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.
So dark, Charlie never knew how dark dark could be. In the city, there were always lamps, light from houses and streetfires. Familiar noises. Sure wasn't any light here but for the sliver of moon he was keeping in front of him, only deeper darknesses and sounds so sneaky and scary his ears hurt trying to keep track of them. What had made him think he could find them? Was he crazy? But what else could he do? He had to find the seven, he just had to!
Charlie knew very little about firearms, and Marie-Laure, apparently, had known even less. The old colt hadn't been cleaned in years, and the powder in its shells had long ago lost it's potency; the hammer had fallen and nothing at all had happened beyond a useless click. Nothing happened. No righteous vengeance, no bloody ending for that pig in fine silks and woolens, no booming report dooming her murderer to hell. Nothing but that stupid, empty, useless, helpless click. He'd wanted to scream and rush right through the tent wall and tear out Vicker's throat with his own hands, but he was bitterly aware how impossible that was.
Love her as he did, Charlie couldn't deny that Marie-Laure had tried to use the plainsman every bit as much as Vickers ever had. Maybe it was some sort of divine retribution, the awful thing that had happened to her, and the plainsman was supposed to be the one to kill Vickers. All that was certain was that he couldn't do it alone, and this was all he could think of to do.
One second he was bent over to pass under an overhang as his horse picked its way up a narrow path, and the next he was airborne, yelping frantically in the sudden shocking absence of gravity as he flew upwards. The gunslinger hauled him up by the nape of his neck and rose up off his knees atop the overhang like a snake uncoiling, Charlie dangling and wriggling at the end of his arm. A grip like iron, and eyes the same as he gave him a careless toss and caught his upper arms in his hands before the boy touched the ground. Not a word did he say, but ran bleak burning eyes over Charlie, then jerked him with a horrified squeak up into his face. Under his black hat the man was pale and grimy, lips cracked, all of him dusty and hard-used so Charlie knew how hard the last few days had been, but there was no giving up there, he was nowhere near beaten.
"Where's Vickers?" Demand, not question, and a coldness that would've frozen fire.
Charlie, aware that he'd fall a long hard way if the man let him go, would've told him anything he wanted to know, "Four miles southwest in camp, but the posse is all over the place, he's in a hurry now, drivin' 'em hard." The next words burst out of an urgent and honest need; "He ain't dead, is he?"
The gunslinger's scowl sent a shiver through him, something shuttered in the pale eyes and the gunslinger seemed to look right into his soul for a long moment. Then he swung Charlie over the edge and set him on the rock abruptly without letting him go.
"No, kid. He ain't dead." Feeling the boy's tremble, seeing it in the mouth before the kid caught it. Chris folded down onto his heels in front of Charlie, looking intently into his face.
"What's your name, kid? What're you doin' here?"
"Charlie. I'm Charlie. Mr. Vickers' hostler. The plainsman is my friend."
Daring him even trapped and vulnerable to challenge what he was so proud of, and prouder still of what might've been respect in the deadly eyes to believe him.
"He's my friend, too, Charlie." The gunslinger said quietly, and Charlie's relief almost overwhelmed him; "Why's Vickers got such a hurry on now?"
"You know a woman named Travis?
Charlie answered the question with a question and wished he hadn't. Cold as they were, the jade eyes went colder still; the gunslinger knew her, alright, and cared for her against any implied threat. Charlie got quick to the point, "She's stirred up a Judge n' he's on his way here, Orson brought the word to Vickers this evenin'."
Though the gunman didn't move, this was obviously very good news, he seemed to electrify all at once.
Mary. Stubborn, nosy, righteous Mary, stirring pots bigger than anyone else dared, oblivious to the odds - or brave enough to disregard them to do what was right. She and Vin were a lot alike in that, though he doubted either would ever realize it.
"How long 'til that Judge gets here?"
"I'm not sure, a day, maybe two."
Could Vin last that long? Could they, with all of Vickers' resources put to taking them down before Travis got here rather than killing them slow of thirst and exposure?
"The judge got any riders with him?"
"Yeah. Don't know how many, but enough t'make Vickers want to get this over with." 'This', just like Vickers himself had put it, like it was a business deal needing to be concluded and not seven lives the Colonel planned to end.
"You figger you could find your way back to his camp?"
"Sure, I followed the moon and I could draw it for you, I kept track as I come like the plainsman said a man ought. Let me loose n' I'll do it for you, I won't run mister, I swear. I'm done with all that, done with him, somebody's gotta kill him and I tried but it didn't work, the damned gun didn't fire n' I didn't know how to fix it ..."
Chris shook him to shut him up, helplessness burning away in a clean and potent fury.
"Charlie, Vin's alive alright, but it's real important you tell me anything that'll help us get out of here, cause he ain't that far from dead."
That scared Charlie because it was flat-out honest.
"Vickers know you're gone?"
"No, I waited 'til he went t'lay down awhile, nobody pays no mind t'me."
For fifteen minutes, the gunslinger crouched like a narrow black shadow beside Charlie asking question after question; the number of the posse, how many and which were town-folks, how many Indians and their style of dress and mount, what he'd seen and heard and other things so seemingly unimportant Charlie might've been impatient with him if he'd dared. By the time he was done, Charlie felt wrung out as a kitchen rag.
