her in the hundred ways the Comanche taught you ..."
Which they'd all witnessed, by the revulsion of their eyes to be reminded of it, and he sank down onto his heels where he stood around a cold shake that would've dropped him otherwise, one forearm hard across his stomach. God, trapped every way but up, he knew his knife would be bloodied if he took it out to look at it. And they believed it of him. He couldn't raise his head, heartsick.
"I never thought so, Vin." J.D. declared with stout defiance, needing to say something, do something in answer to the stricken look on Vin's averted face, "We didn't know is all, n' we still don't know, nobody does ... well we don't, nobody let us see the written statements from those witnesses, nobody asked 'em t'stay in town 'til the trial, that means all they got is heresay, that's what the Judge calls it, n' that's comin' from Vickers and his man!" Chris' eyes sharpened with grim approval as he realized the kid had a better grasp on the legal facts than anyone else, and believed in Vin every bit as much as Chris did himself, which meant Buck would go along. Damn, he didn't like thinking in terms of allies and enemies among them.
"Well come on! Nobody thinks that's funny? We don't know that woman, n' Vin's one of us ..."
Buck put a hand on J.D.s arm, seeing a violence in Josiah that mounted by the moment. "J.D., that's enough."
Tanner came indecisively to his feet, fingers hooked on his hips and his shoulders high as he tried to hide how bad this felt, and even worse the dawning realization that whatever had happened to him was now sweeping them all up in it. Chances were it was already too late.
"If Vickers' swore t'this, it's a sure t'be a lie. That woman ..." A quick slicing glance at Josiah. "I never seen her before, the boy come n' told me t'meet her at the hotel, n' I figgered I wouldn't get a better chance at him with all of you breathin' down my neck ..." After he'd agreed to wait, and he had to take their accusing looks because he'd lied to them, had never intended anything but to get to Vickers and get him dead as fast as he could. Josiah plainly had this lie uppermost in his mind, and had no idea how distressing that was to Vin, who admired him deeply. Much as he wanted to defend himself, he didn't say anything more, knowing it would sound like an excuse to admit that was the last clear memory he had of that night, knowing there were holes he couldn't fill that might bury him in their eyes. Tangled and filthy as ever any web Vickers had spun and he couldn't get it off him this time, maybe not even off them. The thought brought him near to despair.
"Charlie ... must've gave me whatever it was ..." Only just realizing that himself, and his voice faded with shock. As they watched, he flushed hard across the tops of his cheekbones, his eyes flicked down and stayed there as too many half-remembered things crossed through his mind. Only Chris made sense of what he'd said, knowing then that it hadn't been liquor that'd done Vin in - which meant someone wanted him where he'd been.
"Don't make no sense." Vin murmured with a shake of his head.
"The dark angel thought he was saving the world, Mr. Tanner. Madness is it's own logic."
Which brought Vin's head up and his eyes to Josiah, considering and nervous. By their faces, they were all wanting him to say what had happened and there was no way he could make sense of his scattered memories. Some startlingly clear, her skin and the taste of her and how wild it felt, how intense. Blanks, flashes ... had he hit her? His eyes widened and a shudder worked its way up his spine at that new memory, he looked dumbly at his hands and spied small cuts across the knuckles of the right that might've come from teeth, a deep cut in the fleshy part of his left thumb and a sting on his shoulder that made him stop and slide his suddenly trembling hand under his shirt ... deep parallel scratches ...
J.D. looked desperately to Chris, to Buck, the tracker had a vague dumb look on his face like he wasn't with them at all.
That he could hit a woman at all much less forget about it ... Vin could feel his blood drain away to a breathlessly horrible thought - good God, could he have killed her and not remember it? A sound tried to come up out of his chest that hurt to keep in. There could be no potion that'd make a man kill who wouldn't, there couldn't be, or he was well and truly lost.
"I'd say we got things to be lookin' into, then. ..." Chris stepped into the firelight with temper banked in his lightening eyes, mouth small and tight. Didn't set well with him to have Vin looking at them a staked goat surrounded by wolves, nothing here set well with Chris and his short-hairs were standing high and hard.
"We don't know, and Tanner don't know, exactly what happened or who ..." A pointed look around the circle, "is behind it."
Vin's wide blue eyes came to him like he was his last hope.
"So we got some things we gotta be looking' into."
The tracker's nose went up after dust on the wind, suddenly becoming aware of where they were and what direction the dust was coming from.
"We gotta go." He said with quiet urgency, and the indecision still twitching in him had nothing to do with that advice.
Though Josiah threw his hands into the air angrily and Ezra made a scoffing sound to go along with the admittedly unwilling doubt in Buck and Nathan's eyes, Chris believed Vin, and moved to extinguish the fire.
"Boys, by the hurry on Tanner we've got to run now, and talk later."
"At the earliest opportunity, however, this discussion will be continued in depth, are we agreed? Mister Sanchez has a valid and profound concern, and I, for one do not intend to face prison on Mr. Tanner's behalf." Ezra stated stoutly.
Vin took the suspicion defiantly, mortally afraid of far more than their ending up in prison. He looked to Chris for the only opinion that mattered to him just now, figuring he had about a second to find out if he'd be better off alone and not a second to fall prey to the grief of imagining it. Maybe he could lead the posse off the rest if it was too dangerous to stay with them, but he wanted to keep together, he knew they were going to need him and it was his damn fault they were in this fix ... God, the situation was far more dangerous than they knew, more than he could tell them, mad as they all were. Would Chris trust him? Stand on faith alone?
Chris never hesitated, and Vin felt that loyalty in a place so deep and private it had no name even in him.
"We'll figure this out, Vin, smart bunch like us." The gunslinger said with a smile that knew that unnamed place, so brief a moment to convey as much as it did between them.
"Then we gotta get out of here, posse's comin' and they're cuttin' us off from the end of the valley, they push us east and we're trapped against the mountains."
Chris took them up in a sweeping glance; "Let's ride."
The posse came in a wide arcing line that did, indeed, cut them off from the their line of escape through the mouth of the valley, a lot of men, and Vickers' hired guns a large majority among them. Though Vin tried again and again to turn west and run for the pass that would let them out of the enclosed basin and into the plains beyond, the brightness of the moon and dawn too quickly coming allowed the posse to force the seven east, into the wall of the mountains. Two hard ragged hours they pushed the seven upslope, in and out of cover, zig-zagging back and forth trying to break west, but driven inexorably into the outreaching grasp of the foothills. They barely managed to stay ahead of riders trying to flank them on either side, but drove them back the moment dawn gave them enough light to aim with a fusillade of bullets that quickly taught the posse this prey was uncommonly dangerous. Though pursuit dropped back out of rifle range then, and the posse lost sight of them in the early morning gloom, it soon became obvious that if they couldn't catch them outright, they'd settle for chivying them into the gradually steepening arroyos.
Vin knew the dull thud of clay under Peso's hooves that defined the beginning of the foothills, and the mountains above were a daunting sight in the coming of day. They reared pale and ghostly against the lightening sky, a steep maze of gorges and narrow passes and defiles, so old that all softness had been dragged off the cragged peaks by the ancient inexorable forces of wind and water and the shifts of the earth. Clay and sand and rock carved and carried down into the valley below to become the slumping foothills from which ridges rose like the ragged teeth of a giant's saw emerging from a towering pile of sawdust. A place that might be impossible to get up, much less over. Buck and Chris both swore viciously when the dawn showed them how high and endless the area truly was, dry as a bone, unfamiliar and complicated ground. But it's very immensity was the first hope Vin had: However many canyons they had to run to find a way up and over, the posse had to run more in searching for them, which might give him the time they needed. These were tough men, experienced in surviving the badlands, even some fair trackers among them, but Vin knew with prideless certainty that they would need every bit of skill he could bring to bear.
The hoofbeats of their horses began to reverberate as the canyon walls gradually rose on either side, one more desperate time he tried to break for anywhere they might shoot their way through the line of pursuit and run, even on the slopes, for the pass that led out of the basin. But a shot snapped through Nathan's hat, and another plocked the ground so near Peso's fore hoof that it threw him off his stride. A sniper, and too near to being ahead of them for Vin's ease, the time had come to give up on getting west from this open ground. The decision was made - he wheeled Peso back toward the canyons and they followed him like they were on a string. If he had to take them in there to keep them alive, damned if he wouldn't find a way to get them to safety, none of them could be allowed to suffer on account of his mistakes, past or present. He headed for the widest canyon mouth he could see, wanting to keep the posse's search area as big as possible. The light increased, pulling the shadows of the night off sandstone walls striped in amber and gold and red. Pursuit spurred them on, and to run deeper into the maze was all they could do.
All that blazing hot day they worked without words in and out of the shallower canyons, trying to keep from being forced deeper, trying to find a way to double back even if it meant a fight, but it gave the posse the time to flank them, and by dusk they were again taking fire from the higher ground and had no choice but to go up.
At nightfall, Vickers' men made an orderly retreat to the encampment set brazenly at the mouth of the canyon the seven had been driven down, pickets spread wide to prevent anyone slipping through.
The Indians laughed about this, said the posse was afraid of the dark and that the seven white men would have all night to get lost and be even harder to find, they might hunt for weeks and find only the dried husks of corpses in the end. Foolish to make the hunting harder when a night could see it done, but the braves had been given horses and whiskey and gold, and were not averse to prolonging the fine opportunity of hunting and killing white men legally. Their fathers and grandfathers had once hunted here, and they had faith that no white man could find a way out. It would be a story to tell.
Those scornful braves were right in that the seven drove on doggedly, not lost, but with firm purpose despite being near dropping from fatigue and sapped by the blistering breeze-less heat of the day passed. There was no relief, either, in the deep chilling cold that followed nightfall, they seemed to shrink into the warmth of their horses and coats. Vin insisted they had to keep going, had to get out of the open ravines where the wide rims made it far too easy to be spotted from above, even from miles behind. It was crucial that the posse not know for certain where they were, and though no one disagreed, their unvoiced frustration and anger ate at Vin. The guilt for putting these innocent men in this deadly fix was nearly overwhelming, but his determination to get them out alive and unharmed was greater still. It was all that mattered to him, it was everything, and if he had to give up his life to get it done, it'd be a price he'd gladly pay.
All night they threaded up into increasingly narrow passes, steepening by degrees and sometimes forcing them, in sudden endings, to backtrack and try again. Finally Vin had to stop to rest the horses, who were becoming clumsy with fatigue on the difficult terrain. They spaced themselves wide in the shadows facing outward, guarding the shifting night, not daring to even speak with Indians maybe scouting the dark. Vin knew they had to get far enough ahead of the posse to give him time to track a way out, they couldn't have known which branch of the canyon the seven had followed. But they would know where they were trying to get, and their trail would be easy enough to pick up in the powdery dust. He regarded the iron challenge of the mountains above them, cold-eyed and driven. It would be rock further up, he hoped to hit rock before dawn, rugged going and most of it would be afoot, but they'd be harder to trail, and the narrowing rise of the gorges would keep snipers from spotting them from above unless they stumbled square onto them.
An hour after daybreak, Tanner got his rock, but too suddenly and in a form he cursed to recognize. He stopped on the trail they'd been walking slow to keep the dust to knee level in the bottom of a dry creek-bed, rocky walls steep on the east, and a loose tumble on the other side. The rest stopped behind him, strung long down the pass, as grateful as the horses for the chance just to be still. Vin dismounted and dropped to his haunches in the track, reins loose in his left hand while the right touched the sand, testing the depth with his fingers and letting it run through as he studied the narrowing way ahead with more and more displeasure. Sinuous curves of water-worn sandstone widened the walls at the bottom, rounded rocks shouldered up too abruptly out of the sand where the trail rose suddenly and disappeared around a narrow curve. A flood-fall, carved by the spring rains sluicing off the bare rock mountains above, and this was the point where the water cascading freely down the face first hit the earth. As he glanced back, a sudden hard set came to his spine; dust rose above the twists and switchbacks behind them, and so he knew some clever son had found their trail. They'd been hearing sporadic gunfire ranging from near to distant for an hour now, Vin figured the posse was blazing away around blind corners in case the seven had been trapped in one of the dead ends. Like this one.
"Fuck me." He hissed and Chris looked around in surprise, saw fury in his clenched jaw. The tracker flicked his fingers over his head in disgust.
"It's a flood-wash, that's why these damned walls got so steep all of a sudden. Sand's scoured off the stones ahead n' we're gonna run smack into nothin' but mountain around that bend, it's a damned dead end."
"What?" Chris's voice ominous in Vin's direct regard, the tracker accepted the blame helplessly.
"I ain't damned scoutin' no more is what, I just walked us all into a corner. This damned gorge ain't gonna let out nowhere up ahead, dead-ends just around that bend. Spring floods make a falls here, n' by how deep and wide it's carved out the rock just ahead, it comes from a goodly height without hittin' anything else before this, the sand is pretty deep." Clearly upset, an urgency on his anger that made Buck take a look back himself, spotting the dust and straightening uneasily.
"Shit," Vin said, "there's finger canyons like this all over, dead ends and pass-throughs where y'think there ain't none, deadfalls from winter flash-floods - we're in a damned maze puzzle n' I ain't been here before, ain't seen it from above n' don't know it t'git us out without walkin' us into them or bein' trapped agin the mountain."
The tracker dropped back onto his heels, hands dangling off his knees. The wide brim of his hat slowly turned until he slapped it against his knee with a vicious oath, raking his hair off his forehead.
Ezra eyed him from horseback with faintly anxious reproof, "I don't believe I've ever heart that particular colorful turn of phrase out of you, Mr. Tanner. Indeed ...," A drawl, but bright-eyed behind the curled brim of his dusty black hat, and elegantly disgruntled as only Ezra could be, "your consternation fails to inspire confidence. Are we to understand that you have led us through this labyrinth into a trap?"
Enough reproach under his easy smile to bring color to Vin's sharp cheekbones, but it was smoldering suspicion from Josiah that lit a fire in his eyes.
"Yep, Standish, that 'pears to about say it. N' that's all it says."
Ezra didn't tempt the simmering anger further even knowing it was primarily self-directed, he'd never seen Vin Tanner lose his temper and suspected he did not want that unknown capacity directed his way just now. The steep walls on either side suddenly made him very uncomfortable.
"So what do we do?" Chris interrupted Vin's feverishly desperate thinking, noting the dust himself, now.
Vin stood up, raked his fingers again through his light-brown hair and then settled his hat back on his head. Chris read his worry plainly and it worried him, but Vin wasn't beat yet. He said thoughtfully,
"Might give 'em the slip yet, ..." Surveying alternate routes as he stood there; "Gotta get to higher ground, Chris, and keep 'em from pickin' us off while we do, keep 'em from seein' us at all if we can so they have to keep searchin' every crack n' canyon. 'Bout three to one odds here, more if they get together, n' by the way single riders keep headin' back downtrail, I'll wager Vickers is back of 'em somewhere with his tents n' cooks n' maids." Richly disdainful, but with whom was open to question.
Buck slouched deep in his saddle, one hand tucked into the high waist of his pants regarding the wisps of dust against the sky that the rest had by now seen as well. Tired horses shifted uneasily under suddenly nervous riders; "They're too close, we ain't got time t'get t'higher ground now without bein' spotted, n' if we stay here, they'll come in right on top of us. Hell, I hope you got your thinkin' cap on, boy, cause this is a tight little box you got us in here, ain't no cover ..."
"That's why I'm goin' up there." Vin pointed up the loose slope behind him that ran up to the highest point nearby, taking no insult at Buck's disagreement. He'd always respected the sharp mind behind Buck's laconic ease, and Buck was just saying what was so; Vin answered him the same way, "There's room up there for a man t'hide n' wait fer 'em, n' even if it's a dead end, and I don't want t'be driven off just yet; spied a mustang wallow yonder that got me t'thinkin'."
"A wallow? What's that matter?" J.D. asked when no one else did, and Vin answered him directly, as was his habit when the kid asked pertinent questions.
"Mustangs don't track but 3 miles from water this time of year, n' I didn't see no mustang sign in the direction we come, which means there must be a track in the higher elevations yonder ifn' I kin spot it. Might be able to from up there. I gotta see where the hell we are, get the lay of things around us, can't be doin' this blind anymore. You all go up the canyon t'that curve there t'lay track to the rocks, n' then back out on the shoulders and down into that split about half a mile back, stay on the rocks much as you can and outta sight, cover yer tracks into the split real careful n' then let the dust settle. They'll follow the trail n' pass you by; figger we can even the odds a piece when they come in thinkin' we've trapped ourselves. You let 'em come, then it'll be up t'you t'make sure none of them get back past you to tell the tale." All had to die, and he didn't miss the looks exchanged among some of them at this necessity. "All their damn shootin', maybe they won't make nothin' of it if we take 'em quick, maybe by the time they're missed, we'll be long gone."
Now, usually Tanner said what he was going to do and went on about it without waiting for anybody's say-so, but their uncertainty stayed him this time, and he looked at them all, half daring them to say what he was painfully aware was going through their minds.
Josiah had no trouble putting words to it; "You're leavin' us to our own fate, Mr. Tanner? Trappin' us like rats in a hole and escaping friend and foe alike, if not God's holy judgment?"
Vin got deadly still, feeling some part of that suspicion slide through all their minds even unwillingly, and it felt like ice suddenly skinned everything, all of them, the very air. In that glassy silence, he regarded the Preacher as if he were the only living thing on earth.
"Truth ain't somethin' I been afraid of for a long time, Preacher, nor dyin' neither, n' I'm near my limit havin' you on my back this way. I'm goin' up that slope. You want t'stay here n' git yer asses shot off, ain't my nevermind."
He turned, yanked his rifle from his saddle sheath, trusting Chris would take Peso to ground with him, and started up the crumbling slope, a sick fury rising to hear Josiah coming up after him to ensure he did not flee.
The preacher kept up once the ground underfoot became more solid, but at a distance enough not to have to talk to Vin, rage too close to the surface, too hot. Tendriled hair, the tattered fringe on the capelet of his coat, on his chaps, all broke up his outline and made him nearly invisible, every time he fell still Josiah lost him on the steep shadow-strewn incline. It finally dawned on him that Tanner was making it plain he could slip even his watchful eye anytime he chose to. It took a good thirty minutes to work their way up the slope into the wind-rounded heights, moving slow to keep from raising any dust.
By the time Josiah caught up with him, he was already set on one knee and the first report of his rifle jarred the quiet with a startlingly thunderous voice. Josiah heard the sudden frenzy of horses and men below, and knew the posse had come picking it's way after them, knew men were dying down there, and he watched Tanner. Impassive and implacable as the wrath of God, neither forgiving nor condemning, just reaping lives like a harvest that had no other purpose. He shook his head, unable to look away. So had his father looked at times, at an inhuman remove he'd thought was the hand of God on him.
Josiah had himself killed in fury, in the grip of the rage he carried in his soul, the old war he was fighting anew. He'd regretted it many times, and been ashamed of not regretting it others. But never had he killed with the passionless distance Vin seemed capable of, never so unmoved.
The tracker's cheek rested on the rifle butt as on a woman's breast, calm and quiet as the Angel of Death.
"Josiah ..." He said, feeling the weight of the preacher's eyes as he seemed to feel anything near enough to stir the air, "Ain't no souls there for th'savin'."
"All men born of woman have souls, Mr. Tanner, it sets us apart from the fallen angels and the beasts of the field."
"Maybe. Reckon some just lose 'em afore the flesh passes on ... n' any one of them I took down so far'd shoot you dead without studyin' a second on it."
Tacitly saying all he saw down there were Vickers' hired men, but it didn't mean anything to Josiah just then, simply looking at Vin Tanner was to stand witness to his own ruin.
Vin saw that, and chuffed a bitter laugh, "Shit, I've known critters with souls deeper n' some men."
The rifle spoke, and Josiah knew a life lost answered. Wondered if that handsome graven face was the last thing Marie-Laure had seen before leaving this world, as it was the last thing his father had given him before leaving it himself.
It worked. Three lay dead in the throat of the gulley, and the other three had backtracked in a clumsy knot out of Vin's ambush and right into Chris and the others. No dust marked their flight once the quick gunfire died down, so Vin knew the others had been thorough, but he regretted putting even such deaths as this on their souls. Vin took the chance, then, and clambered as high as he could get, hand over hand and nervous about trusting his weight to the unstable surface, but going higher by far than would bear Josiah's weight. Kinda peaceful without Josiah breathin' fire down his neck or starin' holes through him. He walked the humped ridge and gauged where they were, scanned the canyons around them, and the black slashes of towering rock gorges above. From that vantage, it was easier to follow the course of the cracks and twisted canyons, erosion and flash-floods had carved deep, mystifying switch-backs and dead-ends, even looping draws so it would be impossible for a man with less experience to tell which would lead out and which would entrap them. Immediately he saw that they had to get at least a quarter mile west. For a few miles, the gorges and washes were narrow at the bottom but opened up at a sharp slope, which meant they could be spotted from above if they didn't hurry. But what they would have to hurry into was as deadly a piece of terrain as any he could recall, steep narrow defiles and slot canyons sometimes bridged and roofed in rock so he couldn't be sure without being closer if they actually went anywhere. With the preacher waiting several yards below him, he spied a couple of likely routes, which he then sat down to study through the spy glass. Back and forth in a careful overlapping pattern he covered every inch of terrain ahead with a care he'd never exercised so fully, a good hour it took him before he finally collapsed the glass, his eyes still surveying the area, setting landmarks in his memory. Then he went nimbly down the slope into the corpse-strewn canyon to meet the rest, Josiah a silent condemnation behind him.
The rest had gone to ground where he'd set them, a ravine thick with shadows even in the heat of day, and in their exhausted stillness there was no dust or thud of hoof to give them away. They sat wherever the terrain let them, uncomplaining of the thirst Vin could see in their cracked lips and roughened hands, the hunger that put a restless edge on their eyes. Smart enough men to ration their water already, though, even J.D. didn't drink until they all did, and then the same bare teasing mouthful that seemingly vanished before it could be swallowed.
Nathan sat watchfully a few yards above them where he had an unimpeded view of the slice of canyon beyond. Josiah settled against the wall a good yard away with his arms crossed and the full weight of his somber consideration on Tanner, who ignored him entirely. Chris looked from one to the other, both blank as icons and the air practically sizzling between them.
Ezra was singularly unimpressed by their rugged stoicism, experiencing an intensely unpleasant sense of mortal endangerment added to already mortal discomfort. Ezra Standish did not permit either his comfort or his survival to rest in another's hands lightly. The sensation was not in any way ameliorated by his friend Josiah's retreat into a sort of simmering madness that threatened to break into violence any moment. While he was sure Mr. Tanner had both the ability and the capacity to do viciously imaginative harm to achieve his ends, he was not altogether certain he would apply that skill to a woman. Josiah, on the other hand, would hear no word otherwise. Perhaps could not.
J.D. sat wide-eyed next to Buck, and the gunslinger let him draw false comfort from his nearness, knowing how scared he was, and of how much more than that posse out there. Buck was trying to stay calm himself, truth be told, his hackles not easily rising but standing pretty much constantly now in the rising confines of these stony temples and corridors. Chris being nervous as a cat on a fence in a full moon didn't help, and he didn't like suddenly not knowing how men he'd had at his back and counted on would jump if all hell broke loose. And it sure felt like it was going to. Didn't relish the idea of fragmenting into sides, friends and enemies, indeed, nothing had ever felt more wrong than being at odds this way. He swore to himself that at the least this kid would get out safe, and felt better concentrating on something he could do.
Nathan looked down with the same worry in his dark face, wary and quiet as a dusty and hard-run guardian angel over them, his concern for them all clear and somehow calming. The white-hot sun blazed in stripes broken against the edge of the crack against the westerly wall, reinforcing the impression of insignificance between the two great monoliths.
Vin squinted at nothing in particular and said, "They're a couple miles behind us n' ain't likely t'come on us before late afternoon, so we tuck up here through the hottest part of the day, keep our water in our skins 'stead of sweatin' it out. Spotted a couple likely runs I'll be checkin' closer come sundown, one of 'em might be a mustang track up over the ridge just a little west of here."
Chris craned his head up at the sheer cliffs in that direction, the mountaintops peeking over the rim of the split pale in the sun-baked distance, and asked curiously "There?"
Tanner nodded once, "Won't expect it."
"Well I sure as hell didn't, damn thing is straight up, Tanner, ain't the time for you n' that horse of yours t'be showin' off." With a dry grin Tanner might've laughed at any other time, but their safety weighed heavily on him.
Beside Ezra, Josiah stiffened, bristled, bright eyes beginning to burn at even the suggestion of levity when his own soul was weighted like to die, and the gambler decided it was time to play devil's advocate. He would either diffuse the situation, or determine an acceptable route of escape from it in company or alone.
"May I assume by your casual air that we are momentarily safe enough for conversation?"
The cool question brought all their heads up. Vin braced himself.
"I reckon so, Mr. Standish." Vin said, like he was standing up unarmed into a circle of cocked guns, and Buck leaned back on J.D. when he tensed up in Vin's defense. Boy was sure as only a boy could be that a man was every bit the hero he believed, but Buck was far from that sort of naivete no matter he liked Tanner a great deal. He'd been wrong before, and he'd always known Tanner had his demons no matter how quiet they were.
"Let it be, kid." He murmured softly without looking at him, but half-pinning him like a pillow between his big bony weight and the rock behind.
Nathan's soft brown eyes moved around the circle anxiously, men who cared for and respected one another turning inward the deadliness they'd always used to defend each other. He had said nothing, given no opinion but to caution, because he was afraid of tipping the delicate balance that had somehow held this long. Josiah was his friend longer than any of these men, and normally a gentle soul, but grief struck folks differently and he had to respect it. He worried, though, at the edge of some hidden madness in his old friend's eye, the hint of some deeper grievance. Trouble was he liked Vin, too, trusted him immediately - hell, he'd saved his life while they were still strangers. He'd felt safe accepting what Vin offered himself to be, a simple man and honest in his heart, brave and true. Which man might he be wrong about? It was this he waited to see proven, because he couldn't find it in him to believe ill of either man, no matter how stange both were acting.
Chris sat back, eyes glittering with an anger too personal to be of good, and made no objection when Ezra leaned forward, deciding himself spokesman. Things had to be put out in the open sometime, Nathan and Buck both had their suspicions and Tanner had agreed to it, they had to know everything if they were to survive.
"I imagine the time has come that you be compelled to inform us as to your intentions, Mr. Tanner."
"Y'mean after I get yer ass outta this fix, Ezra?"
Reminding the gambler with a flash of tired temper how dependent he was on that, and then regretting it when he saw the rest realize the same thing. Guilt and a deep sick doubt hammered his head down, hands helplessly loose between his spread knees and shoulders hunched. He could not have killed her. And if he should find, God strike him dead first, that somehow he had, then he deserved to die for it every bit as much as Vickers deserved it. But it was something he couldn't know 'til he got them safely out of here; a heavy sigh settled the burden down again, and he looked up, blue eyes muddy with exhaustion.
"I plan not t'get railroaded, Mr. Standish, but I plan t'know the truth of what happened."
"You sayin' you ain't remembered nothin' yet?" Josiah rumbled, eyes piercing doubt under heavily drawn brows, and Vin answered in his own way. "I wouldn't hurt no woman."
Flatly, but Chris realized the uneasiness in not remembering, that bit of uncertainty any man would feel, and Josiah siezed upon it.
"But you don't know you didn't." The tracker's fingers whitened on each other and Josiah curbed himself hard against answering with violence the defiance of that defensive anger. That darkness within him cried out to vent itself and he had more and more trouble denying it.
"All a man's got is knowin' himself, Preacher." Vin said, head set hard proud and ready for any challenge Josiah might want to make, but though something warred in Josiah's pale blue eyes, all he did was grunt skeptically, knowing Tanner was hiding something.
"Mr. Sanchez, Mr. Tanner. Let us not allow this to degenerate into a pissin' contest, to use a rather crude but appropriate colloquialism. Can't spare the moisture, for one, and we've a plethora of well-armed barbarians out there only too willin' t'shrive souls from flesh for us without our lendin' them our misguided assistance. I believe we are all intelligent enough to concur that our mutual survival requires mutual cooperation."
Droll but pointed, and getting no argument. Chris eased back further, eyes thoughtfully narrowed on the gambler. Hadn't expected reason from that quarter, but extremity often proved a man's worth. He was interested to see where Ezra would end up.
"Precisely how do you intend to carry out this pursuit of justice, Mr. Tanner?"
"Ain't figgered that out yet, still workin' on gettin' us outta here."
"Judge Travis could help, I bet!" J.D. said, automatically reaching for the nearest authority figure and, as far as Chris was concerned, right on the money. Always admired the way ideas knit up amongst them with so many varying skills and viewpoints, times like this their differences proved to be a real strength.
"You're forgettin' our faces are known now, J.D.," Nathan's sonorous tones drifted down from above, "We may all got prices on our heads by this time, Chris certainly must. The Judge might not be able t'do a thing."
"It's worth a try." Chris said quietly and it was settled as easily as that by his eyes; "Travis is a fair man and he ain't no respector of persons, not even big as Vickers. I reckon I've seen enough of his judgements t'figure he'll get all the facts together and judge rightly by Vin."
Vin was looking at him when he turned that way, and there was a gratitude in his eyes that betrayed how anxious he was. Travis would try, but if Vickers had set it up, that good Judge could end up as trapped by his duty as Vin was himself.
Ezra huffed, "Well, that's sufficiently nebulous to satisfy precisely no one." A sour sneer curling the delicate line of his lip, care taken not to worsen the splits, and his eyes sharp as swords. "If we could just run away straight to Judge Travis, what in the name of all creation are we doing here, now? And even if some divine intervention carries us on the wings of angels back to Four Corners, do you expect Mr. Vickers will prove ineffectual even in our arena? Moreover, have you any concept of what folly it would be to attempt to beard that lion in his own den should he use the opportunity of our miraculous flight to go on home and leave it to the local law? Judge Travis may be a force to be reckoned with out in these uncivilized climes, gentlemen, but in the courtrooms of civilized society? A curiosity, gentlemen, an anachronism without authority, reputation or influence - commodities our Mr. Vickers possesses in great abundance, if I may remind you. I am a realist."
The angry face reminding them all without embarrassment that Ezra Standish would not die on account of anyone else's foolish moves or overwrought emotions. Erzra Standish was a thinking man, and he would land on his feet. They all watched him now, and not just for his flair for the dramatic; he could be amazingly creative when his hide was at stake, and most of them figured they needed some imagination about now.
"The terms of my hire say nothing of assuming responsibility for a debt that is, essentially, a personal one owed by Mr. Tanner. Who is, I remind you reluctantly, the primary target of this hunt. To be both blunt and brief, it's him they want."
Cut him loose, let him go on his own and draw fire while the innocent parties escaped. Trouble was, Vin had thought of that already. He wished the rest didn't feel guilty for considering it as a strategy, but what he knew that they didn't made his gun among them vital.
Chris saw the fear and knew it wasn't for himself, "Ain't gonna happen, Ezra." He said sharply, "We never left one of us - well, except for you runnin' off n' leavin' all of us."
Ezra took no obvious insult, though his eyes hardened and his smile chilled. "I see I am never going to redeem myself for that ancient tactical error. Fine, then, my trusting friend, it seems I must disabuse you of the notion that you decide for us all whether or not we're going to perish in this dry dusty hole on Mr. Tanner's behalf."
Rather than have both men carry the disagreement to the violence that had been pricking at them all the whole day, Vin took it back on himself by saying with quiet conviction, "Standish, ain't you been payin' attention? Vickers intends t'kill you all, I told you he don't leave nothin' t'chance, no loose ends. That's why I come t'Davis after you when I learnt he'd tricked you all away from Four Corners, that's why I wanted t'kill him quick and have it done with, n' that's why I'm here, now, 'stead of lightin' out on my own!!"
Which Josiah and Ezra both plainly doubted, it was starting to make Vin mad and his voice raised a bit, "You got cross-hairs sighted on yer ass n' don't even know it! Look at those men he's hired, a nastier bunch of desperadoes I'd never want t'meet, and they outnumber the posse three t'one, he's usin' renegade Comanche t'track us. It's plain he don't intend any of us to survive."
"Why, that's just marvelous news, my friend! Isn't that marvelous news?" Ezra shared an incredulous look around the circle, taking some comfort in their unhappy surprise to hear what they'd all suspected confirmed so plainly.