Then the man stood up in thoughtful silence, a slender black silhouette against the blacker night looking across the canyons, down, remembering the lay of it and where the traps were. Finally he grinned into the night, an expression that was all sharp white teeth and glowing eyes, and murmured to himself, "Well, alright." Like a warrior taking up a challenge, and Charlie saw with a thrill of sudden hope what a deadly enemy Vickers' had made.
What Chris wanted to do was kill as many of the sons of bitches as he could, vengeance a lethal need uncoiling in the fact of help on the way. Still a mortally dangerous fix, but this information and Vickers' haste could be used against him - the opportunity made his bloodiest depths sing.
But without faith it is impossible to please Him:
for he that cometh to God must believe that He is,
and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him.
Hebrews 11:6
Josiah heard the sound in the darkness, soft and barely there, quickly gone. Bat perhaps, that fluttering sort of drag. A few minutes later he heard it again, a ripple of sussurant sound, and his eyes passed over Tanner laying quietly beside the bare coals that were all he could risk of fire. The spot was in a small broken hollow of stone open only where he sat on watch. A sudden long shiver went through the tracker, a restless turning of his head, it was the first time he'd moved since they'd laid him there. Quickly Josiah scooted nearer just in time to see Vin's eyebrows twist, his mouth open in a sucking gasp as another shiver racked him head to foot and his hands rose. Josiah's broad palm clapped over Vin's mouth a split second before he screamed.
Josiah hadn't really expected much reaction, so he was badly startled when the bounty hunter jerked violently out from under him and away in the opposite direction, somehow he had his feet under him and went crabbing backwards until his back met the rocks with a thump so hard Josiah winced for him. There he crouched unsteadily, warding him off with a threatening growl, pushing his heels hard into the ground and his back into the stone behind him.
"Don't ... touch it ..." In a breathless hiss of more than pain.
From the heat when he'd touched him, Josiah knew how deep Tanner's fever was, and the unfocused stare only confirmed it. Josiah had no idea what those wild blue eyes were seeing, what Tanner thought was happening, only an urgent dismay that he would pinpoint them to hunters if he started making noise. Vin was moaning something vicious through clenched teeth that Josiah couldn't make out, gradually sinking down into a shuddering knot of angled knees and shoulders because his wounded body wouldn't let him do anything else. Low on his heels and his legs jacked up high and tight to his body, his shaking right hand flattened onto the dirt to keep from going down face-first, but he never took his eyes off Josiah. He shoved the small of his back hard into the rock to keep himself up and glared from an animal's lowering angle, a terrified hatred in his burning eyes that set the preacher back and still.
Then Josiah noticed that Vin's free hand wasn't pressed to the bandages at belly or chest where fresh blood brightened around the dark splotches - it was moving searchingly around his neck, frantic in not finding ... what? The preacher's eyebrows mantled, confused and more than a little alarmed. Whatever nightmare Tanner was reliving was escalating quickly, he was snarling like a cornered predator, dripping sweat and his breathing a raw uneven rasp.
"Tanner ..." Josiah reached for him from his knees and got his hand knocked back with stinging force, Vin lunged unexpectedly at him and snatched Josiah's Smith and Wesson from its holster, threw himself back upright against the rock with it aimed and cocked across his upraised knees. He would do it, Josiah hadn't a doubt, there was mad delusion in those wide glittering eyes he did not dare tempt.
Vin was sinking into a moaning darkness, fighting with sheer force of will to stay up and conscious, he thought he was ... maybe he was - the pistol was real, he could feel the weight and curve of it in his hand ... but it couldn't stop them, because he hadn't had it then.
Josiah made no further move to touch him, lifted his big hands palm up trying to figure out what was happening, and how to stop it. Though the tracker was on the edge of passing out, at this range that big pistol could do nothing but damage. Even when Vin closed his eyes and his head fell back against the stone, the barrel held true, and Josiah knew a sound from him would set it off.
Vin fought as only one orphaned on city streets and deadly wildernesses could have, willing and practiced in a hundred ways to inflict pain and death, but there were too many and it only made them madder, he was starving and sick ... Caught in the bruisingly ruthless force of their hands, in the basest frustrations of prisoners whose honorable war had become a nightmarish struggle just to survive. For some, like these, demons had been freed in the daily horrors, and they came forth that night to savage him, the symbol of their common suffering. One small victory in their decrepit helplessness. Bones twisting, muscles and ligaments tearing against them. Fighting for his life.
Josiah watched, mesmerized, as Tanner flinched, twitched as if in extremity against unseen enemies. A low furious growl shivered out of his half-open mouth, and it was the most awful sound Josiah had ever heard a man make.
Flaring flashes sudden and shocking as lightening, a jolting in his bones, faces, urgent sounds, voices it made him queasy to hear even in his dreams ... Breath beaten out of him, cold air on his legs as they took his moccasins, then his leggings, rising in their hands like a panther trying mindlessly to climb over an engulfing pack of dogs. The Indian leathers marked him as a target, but in a place where men died every night of the cold, they were invaluably warm. His deerskin shirt hobbled his elbows as they took it from him, too, fingernails scraping the skin off in stripes down ribs and hip, shoulder dislocating in one searing instant. He'd fought with everything he had, no savage intent held back, and still they took what they wanted from him like he was a child. Arm breaking, ribs, collar-bone, knees and elbows and face bloodied on the hard-packed dirt of the prison compound and all meaningless in the greater horror of realizing they intended to strip him of everything and beat him to death...