"And you expect us to believe the posse, the sheriff and those fine upstandin' men of the law, will permit this wholesale slaughter in lieu of a fine hanging?"
Vin's grim expression plainly spoke the fate of those innocent men, and Ezra's face reddened angrily; "Well then, all bets are off, aren't they?" Furious to find himself in a danger more dire than he'd dared imagine, and more furious still to have been swept into this foolhardy and ever-worsening set of circumstances over matters that were none of his concern whatever. Angry also that no one else seemed to be angry about it, accepting the situation as a fait accompli without blaming the man who had, willingly or no, maneuvered them into it. His drawl went deep and wide as it did when he was upset and trying not to show it.
"Fine, oh, this is just fine and dandy! All for one and one for all whether we like it or not, is it? Here's a question that's been plaguin' me, Mistah Tannah, and if Ah'm bound t'sacrifice up mah immortal soul over it, Ah'll wager Ah've a right to ask - how is it you didn't realize Vickers was still alive? Ah haven't noticed you to miss what you aim at, and it would seem that, in this instance most particularly, a successful - execution, if you'll pardon the term - would have been of rather singular import."
Tanner just looked at him, head cocked to one side, saying nothing until he controlled the urge to slice the gambler ear to ear.
Nathan, becoming alarmed at the threat among them, and perhaps more sensitive to the unspoken in men's voices from the necessity bred in slavery, heard jealousy in Ezra that Tanner seemed to enjoy a trust that he himself didn't, showing more the depth of wanting that respect himself than anybody probably realized. The tie forged among these men, and Nathan included himself among them with humble gratitude, was a powerful thing even if unrecognized, but it was still new, still fragile enough to break. He turned anxious eyes out to the hard dusty glare beyond and prayed it would hold, these men meant more to him and the future he hoped for than he'd ever told them.
Finally, Vin said tightly, "Sure can stir alot of air, Standish, n' I'll do without yer insultin' me even so pretty-like as you do it." Face and voice quiet, but Chris wasn't the only one to hear the stiff fury of a very private man honor-bound to be questioned with such disrespect.
"Vickers was down when I opened my eyes." Vin said in reluctant answer to Ezra's question, discomfort coloring the high hard tops of his cheekbones, and Ezra latched onto it with theatrical bewilderment.
"Opened yoah eyes? Why, Ah've never noticed you to close your eyes when you shoot, Tanner."
"Don't anymore."
The gambler spread his hands, exasperated by the non-answers and Josiah's growing discontent beside him, suspecting Tanner was being disingenuous and furious with himself not to have realized the man had such capacities, he would not let himself be led.
"But surely there was opportunity thereafter to correct this ... error? There had to have been a hue and cry ..."
"There was, but I believed he'd set 'em on me before I killed 'im. Didn't have time t'check, I got taken right quick after."
"Really? By which enemy, sir?" Becoming truly irritated now that this backwards and probably illiterate woodsman was making him pry every answer out like picking the meat out of a crab claw. Pushing the tracker to anger seemed his only recourse, but to his surprise, Vin's face emptied completely, became stark and unyielding.
"Yer side, Ezra. N' real hospitable they were, too."
The gambler opened his mouth with a sharp retort, and closed it upon remembering the field of battle Tanner had mentioned. Green eyes went razor-sharp.
"Where were you incarcerated?" Ezra didn't know why it mattered, but saw at once that it did to Vin by the way he stiffened, and Ezra obdurately chased the sense of a secret being withheld.
Vin's answer was dangerously short, "Don't matter, weren't there long." He'd lit out like a crippled cat with it's tail on fire for the widest open spaces he could find so he could breathe again, remember himself in the vastness, and crawl out from under the crushed rubble of his soul. He didn't want to bring that part of it into this, damned well wouldn't have it asked about, it had nothing to do with this, nothing. His heart was pounding.
"But you thought Vickers had arranged it ... " Ezra said slowly, not saying what Vin saw he'd guessed, and his stomach clenched up tight as a fist.
Too close to it, reading his revulsion of the memory too well and Vin wasn't about to give up that part of his past to anyone, ever. In Ezra's mouth, Andersonville would be twisted to make justice seem like a personal vendetta, and he'd fought the demons of hell to separate it out, he couldn't have them turned on him now over that. So he let his temper come and hid in it shamefully, stood up and set his hat.
Josiah stood up as well with a bearish growl, "You said you would answer our questions, Tanner."
Vin turned quick to face him, "You come up with questions that have a lick t'do with this, n' I'll answer 'em, Josiah, but I ain't give nobody rights t'stick their noses all free into every part of my damned life whether it's got a thing t'do with this or not, never said I'd flay myself for y'all. I'm goin' out t'scout around, see where they are, y'all make my ears hurt."
Nobody tried to stop him from leaving, and though Ezra looked like he had something urgent to say, after a moment he apparently reconsidered it, laying a hand on Josiah's stiff shoulder to hold him from going after the tracker.
"Let it be, Josiah, the right time will come."
"Best get some rest while we can." Chris said, and one by one they finally settled with what degree of comfort they could find in body and mind.
Ezra Standish was not a gentleman accustomed to the bare earth as a place of repose, and he felt every stone and thistle under him with great discontent. He was filthy, thirsty, hungry and aching in every bone, not a condition in which he liked to find himself. He regarded his friend Josiah, eyes on the distant sky and a black brooding spirit he was uncomfortably coming to suspect had less to do with Tanner than some private demon Marie-Laure LeBeau's loss had called forth. He had seemed to truly love that woman, and though Ezra had known from the first she was both less and more than she presented, he had seen no purpose in denying the Preacher the transient pleasures she had so freely offered. Josiah was both literate and profound, how was Ezra to know a woman's attentions would so overwhelm his considerable reason? And why was that, anyway?
It struck him as damnably agreeable to Vickers that the poor woman had been removed from testifying as to the manner and perpetrator of her demise. There were no eye-witnesses. Yes, the preponderance of the circumstantial evidence was undoubtedly damning, but perhaps too much so considering the forewarning they had received, the knowledge of connections between the players no one else knew. Ezra had some knowledge of Malcolm Vickers, and because of it, this perspective could not be ignored. It had occurred to him that someone might, indeed, want them to just ride on and leave Mr. Tanner to his fate. And once that possibility was removed, the logical course for a man such as the Colonel would be to believe them Tanner's allies and subsequently deserving of the same fate.
Ezra laid back on his saddle and cocked his hat over his face, thinking now what he'd been avoiding thinking of since Tanner had left. He didn't know why he hadn't told the others, it could explain a great deal, and perhaps expose a deceit being perpetrated on them by Mr. Tanner, but he hadn't. His own feelings had stopped him. Most peculiar. Imagine what his dear mater would make of that.
Thoughts of a southern boy sharpshooting for the North, by his skill undoubtedly taking important lives that had hurt the Confederate cause significantly. Couldn't have been much over eighteen, and he was not a big man, even now. A traitor to the south, and a southerner imprisoned among northerners who would hold him their enemy by birth, he had to have been friendless, and victim to both. If Vin Tanner had been in Andersonville, a boy with the reputation he must have had, Ezra had no idea how he had survived even a day. Or why realizing that he had made him view the man that survival had forged with a new understanding.
Vin came back in the late afternoon, and the rest of the day he ran them through the draws and defiles in groups of various sizes in an elaborate game of hide and seek, back- and double-trailing, laying deadfall traps and rock slides that, by the occasional dust-cloud above the rims, did a bit of damage and, more importantly, concealed the true path they were working toward - the westerly ridge and the plains beyond.
They all went in awe of the tracker's obsessive cunning, but he'd stopped talking to anyone, and kept his distance of them all.
Buck and J.D. were a near the rendezvous laying the last dead-end trail, and the sun was going down. Buck rode a minute with his head tilted back to see the sky directly over his head, unnerved a little to have that bit of blue be so narrow, made the sense of being trapped worse, but he trusted that Vin would get them out if anyone could. He was riding in the rocky belly of a wide overhung cut of what might once have been a small lake, the rock walls curving inward high overhead and shallow layers and crevices carved into the sides like slitted eyes. The kid gleefully took on the rough deadwood-strewn higher ground on the other side like he was on a damned camping trip, and Buck kept a watchful eye to him; even tired and anxious, the kid made him smile. Small as he was and yet an exuberant authority on any horse he'd ever mounted, J.D. handled the biggest teams with the ease of an old hand, and the stage line had offered him a job more than once. Ezra'd put him to use in local horseraces to a tidy profit the kid wasn't smart enough to demand his cut of until Buck educated him - and Ezra - a bit.
So when the sound of gunshots blasted in a million echoing pieces and the kid lurched forward in the saddle, Buck knew with a choking bolt of terror that it wasn't a stumble of his mount.
To Buck's horror, he saw J.D. grab the horn as his knees let go, but he stayed on, managed to spur his horse down to more even ground, laying low over his neck and not needing Buck to tell him to run for the narrow bridged split at the end they'd been heading into. Stayed on like a flea on a dog and Buck divided his desperate attention between him and the distant elevated puff he was emptying his rifle at. "Stay on, boy, stay on", he prayed ... which the kid did so well he couldn't get down once his horse stopped in the shadowed safety beyond the bowl. Buck was off his gray in mid-stride going for the boy's side, desperate fear etched on his face, reaching for him.
"Where'd you get it, kid? C'mon, talk t'me, where'e you get hit?"
A trembling curtain of glossy black hair hid his face, hunched over and his hand white-knuckled on the horn, yet to Buck's amazement it was breathless laughter he heard, and when J.D.'s head lifted, his bleary grin was excited and satisfied as if he'd spent the night rolling in some willing woman's arms.
"Shit! Buck!" He gasped right into Buck's shocked face, "I got shot, can you believe it? Shot!"
"Well yippee, you fool, I guess I figured that out for myself, get down now, come on ..."
Going for his shoulder as he slid off toward him, amazed that he was still laughing with blood wet on his coat and a sharp hitch in his breath when his feet met the ground unsteadily. J.D. kept on going down as his knees buckled, and Buck squatted with him to slow the abrupt descent the kid didn't even seem to notice.
J.D.'s eyes were bright with fierce triumph, his grin finding a pallid reflection in Buck's, "Shit, it burns, Buck ..." Pain almost lost in the numbness of fervid excitement.
"Yeah, I know it does boy, like hellfire, ain't it?"
Yet the kid hardly winced as Buck pulled his coat down off his left arm and then his suspenders and vest and shirt, blood streaking down his pale muscular chest and back like black paint in the twilight.
"Is that blood? Is that my blood? Jeez, there's alot of it, ain't there?"
"Yeah, J.D., I know it's blood, didn't think it was plum jam here. Don't worry, you got plenty more where that came from, ain't nowhere near empty."
But sick himself at the sight, a man who'd seen gallons of blood and wounds so much more gruesome than this. The bullet had passed through the muscle between the shoulder and neck just missing his collarbone - the kid was going to feel it when the numbness wore off, but Buck felt his own knees steady in relief.
"I didn't fall off, didja see, Buck? I stayed on, n' it really hurt!"
"Yeah, son, I seen you ... stuck like a burr on wool, like you was nailed into the saddle ... "
"Buck?"
"Yeah?"
"All of a sudden ... I don't feel so ... "
Buck barely managed to catch hold of him as J.D. twisted to one side and vomited, every terrifying second catching up with him at once. Only then did Buck laugh, warm with memory of the same folly in his youth, and the foolish pride men took in getting shot as a rite of passage.
J.D. was reassured to hear Buck's soft laughter in the sudden wash of his own misery, he was pretty sure Buck wouldn't be laughing if he was dying.
"Now, if you could just get laid, J.D., I reckon you'd about have this bein' a man business all tied up."
For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written. The just shall live by Faith.
Romans 1:17
Charlie looked out at the towering edifices of the mountains that filled his sight as far as it reached on either side, split with vertical darknesses and layered canyons footed in angled mounds of grey and red clay like wax melted down off cores of jagged steel. To the east, they rose in a sudden majesty of weathered buttes and black-cracked gorges, rounded bluffs giving way in the higher elevations to spired rock towers slowly wearing away under the weight of ages, wierdly beautiful in the sunset. Beauty only brought tears to his eyes since Marie-Laure's murder, and worsened the gnawing hurt in his chest. His eyes burned with the will to know, to untangle the lies he knew were being spun here.
The plainsman who loved these wild cruel glories was in there, running in that puzzle of sheer rock and sandstone riddled with canyons many as the branches of a tree. That's what the Indian trackers said when they'd driven the seven there, and broad though the search area would be, they had assured Vickers there was no escape from the labyrinth. In the golden light, the mountains could have been a monumental tomb, like the pyramids he'd read about. Charlie wondered how many of the plainsman's friends were still his friends, how safe he felt among them.
Since Marie had been murdered, Charlie had watched, because that's what a hunter did, and that's what he was now. He struggled to fit himself into this strange harsh landscape among the hard-bitten company of men Vickers had hired to enlarge his posse. The men from Davis looked like grocers next to them. He either did a better job than he thought or these men were truly unwary of so common a thing as a skinny boy keeping out of reach and, best he could, out of sight.
Charlie had inserted himself into the urgency of gathering and outfitting the posse as if he'd been told to be among them, harnessing and saddling, bringing Vickers' mount to the block with his own horse outfitted for travel. No one questioned it, not even Vickers when his glass was brought and his campbed made up.
Vickers had seen the burning urge to vengeance in the boy's thin hard face and approved that obsession, furious himself to have lost her, and driven to avenge that loss as though it truly were Vin Tanner who had killed her. She'd been taken from him, and it was Tanner's fault. What mattered now was that her death gave him legal cause to wipe him off the face of the earth, and his friends with him. He intended to do just that.
But all they'd seen of the seven was a twisted moonlit dust plume that the Indians used to herd them by that first night, any men who'd gotten close enough to see them collected a bullet by the time that dark run was done. Charlie knew they hadn't come across the seven today, either, for all their chasing; one group hadn't come back to camp yet and the Indians smiled among themselves, shook their sleek black heads braided with hide and beads and bits of fur.
He looked back at the camp, at those Indians around their coals away from the rest, curious, but more afraid. Real Indians, broad bronze faces savage as ever he'd imagined, feathered lances and bows, and far more fearsome. These storied tribesmen Charlie stayed well clear of, scared of their flat black eyes full of secrets that had nothing to do with the wild mysteries the plainsman understood. No, these Indians harbored dreams and memories of blood and death, and they led the hunt while obeying Vickers with a dark secretive amusement, as if they disdained him as much as they scorned the comforts of his camp and the doings of his warriors.
Charlie had decided he would avenge Marie-Laure himself. Her pistol remained where it had been since her death, hidden under his coat heavy as duty. He would slay the man who had murdered her, it was a choice he'd made while sitting in the darkness outside the room where her casket lay awaiting her final journey home; not as a queen would she return to her verdant city, not in triumph, but as a woman brought low in her glory. It was something to do her honor, alone with a grief he sensed Vickers only played at.
What Vickers failed to see in Charlie's dedication to revenge was the boy's uncertainty over exactly who the target was. He'd known Vickers too long to be convinced of his grief, or certain of his accusations. Not even the neat order of evidence was beyond his arranging, it'd been done plenty back home where everyone was in his pocket. At first he'd thought he'd known, he'd believed what even some of the plainsman's friends had believed, hell, probably because they'd believed it, being his friends and supposedly knowing him. But only until that night sitting vigil outside when the maids laid flowers in the room, fearfully skirting around the walls, and whispering in superstitious horror of having heard her laughing that night from their adjoining chamber - after the plainsman had escaped.
Charlie didn't believe in ghosts, and the witnesses had left their written testimonies and skedaddled in too close a bunch not to suspect a pay-off. So he would watch, and he would listen, and when he knew for sure, someone would die.
Nathan went sliding down the crumbling sandstone incline when Buck and J.D. finally joined them at the confluence of three small gorges, west the quarter mile they needed, and late enough to have worried everyone. They were ready to move up the rock-floored pass Vin had scouted, and the tracker appeared silently out of the twilight at Chris' shoulder as soon as he made out Nathan over the kid below, and heard a hurt sound.
"Buck's easy, so the kid's alright." Chris murmured, seeing Vin's guilty fear from the corner of his watchful eye. Vin watched a moment to reassure himself before slipping back into the night.
Chris frowned unhappily. Read men clear, Tanner did, and to feel suspect among them had to be eating at him. Nothing here was going right, they were all hackles high of each other, getting hurt now, maybe dead, from the loss of the cohesiveness that had been the backbone of their every victory. He'd been in that war Vin had spoken of, too, and several range wars after, he'd seen his share of conniving strategies and the men that worked them. Vickers was such a man. He also knew that the likelihood of surviving this now was far too slim if they were at odds among themselves, Vickers was countin' on that and he couldn't see a way to change it. Josiah was a seething cauldron and only Ezra seemed able to settle him when Vin was in his sight, but the gambler missed his mark if he thought Chris couldn't see the shadow of a doubt in his support of Josiah's judgment. Maybe the gambler, too, made something more than safety in numbers out of the fact that Vin was sticking with them, knowing himself how easily the tracker could've saved himself on his own. Chris had hopes the others would eventually realize that, too.
Vin sat above them, watching their faint outlines in the twilight and the scant coals of a mesquite fire with the heel of his hand pressed hard into his gut against a nauseous guilt. Kid could've gotten killed easy as not, and he knew how Buck would react to that, protective as a sow bear with a cub. Dammit! Deprivation was beginning to tell on them all, drawn and hollow-eyed, signs of dehydration on their dust-stiffened faces and leathery hands, the inevitable cuts and bruises delivered by such treacherous terrain on men made clumsy by exhaustion. Each man had a canteen, but how much water each held he couldn't know, so he'd barely wet his mouth in two days in case his water was needed later; a bit of water-rounded quartz from the canyon bottom against the inside of his cheek served to work up some moisture now and then.
He should've killed Vickers the first second he'd seen 'im, shot 'im down right there in the street and taken his damned chances getting out of the territory. Wasn't born nor bred to live in company with others anyway, he'd forgotten it, gotten comfortable in the place he'd found among them, and now look who was payin'. Chris was there on blind faith and too much of a willingness to die, J.D. out of a kid's worshipping loyalty, the rest he wasn't sure of but that Josiah had bloody vengeance in his eye and Ezra seemed to back it. Ezra and he had never been friendly, but Josiah ... Any or all of them could be lost in this mortal wasteland no matter the intentions of the posse, Vickers outnumbered those good men. Vin had no illusions about their fate - or who would take the blame for it, making the murder of the six a neat justice.
Chris and Buck were sitting by the coals while the others slept like dead men, Buck's eyes drifting often to J.D. twitching in his sleep, and Chris murmured sarcastically, "Buck, you wanna go tuck him in n' kiss 'im goodnight or somethin'? You get any more paternal on me and I'm gonna have t'slap you back into character."
Buck chuckled and stretched his houndish frame, wincing at the bruises and scuffs and soreness they were all feeling keenly. "Like you ain't proud of the little cuss? Cch, tell me another one, pard, you was worried as me. Shoulda seen yer face when we come in n' y'saw blood on 'im."
Chris sighed, his long back deeply curved, and shook his head with a wry half-grin; "Hell, boy's annoyin' as a pup underfoot, but damned if he won't stand up straight and stupid to a grizzly. Course, he'd probably be real surprised when it ripped him limb from limb..."
"Nah, probably try t'talk it t'death, start askin' it questions ..."
Vin appeared behind Buck and the lanky gunslinger jumped, snatching for his pistol; "Dammit, Tanner, done told you not t'do that t'me, yer lucky I didn't plug you right b'tween yer eyes!"
Vin just dropped down on his haunches beside Chris, grim and sharp in the dim red light, and asked, "Where'd J.D. get shot, Buck, n' what direction were you travelin'?"
They'd all heard the gunfire, but they'd been hearing that right along and the canyons ricocheted sound around so much Vin wasn't sure where it'd come from. Buck poured a meager tin cup of coffee, the stimulant nearly as precious as the water itself, and handed it to Vin so casually that he took it with a nod before the significance sank in and he looked up, eyes naked. Buck saying where he stood with a gesture that simple and a forthright look eye to eye, knowing how guilty Vin had to feel about J.D. getting hurt.
Chris saw how it affected Vin, feelings too close to the surface for him to hide lately, and deeper than he'd imagined, which he suspected displeased the tracker as much as it displeased him to realize he had such feelings himself. The responsibility for their lives was riding Chris hard, and harder still the persistent growth of affections he had no intention of acknowledging.
"We were comin' back up that riverbed south where it bellies out, and since they hit him from behind, had t'be east of us. Bullet was fired from a long ways off, near the end of its range."
"Rifle or pistol?"
"Rifle, the rest of the shots were way off. Some scout up top maybe had a one-shot chance at us, n' missed."
"Wish he'd missed." Vin murmured sincerely, and Buck smiled, reached out and slapped Tanner's dusty shoulder.
"I know it, Vin. But hell, th'boy's feelin' blooded, n' he's prouder than a rooster about it, we'll be hearin' it for months."
"Yer lips t'God's ears, Buck." Vin murmured, meaning it. He moved to Peso, untied one of his saddlebags, came back and laid it beside Chris and Buck. "Figger J.D.'s gone through all the hard-tack by now; got some buffalo jerky in there, not much, but bettern' nothin', n' some pemmican at the bottom y'ought to hold in reserve. I'm gonna go back out. Rest two hours n' move further up if I ain't back. I'll find you."
"What're you frettin' about, Vin?" Chris asked, and Vin answered honestly, "That one of th' Indians spotted that mustang track too, seen sign of 'em around out that way, maybe movin' to cut us off from it."
"Does sound worrisome."
Vin shrugged, "They're beddin' down for the night - plain foolish, that is, braves r' probably laughin' at 'em, but I'm grateful for that foolishness - likely ranged across the nearer canyon mouths behind us. Ain't heard nothin', no hoof-falls, nothin'." And he would have had there been anything to hear, they didn't doubt it.
Neither Chris or Buck liked the sense of being driven into a trap, they'd run into more dead ends against the mountains and there was no water in here, and for that reason time was as much their enemy as the posse itself.
"Two hours, then, "Chris said, chewing on that as well as a bit of jerky, "Don't be late."
"Watch yer back." Buck said quietly.
Vin looked at them a moment with something of his old spirit, touched his hatbrim, and faded away into the shadows like a shadow himself.
Buck shivered dramatically, "Gives me the risin' heebie-jeebies, him doin' that, like a damned haunt."
Chris only snorted, "Y'ain't seen him do it in a crowded saloon yet."
"Right around settlin' up time?"
"Y'know, I never realized that!" Their quiet laughter drifted softly over the camp, settling J.D. in his troubled rest and salting Josiah's frustrated wounds.
Chris started getting worried after those two hours were up. Everybody was awake, huddled quiet around the last the coffee-pot could offer. They were all sore and tired from sleeping on the cold ground, grimy and bruised and cut and cactus-bit, and starving for more than the jerked buffalo Vin had left, though they'd gone for it like it was steaming steaks and appreciated the salty savor. They had three canteens of water left between them, and even their mounts stood head down, ragged and dirty and running on stubborn loyal will. J.D., with guilty defiance, had dared to wet his bandana and wipe out the horses' dry mouths, at least, cleaned the dust caked around their patient eyes with a kindness no one could fault him for whether they needed the water themselves or not. No one wanted to tell him that these good beasts might have to be left behind, he was young and got attached like they'd had time to learn not to.
Josiah's taut face spoke eloquently of how vain he thought their wait was, but Vin came at last, pale from dust and exhaustion but with a calm that told Chris he had a plan he felt confident in. The tracker's eyes went to J.D. as soon as he was near enough to see and be seen, he said the boy's name as a quiet question and J.D. grinned, looking achingly fine-boned and young.
"I'm alright, Vin, hell, it's just a scratch. Didn't even knock me off my horse, right, Buck?"
So sensitive to the approval in their uniform concern that he was practically glowing and probably not realizing what Buck knew he'd have been more proud of still - that he'd given them back, in his foolhardy and infuriating self, a common bond. His smile was genuine with affection.
"Yeah, boy, you were a wonder t'behold, didn't cry too much or nothin'."
"Buck!"
Tanner dropped down to his heels, a little too quickly Chris thought, exchanging a glance with Nathan at the shadows under the tracker's eyes and the bruise along the side of his temple looking livid against his pallor. Again the cup came to him from Buck's hand, the last there would be, and he curled his cold fingers around it, took a long sip despite it being thick as mud and hot enough to burn his tongue out of his head.
Absently he rubbed at the ache in the left side of his chest, saying, "They don't know the pass is there, looks like a winter slide maybe opened 'er up, but they're scattered out behind us and narrowin' us down, too near t'miss us goin' for it if they happen by at the same time. The notch is too wide not to make anyone on it a target, and steep, it'll be slow goin' n' slippery for the horses. If Josiah's got 'is farrier's tools with 'im, it'd help t'score crossways on the horse's shoes, give 'em a better grip."
"That steep? Don't sound too promisin'." Chris said, worry pursing his mouth, a glance around the grim grimy circle.
Vin shrugged, "We got no water in here, Chris, and no time nor game t'hunt that I've seen. It's quickest." That and their safety his only motive, and Chris knew it with a tickle of unease.
"The slot intersects with this gorge and then goes on across it, but the far side looks like it goes near straight up n' it's so narrow that they'll pass it by as too unlikely. The slot goes up n' snakes around to the left, lets out 'bout halfway up the southwest face west of that little peak there, you just follow the track n' it'll take you up to the pass."
With the tip of his knife he drew in a hard-packed patch of dirt as he spoke, the gorge ahead and those branching off it, and that one long sliver that wound up and around to become a steep diagonal incline up to the ridge and the foothills on the other side where there was room to run and a place to run to; Four Corners.
"There's a promontory 'bout half-way up the mountain-side of the gorge I reckon I can hold 'em off from if they spot you, maybe Buck watchin' yer ass on the west side as you go up behind 'im. But first you gotta get across the bottom of the gorge there n' up the slot on the other side before they get out this far, and hide your tracks good. It's really narrow at the bottom, but the west wall's got a slope to it and breaks back hard about 30 yards up, opens up the gorge. There's overhangs on that side, so they can't put up more'n maybe three or four shooters at a time, you got good cover except near the top - but it's gonna take you a long while on that open ground, and the pass is like crows sittin' on a fence. They're searchin' too close to here not to come up this way soon."
Of necessity, their heads clustered over the map in the dim light and Vin held very still in feeling them so near, a tightness in his chest at their warmth, their smells and the small sounds of leather and cloth and tired breathing. He didn't dare look up, but fixed his eyes on that drawing.
"The promontory is right about here, it's a ledge about 150 yards off the canyon bottom ..." A bump on the sheer eastern wall; "I can climb it from the back-side. Hopefully, you'll get up t'that ridge and over without bein' seen, Buck'll follow along, and I'll get over after dark n' meet you."
Thoroughly considered on their behalf, but a little short on details about how exactly how he intended to catch up with them, how he'd get across the gorge himself if things got dicey. Chris didn't think he was suicidal, but he wasn't in a hurry to do it this way.
"And if they happen by when we're on that open slope?"
"Then I start killin' 'em fast as I can, I'll be too far up for any of them to reach me." Without pride in the fact that he, from the same distance, could reach them. "They could climb that west wall after you if they ain't gettin' their asses shot up for tryin' it." A spark livened his eye for a moment, a flicker of the edgy humor he had in deadly situations, gone in the instant. "That happens, you either go on or fall back, that's yer call."
Chris rubbed his hand back and forth across the back of his neck, squinting at that map and not liking Vin's chances if it came to a gun-battle, one gun, no matter how good, and too many hunting parties nearby not to come to the sound. Vin could see him trying to think of something else, Buck focused hard on the map as well, and he stood up out of the circle and said quietly, "We ain't got time t'sit n' palaver over this, Chris. It's all we got."
Vin took in the stare of their exhaustion, faces burnt, clothes sweat-stained and dirty top to toe, even Ezra's green jacket no longer any real color under the grime, and his fine white shirt had gone red-brown at cuffs and collar. Not a one but J.D. held anything but a man's knowing in their eyes of how deadly things were here, he hated having brought that look to their faces, but at the same time it steeled his resolve. He was a stubborn man, he knew it well, but so were each of them in their ways. Sometimes stubborn was all a man had.
Chris squinted up at him, helpless to argue. Plainly Vin intended to finish this to his last breath, but whether he would set to taking care of Vickers and his men alone once the other six were safely away was a guess Chris didn't want to hazard.
Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ:
By whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in the hope of the Glory of God<
Romans 5:1,2
The spot was a hard climb with the carbine and a bandelero slung across his back, thighs and calves burning by the time he made it. It was about mid-point up the east canyon wall, some 100 yards up, a precarious promontory attached to the mountain only by a thin arm on the left of him, open behind and to the right with a waist-high slant of rocks across the front. It was a dangerously backward slant on loose shale, but it was worth the risk for the vantage of the canyon below. On the opposite side, the west wall rose in a sheer vertical that started angling back maybe 15 feet up to create the steep slope the rest would be picking their way up, the little peak set well back from the rim but in plain sight and rifle-range. On one knee, Vin set his elbow to the flattest part of one of the stones, thumbed the drooping brim of his hat up off his face and raised the tang-sight. He made a painstaking scan of the geography below to set distances in his mind, and then he sat back and waited with the patience of a stone in a rushing river. He kept half an eye to the furtive progress of the other six up the faint meandering track across the gorge where the mountain rose up and then began its great descent, keeping behind rocks where they could, leading their horses. He waited.
All night they'd climbed through the slot, insignificant as ants in the towering black corridor and their shadows stalking in macabre elongations from the small guttering torches they had to dare to make their way. Backs ached from the constant upward jerk and thrust of the horses, calves and ankles bruised and scraped by the narrowness of the crevice, weaving left and right and left and right 'til they were nearly dizzy, and at times not even seeing the night sky above them when the cliffs leaned together overhead. "Christ ..." Buck was heard to mutter at one point, "Snakier n' a rheumatised sidewinder in here ..."
They'd muffled the hooves of their horses in their spare clothes to keep them from ringing on the bare stone floor, and had to dismount less than halfway up to lead them, laying the stirrups up and hooking them over the saddle-horns when the going narrowed to a point barely wide enough for a horse's barrel. If they'd been fed and watered, Buck observed with wry irony, they probably wouldn't have fit; "Just goes t'show ya you never can tell what'll turn out t'be a help."
Finally, they'd broken out into the bottom of the gorge and Vin had held them up there. To the west rose the little peak across which the mustang track wound and Chris and Buck both craned their necks up to find the ledge Vin would climb to, checking the distance down, and across. Gathered in the close confines with dawn ribboning pink and pale in a narrow band high above their heads, Vin had shown them where the slot continued across the gorge, a mere crack that did, indeed, rise so sharply it looked impossible for a horse to scale. Vin said it was a little better about ten yards up, but they'd best lead the horses on a string rather than risk being behind them if they slipped. While Josiah used his farrier's file with furiously tireless strength to score deep grooves across every shoe of every hoof for traction, Chris studied the length of moonlit track he could make out past the rim of the gorge, winding in the near distance across the pale scar of the slide had left. Rock-strewn at it's lower elevations, rocks piled upon and tumbled over the western rim of the gorge, and the trail itself wild and opportune around the cruel topography. But Vin assured them that if mustangs could do it, so could they; he was deeply reluctant to have them forfeit their mounts when a good run on the other side would put them in safety. When there was nothing more to say and Josiah had packed his tools up and stood somberly near his horse, Vin handed Peso's reins to Chris with a direct and serious expression. For a strange uneasy moment they were divided there in farewells that no one, for their own reasons, wanted to make.
J.D. suddenly realized that no matter how optimistic Vin was being, they were leaving him there alone, and saw that same fearsome suspicion in Nathan's face; they'd discussed it, he'd been there, but he'd never considered the fact of their going on without Vin. Maybe never seeing him again.
There was a sudden awkwardness that felt too fundamental for expression, a sense of grim forboding that made J.D. suddenly very uneasy about the entire plan.