Josiah jumped when Tanner's blue eyes snapped open, blindly fixed past his ear. The tracker shook so hard he nearly rattled, his breathing raw and desperate, and there was a screaming in his silence Josiah couldn't help but witness. Surely the tracker would either explode into violence or die of the stress on his wounded body, he might even shoot him in this state and never realize he'd done it ...
The skin of his neck tore as they found the locket, and that pain, tiny as it was, was an agony that eclipsed all else. He fought to keep it, scrabbled after it, reached for it desperately, cursed them and struggled like a demon. But they tore it away and dangled it in a vicious jig around him, opened it mockingly ... the tomb of all his remembrance, the hope he could hold in his hand ... pale bits of gleaming golden hair sparkling a moment in the moonstruck night before falling into the freezing mud ... his Mother ... all he had, everything she was in his life ... Raw screaming he hadn't recognized, a furious primal grief he couldn't stand to remember, wanted to die rather than remember...
"Tanner, no one's going to touch you, you're safe, you're safe ..." In that voice Josiah could use that was a tone in the bone marrow, comforting and compelling. Josiah was shocked to see tears welling up, overrunning the bruised angles and stark hollows of his face without Vin seeming to notice it at all.
He broke, then. Broke beyond mending. Pain in rivers and waves and white-hot landslides, yet it was those pale ghostly strands drifting away into the filth that finally broke the spirit that had endured for so long. She had pressed it into his small grimy hand, and though he could barely remember her face, he remembered her eyes as she promised him her love would evermore be in that locket. All his life since he'd felt the comfort of her in that bit of silver, could hold that love in his hand and remember he was a Tanner, and hear her voice and feel the memory of her touch.
He'd believed the last of her spirit dwelt inside it, part of her always with him, keeping him right and true. He believed it still.
But they took her from him, tore her from him forever. Bruised and bleeding and breaking, not even a man anymore in the primal red agony, begging, the shame of it like acid, screaming and sobbing and pleading for them to give it back, desperate to find those golden threads, keep her with him ...
"Leave him be, mister, or I'll shoot you myself."
Josiah wheeled around in an awkward crouch, his wounded leg striking a sharp pain up and down its length. He was astonished to find himself looking into the barrel of another pistol in the white-fingered grip of a thin scarred boy with blazing eyes. Not for a moment did he doubt the boy would fire, tried to place him, and finally did with real alarm.
"They ain't here, it's just me. That Mister Larabee sent me in." The boy's dark head cocked suspiciously, but his eyes kept darting to Vin, very afraid of how awful he looked. Gun or not, given the plainsman's condition, this big Preacher could probably kill him without breaking a sweat - is that what he'd been trying to do? How could Charlie stop him if the preacher found out Marie-Laure's gun was useless?
"Get away from him! No, don't stand up, stay low there!" Josiah complied, hands held clear and moving as slowly and calmly as his leg would allow, sitting down, then, far enough away for Charlie to be sure he couldn't get at Tanner. He shook his shaggy head; two guns pointed at him in the hands of a delusional man and a terrified boy, disaster felt very near.
"Yer a bigger fool than me, even!" Charlie cried, shrill with frightened anger, "You're his friend, ain't ya? He didn't kill Miss Marie, you got no cause t'hate 'im! You're his friend, how come you don't know that? Yer s'pposed t'be an educated man, I heard, but y'lose yer sense just because Miss Marie done you like she done any man could do somethin' for her!"
Rich with terrified disdain, and Josiah felt the shock of the brazen words like unexpected blows. Vin hadn't killed Marie-Laure? Hadn't? A fearsome tremble opened up in him ...
Charlie hissed at him, worried by the sudden attention the preacher paid to Tanner, desperate to keep him off him even if it meant making a target of himself, "She mighta liked you, preacherman, but it was for the good juju - Holy men are big magic! Yer as git-stupid as th'Baptist minister down th'hollow at home, he never knew what th'hell was goin' on either." So young for such sage satisfaction at Josiah's dismay.
"It was Vickers done it, mister, they was both usin' Mr. Tanner! Miss Marie wanted her freedom n' figured the plainsman'd kill Vickers for her - Everybody'd believe her even if she had t'kill 'em both herself n' make it look like she was defendin' her master. you woulda believed her, damn you, she woulda kilt the plainsman n' you woulda married a woman who'd murdered your friend! She was wicked clever, mister, she could smile the sun outta the sky as easy as a man outta his sense." Knowing it was true, but forgiving her, as he always had. The loas made her act that way, she was as much their slave as Vickers' and she'd never known it. But she would've sacrificed the plainsman, and it would've been Charlie who'd led him to that death. And one day she might've killed him, too, for some obscure reason, some part in her big plans he'd never be able to figure out. The boy narrowed his eyes accusingly at Josiah.