"Let me come with you, Vin." J.D. blurted impusively, a quiet plea no one scoffed at, though they all knew, even J.D. knew, that Vin wouldn't allow it. The tracker grinned at him, more moved than he could show and trying to ease the fear he knew J.D. felt for his sake,
"J.D., ain't space where I'm goin' for more'n me, n' you hangin' off by yer fingernails'd be real distractin'." Then, as if he couldn't help himself, "But thanks, pard. I surely appreciate the offer."
Such sincerity that J.D. felt tears sting in his eyes, such a look in those wide blue eyes looking back at him filled with respect and affection, man to man. Wordlessly eloquent, yet somehow ominously final.
Josiah stood grimly, clearly considering that Vin was attempting to escape justice, believing the good-bye he saw in Vin's lingering eyes, in the grasp of forearms exchanged in silent communion with Chris, was not the risk of death, but the intent to run. The preacher's eyes, deep in exhausted caverns, burned with dogged determination never to permit it.
As if Josiah's look was a weight hard on him, Vin turned to the preacher and said plainly, "Sanchez, you got my word I ain't runnin'. Ifn' we never cross paths again, it'll only be because I'm dead on that mountain, nothin' else."
Josiah's eyes narrowed as Vin made the promise, but he accepted it with a terse nod. Vin just looked at him a second, a strange yearning flitting briefly through his expression.
As they started up the trail, Chris had looked back at Vin standing alone in the mouth of the slot they'd come out of, a bad feeling in his heart of breaking apart, losing something forever that had only been threatened up to now. He sensed the same feelings of loss in them all, maybe not only for Vin, but for what they'd all been together that felt so gone.
But a man didn't spend himself on useless emotion when there was a fight to be fought, didn't tempt fate by saying good-bye or admitting to the expectation of grief before there was cause. So Chris just looked back at him there and raised his hand, feeling Vin's attention on him as the gesture was answered. A lone man, small against the cathedraled stone, but laden with weaponry and a burning determination to save them, as Vin was always determined to see the right thing done. If there was a God, the man disappearing from his view would survive this day, Chris prayed for it as he seldom had for anything.
Now Vin watched them carefully across the gorge, aware with an ache he couldn't afford to indulge that it might be the last time he ever saw them. It took a long while before he saw them break into the open across the way, and longer before they got themselves high enough to make escape look almost possible, but by then the faint ring of shod hooves over stone further back down the gorge had been making Vin nervous for an hour. The timing couldn't have been worse. As soon as the enemy appeared below, he took on the job of keeping them off the six on the slope, set the rifle to shoulder and eye with implacable intent and chose his targets. Waited to see if they would look up to their right, making promises to God if they didn't.
When one pair of eyes tracked up the canyon wall and the rocky slope above, rifle barrel following the arc of his sight, Vin started letting go rapid-fire from a distance so great his first victim fell before the confounding echoes of the reports rose to full voice. Three went down dead in the churning log-jam of plunging horses and falling bodies before the rest, maybe eight or nine, managed to find cover, firing back not just at him, but at the pass on the other side as well.
Buck's Winchester started barking, and Vin's heart sank. They were in a desperately vulnerable position over there, and he had no compunction about cutting men down in the gorge below as fast as he could reload and begin again. He was far too engaged with keeping the posse pinned to look after the six on the other side, only pray they'd find their way to safety. He'd hold this damned gorge 'til sunset if he had to, if the others couldn't get over now, they might at nightfall, two or three hours, plenty of shells ... Gun-smoke rose in a stinging drift of cordite from below.
No matter how intent he was on his task, however, senses honed on the cruelest whetstones of both civilization and frontier jolted at the slight scrabble of rocks right behind him. The rifle butt snapped down into his hip as he spun on his knees an exhaustion-slowed second too late ...
A glimpse of muzzle-flash and a breath-taking punch low into his body, slicing hot and immediate into mortal places, shock jerked the trigger of the Winchester as a second hit slammed him back onto the merciless rocks, paralyzed in the crushing grip of dire and terrible pain.
A handful of shells went winking and tinking down the precipice as the clench of his left hand loosened and went lax over the deadly drop.
"Vin!" J.D. shot bolt upright from a few feet above Buck on the steep slope across the gorge and Buck, surprised as much by his presence as his shout, lunged out of cover to haul the kid down by the seat of his pants.
"What in Hell are you doin', boy? Sightseein'? You're supposed to be horsed n' up that damned trail, ready to ride!"
"We were almost there, everybody was nearly set, but they started shootin' n' we had to get back from it, the rest are still up there hunkered down, but I saw 'im!" A rush too excited to make sense of, "Vin's down behind those rocks over there!"
"Don't I know it, kid, old hawkeye's pegged four of 'em from there so far ..."
"No, no ..." JD grabbed Buck by the shoulders and forcibly turned him from his fire, something in his terrified face keeping Buck from shaking him off, "He's down behind the rocks, somebody got up to the ledge behind him and I saw him, he's down!"
Buck's long face tightened, slate-blue eyes immediately tracking across and up to Vin's position on the sheer cliff-wall and not finding the barrel of the carbine or the lazy puffs of smoke regular as breathing. Always amazed him how easy Tanner could breathe in the middle of a firefight, pickin' targets like he was shooting cans off a fence ... nobody could have crept up on Vin - 'cept an Indian ...
"Shit. Shit, shit." Buck hissed savagely, knuckles whitening on the grip of his rifle, suddenly all business, reloading with exacting haste, "J.D., you're gonna set up a racket for me, Chris could get in a position from above t'take a look, Vin could be reloadin', havin' a problem with the rifle or something else ..."
J.D. didn't believe that, Vin broke that rifle down and cleaned it regularly, had taught him the necessity of taking meticulous care of the weaponry and gear that was all a man had in the world between him and peril.
The kid's eyes looked black in his pale face, and Buck dredged up the ghost of a smile, in a hurry, but taking the moment for J.D; "Don't get so riled, kid, even if he's shot ... hell, Vin's got shot before - YOU got shot n' yer still kickin', ain't ya?"
J.D. struggled to get his breath, but his eyes were tracking a pattern below for his targets. Vin had told him to quit looking at what was there and instead see what hadn't been there the last time he looked. It'd taken him as long to get that one as it had hearing out of place sounds, but he was catching on, and Buck knew a moment of fraternal pride before his fingers gripped the kid's upper arm, gave him a jerk to get his attention.
"Look ..." Pointing below and making sure he saw, "There ... there ... and behind that scrub there, first ain't much of a shot but the other two can hold their own. One, two, three in a line the second I get out from behind this rock, OK? N' then do it again, I'm leavin' my rifle with you, it's fresh loaded." Suddenly Buck grinned, eyes bright with that peculiar feckless glee he took in a good fight, and it calmed J.D. considerably. "I'm warnin' you, boy, you let my pretty ass get shot up n' there's gonna be a score of pissed-off women huntin' you with the blood of vengeance in their tearful eyes."
J.D. tucked his hair back behind his ears with a terse nod and sighted the rifle on the first target with a grim twinge in his wounded shoulder, telling himself Vin couldn't be taken, a man so wary and careful, couldn't be, just couldn't be. Telling himself they'd never lost a fight and wouldn't lose this one, either, they'd find a way out of it as they'd found a way out of every other mortally dangerous place they'd been in the last couple months. They would.
Vin guessed he was alive and almost wished he wasn't, red-blind, and a deafening rhythmic roaring in his ears ... pain so intense even trying to breathe hurt, and he couldn't move otherwise for the life of him. He'd been shot before, but never had it hurt as deep and mortal as this. Vaguely he felt the ring of the Winchester's trigger guard against his fingers and tightened around it, but it was all he could do.
Chris watched Buck intently from twenty yards higher up the slope, his friend was crouched on an overhang so he could be seen on the slope above past the sharply-rising cut of the rim, flinching against rockshards kicking up at the edge. The curve he made with his hand across his forehead that described the forward slope of Vin's slouch-brimmed hat, a jerk of his fingers down and a flat-hand. Chris's stomach dropped. A hand signal to the rest ranging across the slope above him was all the warning they had, in the next heartbeat he was tucked tight and moving diagonally down the slope as fast as the deadly terrain allowed. Tumbles of rock pocked with holes to snap a leg, sharp-edged shards giving underfoot and he controlled the slide, aiming for a boulder near the edge where he could see down into Vin's position across the gorge about forty yards away.
He thumped breathlessly against the solid stone, legs shaking, and closed his eyes for a moment against a nameless dread. Then he dropped to his belly at the base of the boulder, snatched his hat off, and snaked forward enough to stick his head out. "God ." Unaware he'd made a sound as his heart rattled against the uneven stones he lay on and squeezed the breath right out of him.
Vin was on his back, head down the loose incline, legs tucked and bent to one side like he'd been kneeling when he got hit and Chris was appalled by how tiny the space was, how truly precarious. Vin's left arm draped senselessly out over the long emptiness below, and blood glinted gruesomely bright all over the front of his buckskins and shirt. Frantically he realized there was no way to get to him but to back down the slot, across the gorge full of posse, and up the long steep back of the east face . The wind took tendrils of his hair across his face, but that was all that moved. God, was he even alive?
"Vin!" He yelled, sharply, between volleys. Please, move, be alive ... "Vin!" Echoes lost in the riflefire from below. Nothing.
Finally, Chris laid his carbine over his forearm, closed one eye, focused hard on the lanky sprawl across the distance and prayed in a diffused and utter kind of way. As soon as the next volley started below, he let go a round. Took a great sucking breath when Vin flinched against the rockshards kicked up by his head. The bend of his knees tightened and the hand with the rifle in it jerked, holding on to it said he was alive enough to be aware of being alive, but he was probably wishing he wasn't.
Warmth was the first thing Vin noticed after the stinging in his face, focused low in his belly and radiating ... his back hurt, his chest up high ... warmth became heat ... not heat ... God, he didn't want to know this ... Pain ... a swamping rush so deep and vicious he couldn't, and didn't want to, hold onto the brief awareness.
Alive, then, but bad off if that's the best he could do. Chris didn't want to think how bad, he was a direct man and just wanted to get over there, so frustratingly near as the crow flew that for a ridiculous moment he actually wondered if he might leap it given a good enough run. Or had wings. Get this done, just get over there before his friend bled out alone. He smacked the rock under him, swore viciously. These bastards wouldn't let up before sundown, hadn't let up for two damned days now trying to figure out where they were headed. The seven of them were formidable individually much less in combination, but these renegade Comanche had proven too canny, and no one doubted only Vin had kept them out of harm's way so far.
No escape but the sheer rise behind him where they'd get picked off now like ducks in a row without Vin keeping them pinned. Wouldn't take two licks for the posse to know their prey could escape that way after dark unless they moved to cut them off. Hell, all they had to do was keep shooting at them to keep them away from it until they could send riders around the peak and up the west side to catch them between them. The mustang track would have to be abandoned.
Chris swore again without relieving the clamping pressure, a feeling he knew for scared and one he'd never liked. Nothing made him crazy mad faster than being mistook for helpless unless it was being cornered. Anxiously he squinted at the sun: Three hours before sundown. Vin moved again, but disjointedly, more a reaction to the pain of trying to move, his head rose and fell back. Felt like a needle being driven through his chest to watch him across that helpless distance, it'd take him those three hours to get down on foot, over and up to where Vin was, if he didn't get his ass shot dead in the doing. All they could do was hope whoever'd got to him was a scout so the posse didn't know for sure where he was up there. They'd let up after dark if they held to their pattern so far, bed down in comfort with no reason to risk the dangerous heights at night while the hunted thirsted and starved and frayed themselves running. They knew the seven were trapped, and Chris knew it, too, but it seemed less immediate than Vin right now.
Alright, alright ... Chris forced the biting urge to bloody reckless mayhem down, forced himself to think. The situation was what it was, now he had to find a way to work them out of it ... when he looked back up the slope behind him he saw Nathan making his way toward him and dropped his head at the determination in those wide dark eyes. He'd never be able to keep him from coming with him, Nathan reached him without a word, squinting in alarm down across the canyon at the bloody smudge that was Vin on the other side.
"Vin!" Chris yelled, and then didn't know what to do until the twisted sprawl of Vin's body flexed, the rifle barrel lifted a little; "stay alive!"
Damn but that made him laugh, trust Chris to cut to the chase. Knew the look on his face without having to see him, pissed off and double it to give a damn. Stay alive ... stay alive ... But Vin knew help would be a long time coming.
It was a bad turn to have to abandon that mustang track and nobody was happy about it when Nathan and Chris came back up. They'd be pinned where they were until nightfall, unable to get back up for the horses without exposing themselves to fire, and unable to run for the slot without giving it away, no one was ready to leave the horses, the canteens. Nathan had stood stubborn and silent at Chris' shoulder as they argued it quickly back and forth, his intention plain. Only Josiah offered no opinion.
"Do what you have to, and so will I. Keep yer asses alive." Chris said, and Buck grinned at him and went about setting the rest up as a shooting gallery that would keep the posse off them until dark. After that they could fetch the horses and get into that slot, hide in it if they had to or hope to make it back across the gorge behind the posse. No one argued the fact that the posse would move to cut off the track above, they'd have three hours to get riders up the west side, though they couldn't risk being targets against the skyline any more than the seven could.
Buck fanned the four out across the rocky lower slope, and the rest of that afternoon was spent in a fiercely pitched gun-battle as they kept the posse from coming up after them. Though they were cautious with their ammunition, they picked off the unwary or the clumsy below without mercy, and kept the main body pinned down in cover of the rocks below as well as those who came to join them, drawn by the protracted gunfire. The Indians, however, moved to their own whims, and appeared off and on startlingly close to the seven so they had to keep their backs to each other defensively. The only one who came near, however, had appeared out of nowhere and launched himself out of the rocks over Ezra's position, rapping him smartly on the shoulder with his lance-butt as he went and then disappearing into the rock-field downslope where it seemed a goat would break a leg.
Buck whooped loudly at Ezra's horrified exclamation as he turtled down in surprise, and told J.D. nearby that the brave was counting coup, something he hadn't seen for a long time, and never in a white man's service. But J.D. was too busy staying alive to listen, peripherally aware that the rest were fighting with an almost stately precision, calm and easy - hell, Buck expected him to carry on conversation! And the whole time things were moving so chaotically fast and furious to J.D. that he couldn't keep track of anything; bullets sounded like angry hornets ripping past your head, he was so thirsty his tongue felt like a burr in his mouth, and he was sweating rivers. There was a cold shake down in the center of him that wouldn't stop, and his guns were as hot as the merciless sun.
Josiah went down with a bullet lodged in one meaty thigh not long after Chris and Nathan left, an hour later, Ezra managed to dislocate his shoulder again throwing himself back behind cover too fast, and Buck caught a slug clean through his left hand that had him swearing a blue streak. It was as mortal a day as all but J.D. could remember since the war, bloody and hot and dusty without respite, water tantalizingly inaccessible until dusk on their horses. But they tucked down, the four of them, and fought like they were an army, and taught that posse something about gunslingers and desperados and fools. Buck even made a game of it after awhile, cackling loud enough for them to hear him below as he and J.D. and Ezra scored points between them for the best ricochets. They might be unable to move to safety until dark, but neither could they be moved. It would be a near thing judging the right time to move for the horses and get back to the slot before the posse used the same darkness to move over the pass behind them, but Buck cheerfully declared near things to be his middle name, and Ezra didn't have the energy to shut him up.
Buck's bravado was an odd sort of comfort, after all, to a man fixed on the memory of a screaming bronze face an inch from his own and the death that should have come, and had not.
Nathan's dark face gleamed with sweat despite the wind buffeting his back, breath dusting the rocks under him as he climbed. Chris was a few yards to his right, grim and silent as a ghost. They'd made it across the gorge rearward of the posse where the boys were keeping them occupied and there'd been no gunfire for the last hour. Long dark shadows were now diffusing into dusk; hopefully the boys were headed back into the relative safety of the mazed darkness, going for the hollow they'd agreed on as a meeting point.
"God!" Nathan gasped and Chris's body tensed into the rock, his pistol in his hand so fast Nathan was astounded he didn't plunge to his death from the action; pale eyes blazed hellishly.
"What? What is it?" Snapped low and urgent, expecting an enemy but probably thinking of a live one.
Not daring to let go to point, Nathan used a jerk of his chin to direct Chris' attention to his opposite side, the gunslinger turned and saw the body wedged grotesquely between the mountain and an upthrust spire, eyes drawn with gruesome directness to the spill of grey matter and the ruin of a broad indian face.
The healer shivered at the smile that flitted across the hard handsome cuts of Larabee's face before he started up again, hissing, "Good for him." Nathan set the coil of rope higher on his shoulder and turned back to the climb, taking only half a dozen pushes up before bumping Vin's dangling left hand with his forehead. Startled, he grabbed for the the curve where the promontory met the mountain, heart pounding.
"Chris!" Light-brown hair drifted aimlessly in the quick uneven breezes, Vin's head had to be on the little rock outcrop right above him.
"Wait!" Chris called as Nathan reached up for Vin, making out the darker outline of Vin's lean body, one knee still up, "He's on a loose slope, you undermine him the littlest bit n' he's going down headfirst." Amazed he hadn't already, only being unconscious and immobile had saved him. It crossed his mind to wonder what Josiah might say about Divine intervention.
"Stay still a minute ..." He told Nathan, focusing on Vin, on the surfaces around him, frustrated in his search for a stable place except for a narrow ledge below and to Nathan's left. This was not going to be easy, and his instructions were terse, his eyes fierce on Nathan to be sure he understood.
"We'll have to pull him down from up there, can't get up with him, not enough stable room ... the only place we can take him is just beyond you there, to the left ... let me work my way toward you. It's gonna be a reach and we're gonna hafta be careful t'keep his weight from oversettin' us. Alright?"
Quick and certain, such a clear line to what had to be done that Nathan didn't even hesitate to obey him, nor think that Vin might already be dead. Nor the high possibility that they might all plunge down the rocky precipice to their deaths. He took the step or two higher, carefully watching his boots and testing his weight on the surface before trusting it, then waited for Chris to work his way over to them, trying to see what he could of Vin in the darkening light.
Something cold, sticky wet under his fingers and he grimaced ... a run of blood that had to be Vin's. A lot of it.
Nathan could see Vin now, long raw-boned body loose over the sharp rocks, the updrawn ribcage and the barrel of the rifle slanted up along the flat of one hollowed hip. All he could see of face was the angle of his jaw and the sharp crest of one high cheekbone.
"Vin, you hear me? Hey, Vin ..." Quietly but urgent, and when Vin twitched, the healer's knees went liquid with raw relief.
"Great God, Almighty, he's alive ..." Joy thrummed in the warm deep murmur of his voice and Chris stopped, his forehead rested a moment on the rock with a breath that was the first whole one he'd drawn in hours. Yes.
"Vin, hey, Vin..." Nathan saw another faint flex of the curved fingers in front of him, touched them carefully, a flutter of eyelashes and the edge of aquiline nose turning to the sound of his voice and the sensation of his touch.
"I'm here, Vin, right here, we're gonna get you down. Chris is coming, you're okay, Vin ... we're here."
Into the gripping roar that warm soothing voice threaded a singularly calm tone, like the steady toll of a bell in a howling wind. Vin was vaguely amazed to feel tears track down his temples. Not alone, and he'd stayed alive. Funny, a man so in love with solitude would be glad of company in dying, because he knew he was. Had felt his life bleeding out the last few hours, realized the difference of these mortal wounds... Thoughts disjointed, but so powerful the world seemed small, and him very far away from it.
Nathan saw how blown open the tracker's pupils were and knew Vin wasn't seeing much, his face so white the hollows looked like bruises, blood speckled under his chin and tiny cuts on his cheek. The last of the setting sun across the mountaintop struck gold through the stubble on his angled jaw and Nathan shivered against the forboding sense of a last memory being made. Pre-dead, they'd called it with cynical necessity in the field hospitals, the ones they put somewhere out of the way to die quietly, and he shivered again with a heartfelt prayer that Vin was as enduring a man as he'd come to believe. He reached up to touch him, but Vin's head was already turning toward Chris as he came up on the opposite side of the outcropping his head was resting on. Nathan caught the flash of the gunslinger's teeth to find his friend conscious, and Chris reached for Vin's shoulder with a grip that reassured them both.
"You take good advice, pard, kept your bony ass alive. Good thing, I'da probably kicked your carcass over the edge if' I'd climbed all this this damned way just t'find you dead already."
Harsh and soft so Nathan could hardly hear him, and likely not knowing how much affection he revealed, as Chris seldom seemed to know. Larabee's heart could be seen if you knew what to look for, and Nathan had learned that healers had to be very sensitive to subleties on these dangerous frontiers where showing any weakness invited predation. Some of the six were as stubborn about being 'fine' as any men he'd ever met, sometimes he thought he had to be a mind-reader to know when that was a lie. Well, except now. Vin wasn't fine, Lord. And it was a damned long way down.
Vin's eyes drifted across Chris's face, a dazed and relaxed expression, and Chris's smile was wickedly glad, "Been a tryin' day, eh cowboy?" A puff of a laugh answered that obviously hurt, Chris shook Vin gently when his eyes closed, holding on hard to the edge with his other hand.
"Vin, you look at me, now. C'mon, Vin ..."
Coaxing him with voice and the grip on his shoulder out of the ethers, knowing that every piece of consciousness included a parallel awareness of pain, but gradually Vin's eyes focused on him, glassy and trying so hard. Chris worked the canteen around from his neck and pulled the cork with his teeth, pouring a mouthful of water between Vin's sun-cracked lips, and then another when it seemed to rouse him.
"Hang on to that carbine, we're gonna get you down from there."
He could see Vin doubted that, eyes darkening in dread of the danger they were putting themselves in, of being moved, the very thought made him dizzy and breathless and he closed his eyes again, but Chris wouldn't let him go.
"I know, Vin, it ain't gonna be fun, n' if you fight us, we're all goin' over a long drop. We'll be careful as we can, don't try to help, just let us move you, alright?"
Vin's eyes opened on him, deeply uncertain.
"It has t'be now, Vin, y'hear? It's gettin' dark, n' you know how far down it is ..."
How steep, how cragged, how mortally deadly, Vin knew that well. They shouldn't have come for him, though he'd spent every conscious instant selfishly praying for it ... they'd fall, they'd die - God, had they forgone the pass just to save him?
But Chris would do what he would do, sure as the sun rose and set. Vin gathered what he could of himself and thought he nodded, felt Chris ease his arm under his shoulders and Nathan do the same from the other side of the stone, the knot of their fingers and wrists arching his head back as they met under the top of his spine. Their eyes connected over him, less certain than they were saying about their footing, and more urgent still in the lowering light. Vin was hardly breathing. Both took the moment to set their feet firmly, to let the trembling of their legs ease, neither looking anywhere but at that small ledge and where they would place their feet to get there.
"Gotta slide 'im straight back about a third of the way off, Nathan, n' then you'll have to balance him on your shoulder so I can get around you and up a pace to reach his legs n' swing 'em down to the side." Neither believing it would be as easy done as said, but both were practical men and marked what moves would be needed - and which must be avoided. Neither could afford more than one hand to the task, the other had to maintain a grip on the rock.
At the first tug, Vin's breath exploded out of him on a harsh strangled grunt and he tightened involuntarily. Chris murmured something to him as he relentlessly dragged him back over the rock and down onto their close-set shoulders in a rattling shower of loose stone. The wind took a whip of Vin's hair over Chris's face, and the small sound the tracker made was a scream turned in.
"Don't fight it, Vin, don't help, let us ..." Chris talked more to drown out that mortal sound than to comfort or direct anyone, a quick glance told him Vin's grip on the rifle was firm, but he was breathing high and hard, and his mouth was a thin white line. The two men took a moment to steady themselves and find what balance they could before daring to move again, white-knuckled and barely daring to breathe.
"Easy ... easy ..."
Nathan didn't know which of them Chris was talking to, but he was encouraged by the calm determination of the tone, a man used to working his way out of disasters. Paradoxical that someone who readily tempted death still fought so ferociously to survive, but they'd all come to rely on Chris' ingenuity and resolve in doing just that. Nathan trusted him, and Vin had to, hurt and hanging out over a sheer drop on nothing but faith and the strength of their hands.
"Okay ..." Breathless and shaking with the strain of the angle and Vin's long-boned weight threatening to overbalance them any second, Nathan nudged his way closer to Chris and took Vin's shoulders, then his down-dropping weight with a soft grunt, into the curve of his own shoulder and bracing arm. "I got ya, Vin, it's alright ... please don't move ... "
Rich and soft in Vin's ear and he clung to it, knowing Nathan trusted him not to overset them both, but wanting to die from the pain like he'd never wanted anything, ever, and completely unable to hide it.
Chris made sure Vin was balanced before he let go, latching his right hand onto the rock and slowly, with painstaking care, moving around Nathan reaching with his left for the rock on the healer's other side. His hard narrow length pressed Nathan into the rock as he worked past him, and for a heartstopping second his belt-buckle caught on a loop at the back of Nathan's trousers as he slid by. The gunslinger froze with a gasped oath, but couldn't reach down to free it without upsetting the delicate balanced motion needed to shift his weight from his right hand and leg to his left to get past Nathan. Finally, Nathan slowly turned his hips under Chris' until the buckle was freed, their bodies tight as lovers and trembling with terror and exertion. This was looking more and more impossible by the second, Nathan's arms were burning with the effort of hanging on to the cliff with one hand and bracing Vin between his raised shoulder and his head with the other. After what seemed like an eternity, the warm safe pressure of Chris's body behind him swung on to the left, his foot slipped and all Nathan could do was hold his breath when he heard it. He couldn't see Chris now, and if he went down ... well, they'd be three at the bottom of this mountain, without a doubt, they were a hair from it right this instant. Finally, he felt Vin's weight shift to the left, Chris grunted , "I got ahold of him ... move my way if you can, Nathan ..." as he carefully slipped Vin's hips and legs sideways off the height until he could hook his elbow around the tracker's knees and hold them in that loop against his hip. From that point, using his own hard back-leaning weight as ballast, they worked their way toward the ledge, Chris telling Nathan where to step, since he could see the healer's feet and Nathan could not, Nathan had the heavier and more awkward part of their burden.
Nathan heard Vin moaning softly, 'please, please, please' in breathless pain between clenched teeth, and it seemed to take forever to reach the tiny ledge, jostling and sliding, gasps and sudden clutches, rasping strangled cries that were painful to hear, like everything about Vin, more powerful in spareness.
It was all Vin could do not to fight them, it was the hardest war he'd ever waged ...
By the time they reached the ledge and lowered him, shaking like men afflicted with a terrible palsy with the intensity of their exertion and nerves, Vin was bonelessly unconscious. Chris crunched into a sharp knot of knees and shoulders at Vin's head, trying to take as little room as possible; as it was, there was barely enough room for Nathan to kneel beside him, Vin's boots hung out over empty air.
"Too dark, it's too damned dark ..." Nathan's fingers gingerly pulled open Vin's vest, peeling the tan shirt away with a sticky sound, "Can't see where the hell ..." Talking to himself as he whipped off his bandana, cracking his elbow hard into the mountain as he did from the cramped confines but ignoring the flare of pain as he wiped gently down Vin's houndish torso. He found a bullet-hole maybe high enough on his left chest to have avoided the lung, "Pistol, thank God ..." Not rifle wounds, as he'd feared, then went on down the taut lattice of his narrow belly looking for what had to be another wound with a growing sense of dread. Frantic hands unbuckled Vin's wide gunbelt and unlaced his buckskin pants, laying the right side open and running his big hands across the bloody skin until he found the wound under, and a few inches to the right, of Vin's shallow navel. Long dark fingers spidered sensitively around and under Vin's back and pelvis, fruitlessly looking for exit wounds. God help him, he'd been up here bleeding for the better part of three hours and both bullets still in him, how was he still alive? He couldn't look at Chris but in glances; a gunslinger knew what gut-shot was.
"Bullet's are still in him and I can't do anything here but bind him to stop the bleeding, we gotta get 'im down."
Charged green eyes rose at the despairing pessimism of his voice and snagged Nathan's, held him over Vin's bloody body with implacable intent.
"Then that's what we do."
Nathan would never forget the struggle down that mountainside, Vin strapped back to back on Chris by the shoulders and chest with the fine braided lariat the gunslinger had carried up with him off Peso. Vin's arms and legs dangled and swayed, but Chris seemed able to balance it. They had debated for a few minutes how best to do it, the outcroppings and subtle outward slant too likely to snag him if they tried lowering him, no way they could carry him together. With dark too near and Vin too still and pale, Chris took the burden of the solution square on himself.
Nathan was a tall, strapping strong man himself, but he never would know where the gunslinger found the strength, dangerously awkward on the sheer slope and rocks, he watched in awe as the man in black went at it with silent grit and will. In slow painstaking increments, they inched their way down, Nathan remaining stationary above, braced as securely as the mountain allowed, with the rope anchored around his waist and looped around one powerful bicep so he could play it out to control the speed of Chris' descent, take some of the weight, and provide balance. Each time the rope neared its limit, Chris would have to find a spot stable enough to wait, white-knuckled hugging the cliff-face with his shoulders hunched under the weight, and let Nathan follow him down to start the whole thing over again. In this laborious fashion, they slowly brought their friend down the mountain.
Both spent awhile on their backs when they finally met the base of the cliffs, sucking in air that for too long seemed not enough, shaking with exertion and adrenalin. Even then, Chris kept his hand on Vin's chest, maintaining contact with the reassurance of his heartbeat. Night had fallen, and the creeping chill was welcome to overheated men. At last, Chris got unsteadily to his feet and dragged himself up onto his horse, lifting himself behind the saddle before beckoning Nathan. It wasn't easy for Nathan to get Vin high enough for Chris to pull him up in front of him, and he was glad the wounded man was unconscious through the jostling. Finally, Nathan passed up the reins, sweat gleaming on his earnest mahogany face and his eyes eloquent with worry.
"I'll go ahead, get things ready. " He said, "You'll need to take it slow, he's still bleeding more n' I like." He might have a little time to review his medical book, this would not be a simple procedure and he was already beating back despair of Vin living through the night.
Chris nodded, drawn and pallid, but unstoppable, bracing his arms around Vin's limp body and easing the tracker's head back against his shoulder. Nathan was worried by how sharp-boned and white the moonlight painted him, but Chris just moved off at a careful walk as soon as he had Vin's weight settled in balance against him. Nathan mounted, Vin's hat and gunbelt carefully stowed behind his saddle, and passed them at as quick a pace as the terrain and the darkness allowed.
Halfway there Chris felt him jerk, felt a breathlessly agonized moan vibrate against him, and a few seconds later a dazed whisper, "Chris?"
"Yeah, pard, I got you, rest easy now."
It seemed enough, and Vin relaxed. Chris didn't know if he was conscious or not, but he could feel his heart beating heavy and slow, as well as the damp heat he'd begun to radiate. Stay alive, stay alive, the slow cadence of carefully guided hooves, heartbeats, prayerful wishings.
How had it happened that he so much didn't want this man to die? Not any of the six, and this one in particular? Because he stood when he should have fallen or run? Would die to see justice done even having suffered injustice most of his life? The whole thing had been no more than a coin-toss in his head that day in Four Corners, numb and itching for something to relieve the pressure that still threatened constantly. They'd been dragging Nathan away to be hung, and Chris had been flipping a coin in his head, playing an idle game of mental tit for tat in waiting for someone else to stand to defend the town and the bold beautiful woman following the mob in a dust-ruined black silk dress. Vin Tanner had, and it wasn't even his town.
Dangerous, damnation, it was so dangerous to care this much, to risk the tiny bit of his heart that still sheltered a hope he knew would kill him to lose.
He heard horses coming in front of him, slow and careful, and stopped, backed his mount with a quick twitch of reins and a brush of heels into the darker shadows along the canyon wall, watching the animal's ears. They flicked forward, muzzle rising with a flare of nostrils in inquiry without alarm - friends. Buck, his broad angular shoulders bent as he back-trailed Nathan, Ezra emerging from the dark behind him.
Chris took his hand away from Vin's mouth then, and nudged the horse forward, Buck's head and gun both snapped to the motion. His dark eyes scanned Chris's face, then Vin's and he didn't have to ask the question Chris read in him.
"Holdin' on. What's the lay of things?"