"You couldn't figger that out? Hmph. I could, n' I'm just a kid, right?"
"Give it ... don't, God, don't!" A sound near a sob if it'd had any breath in it, Vin, oblivious to them despite the pistol, tightened down into a shuddering knot, his fingers closed over his throat as over a gushing wound.
They had kicked him and kicked him, boots going with vicious whoops of glee for where a man could be hurt most, his fingers broken in a futile instinct to protect himself and yet all he'd had sense for was the sight of that golden hair not an inch from his face. The purity of his mother cast onto the dirt, being trempled into nothing. Laughter that a man should weep to lose a bit of cheap jewelry and a single soft blond curl ...
A growl so quiet it could hardly be heard and in a Kiowa dialect Josiah barely understood, "...will lie ... with your blood drying in the sun, under heaven unsung ..." Something like unhallowed, and ruin, a curse spoken from a deep and vital hate Josiah understood well.
"You never been on yer own in the streets, have you mister." Turning his face into the little bit of light so Josiah could see the scars his hair usually hid, pulling his collar open so the faint round cigar burns would show. "Ain't never had bad men catch you, beat on you if they want 'til yer bones bust n' yer blood runs! Take everything you got, every special thing you ever had like it was trash ..." A dark unflinching knowing Josiah winced to see - Andersonville ... Ezra had speculated that to him, told him something of those thousands crammed into a barren misery fort reducing to stealing from and killing each other to survive. A southern boy in a prison camp for northerners, a white boy in Indian dress ...
Charlie held his gun on Josiah, but he stared at Vin with an ancient and terrible camaraderie shimmering defiant tears in his dark eyes. Josiah sat back from the grim authority the child turned on him; the eyes could have been Vin's, and he'd never known what that ghost was. It left him breathless. Wrong, he'd been wrong all along, used, seduced ... wrong!
"Blind as a bat, ain't ya!" Charlie sneered, "I know this plainsman a minute compared t'you n' I know he's true!" So fierce, that child's face, his voice a passionate rush, "He knows, he knows lotsa things you'll never know, n' bein' what he is anyway means I can be, too!" Which was the deepest truth Charlie would ever speak and the font of all his dreams. He hadn't meant to say it, wanted to call the secret back, but though he trembled with the useless need to cry, he still stood straight and determined against anything Josiah would do. "Cch ... you'd think a preacher'd know where t'put his faith - guess you were worryin' more 'bout where you was gonna put yer willy, huh?
Truth fell hard on Josiah's heart, blows to a place unshielded by his anger - 'you'd think a Preacher'd know where to put his faith'. My God ...
Left him, naked and whimpering and nearly dead in the mud and rain, in the dark. Bleeding and beaten and cut by a short knife one had forged, mercifully too small to pierce organs but bleeding him in slow increments. One muddy strand came into focus in front of his dazed eyes, and all he could do to save even that was drag it, filth and all, into his mouth, the small move the end of his strength ... Snatches of distant jeering voices placing wagers, merciless eyes waiting avidly for him to quit breathing. Like he was a dog, some pitiable ruined thing of no value to anyone. He'd never believed it before.
There, in the stinking wet, in the icy madness of that starless night, Vin Tanner finally forgot he was human. Finally parted from the humanity he'd held onto in his mother's memory. She was gone, and he surrendered his soul. Three days had he lain under a cover of mother earth while they searched in astounded fury, three days in a grave that yet nurtured ferocities he had never allowed into the light.
Vin made a strangled sound and almost went over onto his side, retching weakly, the gunbarrel bobbled so both Charlie and Josiah surged toward him and then stopped as it returned to true, his finger white on the trigger and a fearsome delerium on him. He might kill one or both of them and not know it. Tears sprang to Charlie's eyes, he couldn't stop them he was so mad.
"He's your friend, you shoulda believed him, you shoulda known he'd never do nothin' like that to anybody, beatin' a woman t'death, tormentin' her, cuttin' her like that! What got done to Marie ... that was somebody enjoyin' it, mister, and he never could! Somethin' like that gets done t'you - you believe me, mister, it ain't nothin' you'd ever want t'do to somebody else, not when you know firsthand ..."
Josiah lifted his hand so the boy would stop, his mighty head fell forward penitently, eyes falling closed in the realization of how he had misjudged ... In a sudden crushing moment, Josiah understood so much about Vin Tanner. Why close quarters with too many people made him almost sick with anxiety, why he avoided being touched even though he was a friendly man. Why he could never have done what he was accused of ... like thunder in his soul the truth hammered down, why he had needed so much to believe it, how he had blinded himself to one fundamental fact:
Where faith is placed is as important as the act of faith itself.
Nettie Wells had said that to him after services one Sunday, and he'd never realized what she meant until now.
One massive fist closed, rose slowly to his chest and thumped there hard enough to resonate as he shook his head, disbelieving and unable to disbelieve, lifting his eyes to heaven as if seeing it for the first time. This scarred skinny boy had invested his faith far more wisely than Josiah had since he'd left his father's side.
Charlie was startled to hear him laughing as his head fell, shaking, if such a rumbling and bitter sound could be called laughing.
What a fool. No glorious revelation, no brilliant epiphany nor a resounding victory at the end of a hard-fought war. No. Only a bluntly inescapable realization of his own monumental stupidity. There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death' - (Proverbs 14:12)
A Preacher with more faith in his father's cruelties than God's mercy. A Preacher who didn't know where to put his faith.
Vin had the shadow of crimes and sins in his eyes, Josiah recognized them in some of the others, too, his own with a terrible clarity. But Vin's disregard of mortal danger was not Chris's grieving disdain for life, nor a guilty invitation to death. It was not penance or distraction or even searching. Vin's scars were as terrible, yet he was not crippled as Chris was, as Josiah was himself, Buck in his inability to settle, Ezra in his inability to trust. Vin had gone to the bottom of the abyss all men harbored in their souls, knew the place where even the strongest and most righteous were pathetically wicked. And Vin had survived that scouring journey, had buried his pain and done his grieving, accepted his sins and found a faith in himself that Josiah prayed with sudden true humility to find for himself.
It was that simplicity that drew Chris's curiosity, his own, that confused Buck and must rasp on Ezra's restless dissatisfaction. Only because his friends had been caught up in the wake of his past did that past torment him now. Without the other six, the folk of Four Corners, Vin would've killed Vickers' and escaped to his beloved wilderness. For them he'd stayed his true heart's instinct, suffered all ... this.
Charlie didn't know what to do, to move or not to move, the Preacher acted like he didn't even know he was there, his head down hard onto his chest like he was praying. The plainsman's head was laid back upon the rock, slitted eyes fixed and burning on some terrible distance.
When next he was seen in that sewered swamp of men and mud and despair, his nakedness was covered in the bloody rags of the man whose life he had taken in the night. He was not a man anymore himself, but a predator rabidly obsessed with slaughtering those who had killed the last of his mother's soul. It felt like they had murdered her in the mud and rain, taken her finally and forever beyond his reach. An animal could not recall it's mother's memory, her face, the sweet guidance of her voice, and without her locket he could not either. It was what had always held him together, the one thing he couldn't live sane without. So, he was insane, then, and demons of his own from a lifetime of cruelty were set free without her to restrain them in his heart. Like an animal he'd killed them, each and every one he could remember no matter the uproar, no matter how they searched for him among the miserable crowd of tents and holes dug in the earth for shelter. Savage and cunning and moving only to the urge of that cause unencumbered by the morality his mother had laid so surely as his foundation. Hate, clean and pure and white-hot, free to work it's bloody will. Five who had taken their joy in scattering what remained of her spirit into the mud, five who had laid killing hands on his human heart. Oh, he had taken their lives in a savagery of grief, one by one, in the dark, in silence, and as gruesomely as possible. Relishing their terror as they had relished his pain and his grief.
One by one he'd watched the light of life fade from their eyes from a butcher's distance, no farther than his bare hands. But it hadn't made him whole again ...
It was a hard understanding for Josiah to take: All this time he had harbored a faith not in the God of mercy he preached, the God of understanding and compassion who forgave and uplifted His children, but in his father's condemnation. His father's belief, no matter how he denied it, his father's certainty that he was a sinner undeserving of happiness or peace. Fighting so long to prove that bitter old man wrong and only fulfilling the bleak destiny proclaimed for him. How many chances had been lost in that blindness? How many opportunities never taken up? And how many innocents had suffered his blame for it, as Vin had, all of them, in his faithless breaking of the bond coming to be among the seven of them?
Josiah had known from the first that they were, in some mysterious manner, each other's salvation, the last chance most of them had for it, but that it might be Vin who had the answers he'd never suspected. His father had made God a burden that he'd taken into his heart for far too long.
A sound brought his head up, blurry-eyed with unshed tears, and the boy jerked to attention, the big old gun trembling in his fisted hands and his eyes frantically darting between the plainsman and the preacher. Vin was struggling upright, bootheels slipping clumsily as he tried to keep the .45 true and having a hard time of it, but stubborn ... Lord God, he was stubborn.
Ruined, crippled and broken, he'd finally dug his way out, pushing the soil behind him not caring how easy it would be suffocate, to die under the ground unnoticed. With a crude little blood-stained knife and the unbroken fingers of one hand, he had dug for days in a fevered hallucination of stifling darkness and pain. Waking with his cheek pressed into the cold moist dirt, lightless as the pits of hell. Luck alone brought him up outside the walls, all day he'd had to lay on his back and hold the plug of grassy soil in place until it was dark enough to break out of his tomb and stumble into the shadowed wood. He was not seen by mortal man for a year thereafter, wild as any animal, wild and woolly in skins and beard, avoiding even the passing trappers and hunters as though it were his skin they sought. So long alone with his grief and guilt and shame until he heard his Mam's forgiveness in the lonely wind and felt her smile in his gradual coming to peace. But he had heard her again, and he had found that peace ... suddenly he could breathe ...
The boy remained where he was, holding that pistol that had more rust than shells in it, but holding it fearlessly even on a man he had to know could've taken it from him in an instant. For faith in a plainsman he'd known but a few days. Josiah truly admired the boy in that moment, as well as the man who could inspire it.