Ezra turned in beside them with a fastidiously grim face and took it on himself to answer; "Well, no one has died, at least among our little company." Chris' eyes glittered at the faint blame, and Ezra, strangely, seemed to regret his flippancy. "We've found suitable concealment in a charming limestone bower, and our adversaries seem to have made their usual tactical retreat." A theatrical sigh, dingy-laced wrists crossed with a brief wince over the pommel of his saddle as though he were out for a pleasant afternoon ride that had inexplicably landed him here. "Obviously their rustic sojourn is a somewhat more amenable experience than ours has thus far proven to be." Ezra's shoulder ached abominably, and he had taken most of the skin off his palms as well as the knees off his black pants in a fall more mortifying for the sight he must have made than that injury.
"We got bloodied a bit, but we're tucked in n' there's Indians cookin' somewhere upwind." Buck translated tersely, flexing his bandaged left hand with a short hiss of discomfort. Chris's back stiffened; cooking upwind so the enemy would feel it's privation more acutely, they knew their supplies were exhausted.
"Comanch ..." The soft rasp of Vin's voice startled them all as much as the slurred humor in it, "mighty imaginative in their torments ..." like wolves nipping and chasing, bleeding the prey to the killing ground in excruciating increments just for the fun of it, and he couldn't let them be driven, had to warn them ... of something ... the dreamy drift that had brought him up took him back down again.
"Sons'a'bitches." Chris muttered.
"It's not too far, Chris, follow on." In their safe company, exhaustion descended on Chris like a hammer. He didn't remember half the hour it took to pick their way down the canyon, so deep and steep the stars were a mere spangled slice overhead.
J.D. and Nathan came out to meet them from their sketchy camp, and Nathan reached for Vin at once, searching Chris' face anxiously when he tightened his grip on the tracker protectively and looked down in vaguely threatening confusion. From a distance, Chris heard the creak of Buck's saddle as he dismounted, then his warm hand on his thigh and a low calm tone.
"Chris, let us get you both down from that horse."
They were here, and Vin was still alive, though he hadn't moved in a very long time. He passed him down into their arms, blinking at the loose boniness of the tracker's length as his leg slid over the saddle. Like he was a dead animal. Chris had to hold the horn a moment when he dismounted so his knees would steady, dreading the bloody hours to come that he saw in Nathan's eyes. A gunslinger did, indeed, know what gut-shot was. They might be able to do nothing but be with Vin when he died.
J.D. hovered around the outside of the camp, unable to get nearer for all his anguish, shaking and finding it hard to breathe, impossible to be still, a deep shivering in his vitals. Vin looked ... dead, slack and pale, blood everywhere, helpless. Vin was never anything but capable, never unwary, seldom fooled, wasn't ever helpless... Blood had a strong smell, everything had a strange horrible clarity. Lord, he didn't want Vin to die, Lord, please don't let Vin die ...
There was a small campfire in the concealment of the rocks overhung with a ground tarp to avoid casting light upward, and they carried him there. Josiah rose from the shadows on sentry above, a bloody bandage around his right thigh and favoring it heavily as he came down far enough to see under the tarp. His face was an unreadable cast of primal bones in the sharp shadows.
"Is he dead?" A bare grumble of voice, but he immediately found himself the focus of Chris Larabee's truly deadly regard. Josiah wasn't afraid, the specter of death had not enjoyed that power over him in many years, but he recognized the madness in the gunslinger's high-noon eyes and said nothing more, regretting the way his question had sounded but unable to change it. He felt a strange lassitude that was more than blood-loss and exhaustion, he seemed to be seeing and hearing at a numb distance even from himself. Blankly he looked down; men he had cared about, men he'd trusted, admired ... a collection of strangers now, as he was to himself, lost. He clung to a faith that had never uplifted him, and chastised God for forsaking him.
They laid Vin close to the fire for the meager light and warmth, and Nathan and Chris set about stripping off his vest, the ruins of his shirt, sodden and tacky. A broad dark bruise over the center of his chest was revealed as Nathan cut away the bloody bandages, and Chris spared Josiah another lashing glance.
The preacher refused to think where these men and he might be when this was over, he moved back up into the darkness, desperately searching for a guiding voice other than the doom proclaimed in his father's. He stood above them, feeling utterly apart. Listened to their quiet urgent murmurs, could pick out who was talking even so quiet as they were being. A deep sigh escaped him.
Four Corners, and these men, had given him a tranquility he had only been pretending at for years, fooling himself that repetition would yield what belief had not. The years lay heavy and long on him now, too many, too useless. Too hopeless without any faith at all.
J.D. watched, gruesomely mesmerized and far too aware of how hard and fast his own heart was beating. Shot twice ... one messy hole high on his left chest and another very low to the stomach on the right, dark blood spattered down his groin and the front of his unlaced buckskins, bright blood trickling down around his narrow sides as he lay there, still as death. The youngest's shoulder ached with a sudden ferocity and ceased to be a proud badge of manhood, but a near miss of true death. In an instant, everything could be lost, even his own life. It was the first time among them that he'd really realized they were vulnerable.
Don't die, don't, never realizing he was whispering the words aloud.
"My things are in the coals, Chris, if you'd bring 'em to me."
Blades and long tweezers and probes fading sullen red from the sterilizing heat were laid on a clean towel next to Nathan's medical book, propped open to catch what light he could from the fire. A shudder shifted under Vin's tight thin skin as Nathan checked for any further damage.
J.D. stared, thinking so many stupidly panicked things. How much more muscle Vin had than he'd thought, sinewy though it was, no fat on him anywhere, like he'd been peeled down to his essentials by a life J.D. couldn't guess at. He had so much to learn from him, he was so key to what the seven were ... please, God, don't let him die ... a childish litany but he couldn't stop it, feeling helpless and useless and invisible.
A soft sound brought their attention to Vin's face; neither Chris nor Nathan were happy to find him rousing.
"Jeez, Vin ..." Chris knelt by his head with a tight wry smile, "Couldn't y'stay unconscious when it counts? You're gonna be a lot of damned trouble, I just know it."
"Don't worry none ... " Ghostly hoarse, "don't expect I'll ... be this way long ..." An attempt at a smile that turned into a grimace. "Hey, give me ..." Bloody fingers weakly gesturing after Ezra's silver flask by Nathan's hip, "B'fore Nathan ... wastes it ... all ... hurtin' me with it ..." A brief slanted stretch of almost smile at Nathan acknowledging in advance what he would have to do to him. Chris kept him from chipping his teeth on the rim.
"Nathan's gonna pull these slugs you're totin' around."
Vin choked on the swallow but kept it, sputtering, "Dammit, I knew you were gonna say ... that ... let's not be botherin', won't make no nevermind ..."
Darkness eclipsing his eyes and Chris got mad at how scared that made him, "Look, cowboy, I didn't haul your sorry ass down no damned mountain to let you die, even if you want to." He gave him a second draw off the whiskey and then had a defiant drink himself before measuring what was left with a critical shake, and passing it to Buck. Ezra's hand reached over his shoulder for it next, but Nathan took it back before he could lift it to his lips.
"Ain't enough there t'put you out," Chris said, "but I expect you're gonna want to die 'less you let me cold-cock you."
"I'll ... shoot ya from hell you do ... got enough damned bruises n' ... shit." Nullifying the argument by passing out.
"Cooperative old cuss, ain't he?" Buck drawled.
Nathan poured a small amount of carbolic on his hands, since they didn't have the water to spare, then dried them on a clean cloth to which he added more cabolic. "Alright, let's get to this while he's out: Buck, J.D., hold his legs down just above the knees, Chris and Ezra, get his arms, I can't have him movin'. J.D.?" Wide dark eyes did a stunned drift from Vin to where they were all waiting on him, so pale his freckles stood out like spots of blood.
"You'll be alright, boy, we need you t'lend a hand, now." Buck said in gentle encouragement, and J.D. came to do what was needed. To everyone's surprise, however, as soon as they laid restraining hands on him, Vin came to so violently they were all startled into grabbing on too hard.
"Vin! Quit!" Chris recognized panic, and it was a wild second before the tracker knew them and sank back in shivering lucidity, something near relief in his eyes that confounded Chris. Where had he been in those few seconds that the prospect of having a bullet cut out of his belly was preferable?
"You OK, Vin?" A nod, darting eyes. "Dammit, cowboy, I told you you'd be trouble."
"Call me ... that ... agin ... I'll find a way ... t'kill ya right now." Chris actually laughed.
Ezra mirrored Chris as he sat down just behind Vin's head to the left and set his left boot over Vin's shoulder, his heel in the tracker's armpit, taking Vin's forearm up the back of his own calf and getting a grip on his wrist against his knee, effectively pinning his shoulders to the ground. Awkwardly brutal, but effective, Vin would fight them at the risk of dislocation, malady Ezra had recently experienced in excrutiating detail.
Vin closed his eyes with ferocious will, his sinewy body vibrating like a wire in a high wind, but not making a sound. There could be no noise to give their position away, and he made none despite feeling the burning stretch in every bone and muscle, his belly on fire and a sharp deep pain in his left shoulder that the position made nearly unbearable. Didn't want to do this, but couldn't bring himself to stop them trying to save him.
J.D.'s eyes remained owlish as he watched them, businesslike and calm, like blood and gore were as normal as pitched gun-battles, as starving and dying of thirst, and he couldn't understand how when he was struggling mightily against fainting or puking, so much going on in him he didn't know what he'd do. The tendons of Vin's chest and arms in high relief, all his bones striking hard under his skin with how much it hurt, maybe how much he knew it would, but he didn't make a sound that carried more than a few feet. Somehow the small involuntary grunts and moans were worse than screaming.
"You ready, Vin?" Nathan asked.
Vin's breath exploded in a hurt gasp of laughter that surprised everyone except Chris, whose wry grin flashed answer.
"Helluva ... question ..."
"I'm gonna wash you down with the carbolic and get a better look, gonna do the belly first, alright?"
"Oh ... yeah. Can't wait..."
Warm and calm as a mother and hands as gentle as that, but the carbolic hurt in a cold deep way that set off fine tremors. All his courage came from their hands on him, the anxiously resolute jade eyes above him.
He made it through the cutting OK, Nathan was quick, and his blades razor-edged, so it was done before he had a chance to feel it. But the first probe yanked his spine up in a hard bow off heels and shoulders, and everything went frantic. Nathan snatched the probe back before Vin impaled himself on it, the heels of Buck's big hands slammed into the tracker's hipbones to force him down, slipping in blood. Rather than dislocating his shoulders, Vin proved tricky enough to slip Ezra's grip entirely so the gambler had to go flailing after his arm before Chris threw his leg over the top of the tracker's chest, holding left arm firmly, talking to him in a quiet but urgent tone that Vin didn't seem to hear.
The tracker wanted up with everything he had, and they held him down in a breathless chorus of grunts and words, his name, not wanting to hurt him further or allow him to do it either. Again, Chris sensed raw panic at being forcibly restrained.
J.D. felt like he was on a bucking horse until the dull flash of Chris' pistol barrel cracked sharply along Vin's head and he collapsed into stillness. Everything went so quiet they could hear Josiah's uneven climb back up to sentry. J.D. looked up after the preacher, surprised he'd come down in the first place.
"Shoulda done that t'begin with." Chris said finally, holstering the colt, then rubbing the fast-growing knot above Vin's ear to be sure he hadn't hit him too hard.
"Gonna be pissed when he wakes up, Chris. Don't know as I'd've done that to a feller who can shoot your nose off from a mile away." Buck said, half-serious, but Nathan breathed a sigh of relief, and his deep liquid eyes were only half-joking.
"I'll let 'im do it t'Chris next time he collects a bullet." Which gave them a bit of macabre hope that time would come.
For the next half hour, J.D. watched, hypnotized by horror, as Nathan deftly opened the thin skin and successive overlaps of woven red muscle, blood welling up and over, and then hints of gleaming organs that had him a breathless instant from vomiting before Buck reached over and grabbed his chin in his fingers, forcefully drawing his look away.
"Deep breaths, kid, look at me ..." With enough condescension to prick J.D.'s pride and settle him that way. Obviously, all of them had seen such things before, tended comrades brought low in battle, but J.D. had never been shot or knifed or even seriously injured until yesterday, and that was a scratch by comparison. He didn't know how to act, had never realized how vulnerable a mortal body was that a tiny lead ball could bring it down without regard for strength or size or heart. Someone who'd never treated him with anything but patience, answered his questions as if he weren't stupid to have asked them. Laid out the wilderness for him in a way he'd never expected to know it. 'Friend and foe and blameless in either guise'; it was the first time he'd ever felt like he had a mature grasp on anything. Buck smiled at him almost tenderly, the way he had of knowing what J.D. was feeling so he didn't have to say it.
By the time Nathan was done, they were uniformly speechless at the new level of skill he'd displayed, delicately finding and stitching three holes in the large intestine before he located and removed the slug, laving carbolic acid diluted in warm water into Vin's body cavity against the poisons of the breached gut. The whole time he kept thinking back to the articles he'd read so recently, closing his eyes as he ran his fingertips along the slippery walls of intestines feeling for any other holes, pausing now and then to reinforce the memories of what to look for. Then he closed him up in successive layers and weights of fine stitches, using the carbolic liberally all the way, checking where to stitch, what sort of knot, how and how many ... Their healer sat for a long few minutes when he was done there, flipping the same three pages back and forth in his text and examining the illustrations carefully to reassure himself that he hadn't neglected anything.
The chest-wound he had to go deep and hard into. From its upward path, Vin had already been falling when he'd taken that one, and it had lodged inside the scapula right at the joint of his shoulder so he couldn't get to it from the back. It took a great deal of force to get it out, further bruising the confluence of bones and ligaments so it would be a source of pain for a very long time. If he lived.
Nathan was still murmuring to himself when he finally sat back from cutting the last knot. "I need more of them journals, gotta find a way to get my hands on more ..." Talking to himself as if unaware of them, still focused on his patient and the demands of the injuries. Two months ago, he wouldn't have known what to look for to find the intestinal perforations, wouldn't have known how to reliably close them or try to stave off what had always become mortal sepsis, but despite the comfort of this new information, there was so much more he needed to know ... He sighed deeply, examining Vin carefully, the bandages, his bruised and scraped and blood-streaked body, his color, his breathing, not satisfied, as he was never satisfied, that he had done everything that could be done.
"He's gonna need water ... gut was empty, which is good, I suppose, but he ain't taken no food in a long time, nor water either ... J.D., fetch the canteens, let's see what we got ..."
When the kid came back a few minutes later he had six canteens swinging lightly in one hand, and one, Vin's in the other that he held out almost gingerly, as if its weight had some profound meaning he couldn't quite grasp.
"Vin's is nearly full, Chris ..." Chris straightened, looked down at Vin in quick and painful understanding.
"Where did he come by water, and why didn't he tell us?" Ezra said, and Chris shot to his feet, hands striking snake-bit quick into Ezra's shirtfront and his eyes blazing cold fury as he yanked the gambler up into his face.
"Ain't no water in here, Standish! Think about what that means! That man," with a shake that knocked Ezra's hat off, "that man you're so all-fired ready t'blame for everything from original sin has been doin' without so's we'd have it if it came to it!" Furious with Ezra, and furious with Vin for doing it.
Ezra, startled and not a little afraid of Chris' barely-checked fire, held his hands open and wide, looked back at him as though the concept of such selflessness was alien to him, disbelief warring with the inescapable logic. Three days? For three days the tracker had resisted water in this blistering wasteland to reserve his water for them? Was it possible? Chris saw that shamed turmoil in Ezra and let him go with a disgusted shove that set him back a few stumbling steps. They were all looking at Vin, wondering, amazed.
Finally Nathan sighed deeply, sorrowfully, and said, "C'mon, let's get him onto somethin' clean." All of them helped so Vin nearly floated onto a dry clean bedroll. Chris cupped the back of the tracker's head to slip Peso's saddle blanket under it, laying his arms comfortably beside him with thoughtful solicitousness. It was a long minute before he was able to risk meeting anyone's eye.
"Nathan?" He said when he finally looked up, all that mattered in that question, and Nathan found himself the focus of all. His face was anxiously sympathetic, but unflinchingly honest.
"Chris, I don't know. He's lost a terrible lot of blood and it's a belly wound left untended for half a damned day." He covered Vin and looked around at them again, even Ezra's face was sharp with more than just fatigue.
Chris's eyes snapped, "He's strong-hearted."