Charlie'd never seen a smile so unexpected, he didn't know what to do when the preacher turned to the plainsman but squeak an unworded warning.
Vin's glassy blue eyes flared as he fought to hold the lucid moment, focusing with everything he had on Josiah's face, and though his voice was a broken rasp, it was passionately true. "Josiah, I never hurt no woman like that ... once I mighta been that crazy ... but never since ... " No, he had never hurt her and he knew it, now; once a man was an animal, he knew the limits of depravity he could endure. He had left alive in Andersonville the frightened boy who wore his deerskin shirt, it was that mercy that had finally saved him. "I ... swear it on my Ma's ... soul ..." His trembling hand flat on his chest, on the heart she had resurrected herself in, "n' she's the only thing ... I ever held holy."
Josiah knew he was hearing Vin's most solemn vow, and he bent his head, feeling unworthy of it and at the same time deeply gratified. What power this simple uneducated and solitary man had in his obstinate faith that made Josiah's look paltry.
"I know, Vin." He replied softly, earnestly, and the tracker's head cocked, perhaps not believing what his ears said he'd heard. Then what could have been a smile softened the tormented angles of his face, the pistol barrel lowered in a slow shudder into the dirt as Vin finally went down. Josiah dared move to catch him, and Charlie lowered the useless gun and let him.
He staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief:
but was strong in faith, giving glory unto God.
Romans 4:20
Chris came in near dawn and found Josiah close by Vin, his sheepskin coat laid under the tracker for an extra measure of warmth off the cold stone. The preacher had to feel the cold ... why would he suffer it for Vin's sake? Pale deepset eyes lifted sharply at Chris' whistle and his gun did the same. And his other hand moved to lay the old Bible between his fingers face-down onto Vin's chest like a shield. That defensive determination that made Chris' heart lift; not a man worried for his own hide, but a man protecting a vulnerable friend. So Chris knew Josiah and Vin had found their way across the rift between them, and it was a relief too great to bother denying despite not liking how it made him feel suddenly whole.
"Nobody else back yet?" He asked, coming near to crouch and lay a hand on the side of Vin's face, finding it hot, but his color a little less ashen. He looked almost peaceful, relaxed in his stillness.
"Nathan's up in the rocks there. We managed t'get almost a whole cup of willow-bark tea into him - 'bout the last of the canteens. But his fever is down, and Nathan says he's more sleepin' now than unconscious ... " A hesitation Chris didn't notice until Josiah spoke his name, eloquent with regret, "Chris ..."
"I'm grateful, Josiah." Chris looked up directly into Josiah's eyes with the double meaning of that truth plain: He had kept Vin alive, and he himself, the ferocious warrior he had proven to be, was with them again. Josiah nodded, unable to forgive himself as easily. Chris twisted around and sat back with an exhausted thump against the rock on the other side of Vin, his long dusty legs braced knees-up around Charlie, who was curled up at the tracker's side. The gunslinger let his head fall head back and closed his eyes, and neither man spoke for awhile, appreciating the comfort of that silence. The feel of friends come home after a dangerous absence.
Chris didn't open his eyes when Josiah spoke at last, low and somber;
"You know, Chris, God has never spoken to me. But I heard Him laugh at me last night."
Chris was just too tired, too relieved and worried and exhausted and wound up to stop the rasping wheeze of laughter that burst out of him, it just struck him as funny and he couldn't help it even if Josiah killed him for it. He was trying to stop himself to apologize when the low rumble of Josiah's chuckle set him off again, and then they were both laughing, shoulders shaking in near silence until they were breathless and wiping tears off their faces. Josiah opined as how it was a terrible waste of water and they both went off again. Finally Chris rolled his head on the stone and cracked one eye at the preacher, who sat looking into the distance with a smile the gunslinger hadn't ever seen, and said,
"Well, hell, Josiah ... least you know He's payin' attention t'you ..." Josiah snorted and looked over at him, and the moment their eyes met both started laughing again. Lord, it felt good to laugh, even now. Especially now.
Nothing further was needed for forgiveness than the warmth of Chris's hand reaching across Vin to grip Josiah's shoulder, a hard brotherly shove that sent their eyes suddenly away from each other, emotions too high.
The rest started coming in, then, Ezra first and Buck and J.D. within fifteen minutes, Nathan moving among them in the suddenly crowded space after various wounds and bruises and scrapes from both the terrain and run-ins with the scattered posse. No matter how tempting it was to just shoot every man in that posse they'd run across, by agreement they'd only taken out those they could without detection; Chris wanted to know where they were without giving the same information back. All were heartened by Vin's improved state, and the news of the Judge coming lifted their heads with a hope they'd nearly run out of.
As soon as Nathan had pulled the bullet from Chris' bicep and bandaged it up with a forlorn look at the end of his supplies, Josiah stood up in a way that made the rest fall still and look to him. The preacher had noticed that none but Ezra had greeted him, even looked at him, and J.D.'s shoulders were high as a hackled wolfling. He was ashamed to have driven them off that way.
"I owe you all an apology ..." He stopped, and shook his head, looked up with his big fists set to his hips and his breath hard. He was usually an eloquent man, but this had to be said plain and true. He met their eyes. "I was wrong about Vin, n' I been wrong about more than that for longer than you know. You boys've been better friends to me than I deserve, and I'm telling you I'm sorry for it."
They looked at him, unsure about his apparent change of heart, almost afraid to hope something good might actually happen. Charlie sat near Vin wide-eyed, still as a stone.
J.D. was first to move, getting up from the ground and going to stand in front of Josiah as if he couldn't stop himself, his eyes searching the preacher's face with nakedly earnest hope. What he saw there made him put out his hand, never even tried to hide the tears that welled up in his hazel eyes, and the preacher took it with all the gratitude that could be expressed in that masculine grasp. It was as if they all started breathing whole again in that moment, as if a weight more profound than their present danger had been taken off their shoulders. Nathan lowered his head in grateful prayer, and Buck slapped his knee with a grin that could've lit a city block, "Well, this is more like it!"
They all felt that same sudden exhilaration; even exhausted and beaten down and hurt, they were together once more, and unstoppable.
They sat close, smooth against each other again, and with a new determination each added what he'd seen to the rough map sketched in the dirt. Then Chris leaned back for a long few minutes just looking at it, asking the odd question or two. Finally, he said, "Boys, call me loco, but I'm think'n it's time t'put this dog down." No one mistook him - not running, then, no thought to escape, but taking the fight right down Vickers' throat. Ezra's raised eyebrows were eloquently doubtful, but not unwilling, and Buck rubbed his hands together with glee. The look that passed among them made a knot that would never again fray.
"Charlie here knows where Vickers' camp is, and I'm for tippy-toein' our way through these bunches of posse and cuttin' the head off this fuckin' snake. Judge is comin', n' Vickers has got 'em out in round-the-clock shifts, so we go the one place they'll never expect us. Catch whoever's in camp nappin' n' have the best hostage we could have once I lay hands on Vickers, they ain't gonna risk shootin' the pocket their pay's comin' outta." Even Ezra had to agree with the logic, if not the potential of making it that far unscathed, much less unnoticed.
As one, they looked at the dark surly boy under Josiah's benevolent hand and the youngster returned their suspicion with a defiant scowl, arms crossed over his narrow chest and weight cocked on one hip. With a brave snort, he said caustically,
"I can get you there, lay you any odds yer gamblin' man wants. Plainsman taught me how t'lay sign n' I did it good. Or stay here n' git picked off, you don't believe me, ain't no nevermind t'me."
Dirty, exhausted, hungry and thirsty, yet every one of them grinned for having heard Vin lately say the same thing with much the same prickly attitude.
"All piss n' vinegar, ain't ya." Chris laughed, knowing how much of a nevermind Vin's survival, at least, was to the boy; "Well, I believe you can get us there, n' in fact, I'm countin' on you t'do just that." Not a man a boy wanted to disappoint, and giving him a chance to admit uncertainty, but the kid only stepped away from Josiah and squared up before the rest on his own, head cocked and hands fisted. Chris grinned again like the devil himself just got let out of a box.
"I'll stay with Vin." Josiah said with a set to him that said nothing and no one would get past him to do the tracker any harm.
"Don't ..." The harsh-rasped word that caught them all, Vin heavy on one elbow watching them, shaking his head, gathering breath at painful cost. Black and white spots scattered at the edge of his vision, which went in and out on him like he was on a swing. Great merciful God, he was all hurt, everywhere ... Nathan rose and went to him immediately.
"Go ... over th'damned ridge ... run ... run for it ... won't expect that ... neither. Tuck me up ... somewhere, get th'Judge. I'll last ... dammit ..."
His eyes squeezed closed a moment in dire and mortal pain, feeling how close he'd come to dying in the hollowness of his bones, the over-sensitivity of his skin. Close to his maker, still, he didn't fool himself, but he could think again, and be furious that he'd led them to the point of planning this madness. He knew how they felt, how the wholeness surged like pure power and prodded their confidence to rise like a sleeping lion to roar, but Vickers had never been a man to fall prey to a full-frontal attack, he always had contingencies, always had protection. Chris was pissed and wanting revenge, they were all so fired up thinking help was on the way, caught up in the invincibility they'd always felt together - they thought to go kicking Vickers' teeth in without knowing they had a better chance of getting chewed up themselves. He struggled with a darkness full of teeth and terror, felt Nathan's strong tender hands urging him down to his back, but he couldn't allow it. "Dammit ... run!"
"They ain't gonna do that, Mister Tanner, even I know that, n' I ain't never even rode with 'em." Charlie said, and it looked odd to have him standing small and thin in front of the six not even having to look back to know they supported every word, he didn't doubt it a second. Neither could Vin. Nor could he speak through the constriction in his throat, though his face was expressive with worry and guilt.
Because he cared for them more than for his own life, Charlie could see that, and stood in the wash of it being returned from Tanner's friends behind him, understanding the mighty fearless power it was.
The gunslinger went and squatted down beside Tanner like a jackknife folding, forearms resting across his knees and the duster spilled on the ground around him. He smiled at Tanner like he was sitting with him conversing over a good meal and said, "We're all goin' home together, cowboy."