So certain of it on so brief an acquaintance, and yet Nathan could only nod in agreement. The tracker was what his Mam had called an enduring sort, and though he couldn't know what hardships had tested Vin Tanner, he knew steel when he saw it.
"I reckon if anyone can survive this, Vin will." Tenuous hope, but all he had to offer just then.
"Yer lips t'God's ears." Buck said quietly, quoting Vin.
Ezra looked out into the darkness where Josiah's shadowy figure loomed like prescient doom.
So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.
Romans 10:17
At sundown, the posse had come stringing into the camp they'd struck in the sandy bottom of a wide intersection where several canyons met, and though their weariness and wounds were much in evidence, so was a sense of victory that scared Charlie. They were missing a goodly number of men and there were many moaning and bleeding, but what was more significant to Charlie was that the Comanche were not laughing today. Even when one of their own had been killed, they managed at least disdain for the white men's failures that enriched them, they hadn't seemed to cared if the white men took a month to catch the seven.
Today, however, their dark faces were closed and cold as masks, and they moved their camp a good distance away into the privacy of a smaller ravine where they convened a dark ceremony at their fire. Fearfully curious, Charlie walked a string of horses cool and watched surreptitiously under their necks and bellies, ignored and unnoticed as ever. He watched them smoke awhile, blowing grey streamers into the winds, then the one who'd sported black stripes on his face the last two days and would no longer eat in the mess tents began to speak, with many significant pauses and looks.
Big Tree was a Parabio (chief) and eldest of this group of Comanche warriors, who had come from three different bands. He was a man of many war-honors and strong puha (medicine power), generous and faithful to the old ways, his family respected among the bands, so they had honored his demand to make council, to smoke the pipe and hear his words.
"The favor I do in serving this white man for White Wolf ...", a nod in that old friend's direction - "is gladly given. My only son's life was saved by this friend's courage on the battlefield, and he was wounded doing this honorable thing." Slight nods acknowledged the depth of what it was due.
"But I say we hunt a brother. This we have proof of in the track and the tricks left for us. His rifle fire today." That this masterful rifle-fire itself called forth private memories Big Tree did not say, it mattered to no one else. "That fierce one did not come back today." Santanta, but the Comanche did not speak the name of their dead. Six wide copper faces blank as carvings to Charlie, but to each other, the respect for the skills and cunning they'd encountered was plain. Six, where they had been ten, and all experienced warriors. Big Tree saw these things in their still faces.
"We hunt a brother, and our good friend White Wolf has been told a big lie. We have taken horses and goods and offered the spirit portion only to discover the offering tainted, and our brother dishonored. No." Cleverly holding them still on these points of honor, which were larger than the wagon of goods that had been delivered to the camp and the horses that had been accepted. Big Tree saw the narrowing of a few pair of eyes to realize the trap he was leading them toward, and he did not make them wait.
"Big Tree will repay his debt to White Wolf by avenging this dishonor - which has stained all of us as well. Will we be tricked like children into spilling the blood of our brother for these fools and murderers? Pah, they do not deserve the sacrifice." They could not argue with him, and some did not like what he said, but Big Tree was masterful in more than the battlefield; "Also,", said he, and the glint of a toothy smile was allowed - "in there, we chase seven starving and hard-run horses, while out here ..." A tip of his chin toward the remuda. Dark eyes sparked with mirthful avarice and they agreed, honor and purses both intact.
Charlie understood nothing of what he heard, faint gutteral exclamations somehow made more grave by their somber faces and formal posture. But when the one finished speaking, all the warriors arose and put off their white men's clothing with indifferent immodesty, bodies blocky and dark and powerful in the twilight. Then they dressed again in deerskin shirts and breech-cloths, mocassins that sheathed their legs to the hip painted with pale blue designs. Charlie wondered what had happened, what the shadowy resolve in their faces meant. Why it made him shiver to watch them draw parallel lines across each other's wide foreheads and lower faces using soot from the fire mixed with something one carried in a tiny gourd. Charlie hadn't thought they could be any more scary.
Once dark fell, Charlie shadowed the Sheriff and tucked up in a small shadowed niche at the bottom of a cluster of rocks where he'd purposely set Vickers tent. Listened, as the plainsman had shown him, sieving out the sounds of the camp one by one to those he needed.
"... maybe three days, they can't last no more n' that without water, hot as hell in the day n' freezin' their asses off at night, no food ... " Sheriff Saunden's gravely deep voice confident of eventual glory with a posse Sherman would've killed to have. "We think one of them Injuns took the sharpshooter out ..."
Charlie's heart clutched in the same instant Vickers leapt from the camp chair, Saunden took a step back and the shadow of his rising hands stretched like crazy wings across the canvas.
"Think? Think? Is he, or is he not, dead?"
"Don't know, weren't no fire comin' from the heights for a good while before dark, n' they was workin' pretty hard t'keep us off where he mighta been. We lost one of the Comanche scouts right about the same time, that crazy buck that likes t'bloody up your boys so much. Figgered he could've got him, he's the only one who would've tried t'climb that cliff. We winged a couple of the other six, too, n' their horses are nearly whipped, tracks've been draggin' , they're near cornered ..."
Charlie didn't have to see Vickers face to know why Saunden was talking so fast, the Colonel's hand shot out and fisted in the Sheriff's shirt-front; "Then what in the hell are you doing here?" He grated, "You have an immediate advantage, and instead mosey on home for supper?"
"Ain't no different than we been doin every night!" Saunden said defensively, trying to stand behind the badge, "We lost eight of your men out there today, Vickers, not countin' the Injun, and seven more got wounds gonna make 'em pretty useless even if they live, what're we supposed t'do in the dark?"
"Have you no idea of the true purpose of this little exercise, Sheriff? Do you think we're on some fine and fancy camp excursion with scheduled entertainments and quitting times? Do you think I'm paying you by the hour?" Vickers' voice rose with fury, and he let Saunden go with a shove.
Charlie didn't hardly breathe, eyes drawn to the towering blackness of the mountains where they cut off the spangled sky. The thought that the plainsman might die before he found out the truth had never occurred to him. It would ruin everything, he'd never know if he could have faith in anything ...
Saunden kept backing up from the threat of Vickers' anger and was nearly out the tent flap when Orson's headlong rush inward almost bowled him over. The canvas wall in front of Charlie jumped and he did, too, cracking the top of his head on the rocks above him and barely swallowing a hurt yelp.
"What is it!" Vickers snapped, and Charlie knew the seething eyes and daggered voice that stopped Orson so fast he nearly overset himself.
"Sir ... sir, this is urgent, private, sir ... and urgent ..." Stammering and shaking like a tree in a high wind, his shadow dancing with quick nervous movement. After a dangerous moment of fuming silence, Vickers dismissed Saunden, whose rush betrayed his relief, and Orson dared wait another moment after he'd left to be sure they weren't overheard. He came close to Vickers, his head turning as if he might see spies beyond the tent. As if he might see Charlie listening with his whole body. His voice was low and scared.
"Sir, I just got word from Davis that Mary Travis, that woman editor from Four Corners, has convinced the Judge to come here."
The Colonel's shadow froze, "What?" He hissed, "For what reason, come here?"
"I don't know, sir, apparently she's done some digging, sending a lot of telegrams, I don't know, but he's coming, and they think he's got men with him." Orson's tone shook, softened breathlessly, "Sir, these other six are friends of that plainsman's, and we can't expect to kill a judge, sir ..."
"Why not?" But it was bravado, a stubborn refusal to be bested, Vickers knew he didn't dare. However, if the seven were dead before the judge got here, there would be nothing Travis could do.
"Get hold of yourself, Orson, it damned well doesn't matter." Decisively in charge in manner if not yet fact. "Tanner stands accused and all but convicted of murder, he's already a fugitive in Texas, and the rest have gone outlaw by helping him. We, my dear boy, have the law on our side, so roust them, Orson; from now on, they hunt until it's done."
"But sir, the maids..."
"The maids?..."
"Yessir, the maids, sir, Isobel and ..."
"The maids, Orson? What the hell do my maids have to do with it?"
Orson's distress was palpable, "Sir, they know, they heard her ... after the tracker left, they swear they heard her laughing ..."
Vickers' shadow seemed to swell, and Charlie felt his skin go clammy cold; by the sudden shaken lean, Orson's did, too. It was no more than he'd heard the maids say himself, no more than rumor, but ...
"I told them it was superstitious nonsense, sir, I sent word for them to be on the next stage home, and warned them to speak to no one of it ..."
"You should have had them killed immediately." Cold as a snake, glacially mortal, and Charlie stiffened with shock at the same time Orson's shadow did.
"Sir, I couldn't just ..."
"Couldn't you? Is your memory that truncated, Orson? Have you forgotten the first precept of business? 'Keep a clean board' - no loose ends."
"N-n-n-no sir, nossir, I ..." Terror colored every trembling word, his hands quaked against the canvas, shoulders rounded submissively. Orson wasn't a bad man, Charlie didn't think, stuck up like all rich people, kind of mousy and obviously in way over his head here, he had no idea ... Vickers shadow advanced toward the slender flicker of Orson's.
"You have witnessed, Orson, how I dispatch those who compromise my interests. You know I leave nothing to chance, I haven't come this far being careless and I don't intend to be careless now. Send six of those desparados out there after the stage the maids are on and give them their heads. No survivors. Then get the rest of the men moving, there are thirty of them, dammit, to find seven!"
Within the tent, Orson's sweat made his hands slippery, his heart beating so fast he was lightheaded, flushed with a heat that felt like hell opening up under him. Yes, oh God yes, he'd witnessed Vickers' dispatch, and that his own life was at terrible risk he no longer doubted - he was a loose end himself, he'd seen her after the plainsman had left, seen her alive, if a bit bruised. Heard her purring voice and wicked laughter and knew very well how she had died. Bound to uphold Vickers' testimony or perish long before he had the chance to get home, he'd had no choice but corroborate the lie of her dying words.
Orson understood now with a terribly forlorn loss that his initial suspicions were correct; his father couldn't help but know what sort of a man Vickers was, and the contract he'd arranged for the sickly son he despised was meant to either force some value from him or get him out of the way of his brothers entirely. Make a man of you, father had declared stoutly, and he'd been too ashamed and afraid to do anything but go along.
Outside the tent, Charlie shook like he was in a high wind.
"Well? What are you still doing standing there?"
"Sir ..." A gulp even Charlie could hear, a breath, struggling after a scrap of courage. "We can't just have them murdered, they're innocent young girls, they've worked for you since they were children, surely you can't ... "
"Inconvenient time to attempt to grow a spine, Orson, and you and I both know it won't hold the weight of a bit of lead." Silky smooth and almost pleasant, but Charlie knew that voice, knew Orson got white-faced without having to see him. He'd wilted like a hot-house lily in a fire every time Vickers raised his voice, so he was surprised Orson had dared even that weak objection.
Vickers' shadow eclipsed Orson, the little man's head was thrown back to look up at him as he loomed over him like a cat over a mouse. His voice was so low Charlie dared poke his head out of the cover of the rocks to get his ear against the canvas, knowing anything Vickers wanted to keep private would be something valuable to know.
"Listen to me, little man." He growled, "No one, and nothing, ever threatens me. No one. Nothing. I don't care how long they've been in my employ, their value ceases irrevocably when they can imperil me - how do we know they haven't told anyone else?"
Charlie's stomach jumped into solid knot. Not superstition, not fear of the voodoo or her loas - the maids had known the truth! She was alive when the plainsman left her! His heart felt like a burning stone in his chest.
"How stands the value of your life to me, Orson? Your father is my associate, and I would hate to have to report anything untoward happening to you out here on this wild frontier. Surprisingly, you have been of great value to me, you have a fine grasp of the vagaries of the commodities markets ... but that can change. You've seen that even long-time relationships can change, haven't you, Orson?"
Orson made no reply that Charlie could hear, working the pistol numbly out from under his shirt.
"How long do you think I owned Marie-Laure, boy? Twelve years, since she was fifteen years old, and I treasured her as I treasure very little that draws breath. But she tried to use Tanner to kill me. Do you understand now, Orson?"
Orson did, oh yes, he did, the quiet, almost affectionate voice flowing over his senses like acid whilst the eyes nearly choked him to death, too afraid to breathe. He understood all too well, God forgive him, all too well, and Vickers saw that with an approving nod.
"Serve me faithfully, and you may yet enjoy your Daddy's pride, your rewards will be many. Betray me, and suffer the same fate that faithless whore suffered at my hands."
At my hands ... my hands ... it was all Charlie heard, the final irrevocable truth. Shivering like a sapling in a high wind, he pointed the pistol at the shadow on the canvas, followed the confident motion as Vickers returned to Orson, who had not budged. His finger curled around the warmed metal and his eyes watered with terror, but he knew what he had to do.
Buck came in fast out of the dark, touching Chris to wake him, carefully out of the way of his hands. Nathan looked over from his watch near Vin, looking worried and frustrated as he always did when someone was bad off. Buck's teeth flashed white in his grimy face, but the grin was grim; "Well, the bad news is there's torches in the far passes, Chris, they ain't waitin' 'til daybreak this time. Good news is they gotta be broke up in smaller groups, many of them as there are, 'less they got a damned army here since nightfall, we got a better chance. Kid n' me saw groups movin' through four of the canyons east, 'n I don't know south ..."
"There as well." Ezra's drawl startled them as he slipped in from the dark with more stealth than any expected, "It would seem a renewed air of determination has somehow been instilled in our pursuers - perhaps a more substantial bounty? Bless my soul, can you imagine what the seven of us might be worth? I declare I am moved disguise myself in bustle and bonnet and turn you all in just for the stake!"
For the first time since he'd met him, Chris flicked him a crooked grin in appreciation of his sarcasm. Yammer on as he did, and Lord knew he could whine the ears off a mule, he'd sat by Vin for an hour when he could've been sleeping coaxing dribbles of water from Vin's canteen into his mouth. The gambler had stuck it out this time with a kind of defiant dignity Chris had to respect, he figured him to be in it to the end and he was glad of it, because this was as bad a spot as he could ever remember being in.
With J.D. wobbling with weariness and the whole posse behind them suddenly making moves in earnest, Buck was uncharacteristically nervous, "Chris, they're gonna be after us everywhere, they're spread out all over the place, we gotta be mobile."
"Vin can't take movin'." Nathan's voice was low and clear, but his eyes flashed worry over the embers of the fire, his dark fingers remained on Vin's wrist even as he entered the conversation. Their tracker hadn't moved since they'd laid him there, barely breathing, and his pulse was lazily uneven. Worse, he was starting to sweat in earnest. "Chris, it'll kill him. I ain't none too sure he's gonna live as it is. If I missed any little holes in the gut, if stitching them done any good whatever so long after he took the wound, if I flushed ..." He stopped, seeing how hard his worries struck them, but unable to be that merciful to himself. If he'd flushed the cavity properly, and if that was of any real use beyond the hope of a few progressive physicians in a medical journal a year out of date. If the infection got worse, the fever higher with so little water and the risk of dehydration ... Vin had been running on empty for days and didn't have a reserve left to him, there were way too many 'ifs'.
"Then we don't move him unless they get near," Chris said directly, "this is pretty tucked away. I kinda like the idea of them bein' broke up out there, but let's not be going out shootin'. You get a chance t'take one or two quiet, do it, but otherwise stay out of sight. We're gonna need all the eyes we've got t'keep track of 'em 'til we get the lay of things and figger out what to do. Nathan, can you leave him?"
Nathan looked down at the tracker, his unwillingness plain. "Well. Ain't like he's goin' anywhere. But somebody's got to stay with him, he's gonna need sips of water whenever he can take 'em. Josiah can't get around out there in the dark on that leg."
All their eyes went to the preacher in the shadows, and they hardly breathed for feeling like Nathan, in his tenderhearted commonsense, had run them all headlong into their mistrust. Now or never. J.D. came closer and Buck side-stepped to interpose the back of his shoulder and stop him, "Be still." Meaning it.
Chris approached Josiah, not careful of him but being as threatening as he felt it was useful to be. For a very long minute they just looked at each other, eye to eye. Finally Chris said with brittle sincerity.
"I'm trustin' you with Vin's life, Josiah. N' I got faith in you, same's I do in him." A moment more he held Josiah's blankly glittering eyes before he turned and went into the darkness.
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