Intense blue eyes looked back, not entirely convinced, but stubborn with wanting to see this through and Chris laughed softly, stubborn himself as any man born and well-matched in all these men. One by one Vin looked at them, struggling to keep his focus and then to hold his heart from bursting at the faith he saw in their faces. All of them, even Ezra, solid at his back, but the Judge might not be, might not be able to be. The argument never made it past his throat, he couldn't stop them from trying, couldn't expect them, knowing them as he did, to sit here and wait to die or be shot. Knowing he'd be in the thick of the same madness were he able. He shook his head helplessly, and Chris stood up with a grin; "Well, alright, then!"
Buck whooped, ducked comically at the onslaught of simultaneous shushing noises and grinned bright as a bluejay at the thought of some payback. The same eagerness swept around among them so Charlie found himself grinning, too. Vickers had no idea how deadly these seven men were, and breaking his posse into smaller groups made those groups vulnerable to any one of them, he had no doubt each could account for a goodly number of posse on their own.
Nathan gave up trying to make Vin lie back down, he resisted to the point of hurting himself and the healer let him sit up, then, secretly heartened that he had that much gumption. So Charlie went and sat by Vin and drew the trail he'd traveled to them in the dirt with the tip of his knife, and Vin fought the blackness and the breathtaking waves of pain that sometimes gripped him into shuddering silence mid-sentence as he made corrections and extended Charlie's map further. He'd traversed far more of this maze than anyone had known, and Charlie positively glowed with pride to have come to them so directly. Josiah settled behind Vin when he thought he'd go down any second and insinuated his broad back against Vin's, took his grateful weight in warm solid silence. Paler and paler he grew, breathlessly hurried because, want to or not, he'd have to lie down soon and be quiet for awhile. But he got everything said that'd do his friends any good, and he had the moment to look into each of their faces and wish with a savage intensity he was going with them. Envying the sharp edge of finally fighting back. Hating Vickers more for what he'd done, what he was doing, to these good men, than for anything he'd ever done to him. He put up a wholly vindictive prayer to be allowed to put a mortal bullet into Malcolm Vickers, and passed out with that prayer foremost.
For a little while they just sat near him in unconscious comfort, quiet hands loading guns, doffing spurs and any other thing that would make noise in their going through the canyons toward Vickers' camp. So many men out there they had to avoid, a net they had to find holes through unnoticed, and none of them deceived themselves that it would be easy. They would have to go on foot to get up and over places too steep and narrow for horses, it would take seven or eight hours and they'd have to go like smoke to avoid the Indians sure to be scattered and scouting for them. The only way this plan would work was if no one suspected they were anywhere near the camp. There were bound to be enough men there to put up a fight, but it was a fight they were sure of winning if the posse was searching the canyons and couldn't bring the advantage of their numbers to bear.
They talked softly about what they had to do, and Buck took it on himself to instruct J.D. in painstakingly irritating detail, half to tease him out of his nervousness and half to make sure the kid knew how this had to go. He told him what to look for, where not to put his hands and feet, how to walk on the outside of his feet and look and listen and how to damn near breathe 'til J.D. stopped what he was doing and glared at him.
"Hell, Buck, whyn't you just to try to stuff me into your pocket or something? Seeings how I'm so all-fired sure to go n' get myself snake-bit while I'm bumblin' off a cliff n' breakin' my fool arms n' ankles in rock-holes on the way down. There was any water around here, I'd probably drown, too, right?"
Buck burst out laughing, and it was that merrily reckless laugh they hadn't heard for awhile. "Kid, you're growin' on me!" With a clap on J.D.'s shoulder - unfortunately the wounded one - that made the kid yelp and Buck laugh harder even trying to apologize. J.D. kept out of his reach reproachfully, but his eyes were alight and they felt their shoulders letting down. Dire as the situation was, it still felt more normal than it had for too long.
Josiah's big hand appeared over Ezra's horse as he was saddling him, passing his rifle over for Ezra's use; "Vin's is better anyway, though I doubt anyone will come on us here." Josiah was quiet a moment, watching the rest loading weapons and preparing to take the war forced upon them into their enemy's teeth. Somehow he knew they would prevail, they'd never lost against any odds and he knew it was because their causes had been, and still were, just.
Everything about the big preacher was gentled, Ezra had already noticed, yet at the same time Josiah was clearly girded for war.
"You seem to have come to an ... understandin' with Mister Tanner, Josiah." A statement that needed no answer in case it was too personal. Ezra was a little uncertain now that Josiah no longer needed an ally, but comforted himself with the pragmatic fact that their renewed unity increased their odds of survival dramatically.
Josiah shook his head with a self-deprecating grimace; "More like come to an understandin' with myself, Ezra, and the Almighty - a forgivin' God. Good thing." Then he looked across the saddle-seat at the gambler, eyes direct with gratitude. Ezra flushed and bent to the stirrup, they weren't taking the horses but they had to have them ready in case ...
"You kept me from killing him outright, Ezra." Josiah insisted, Ezra had to look up at him, knowing he was admitting an affection in his face that made him deeply uneasy. "The why's didn't register," Josiah continued, "it didn't make any sense to me. Wasn't for his sake alone, either, I know that, but for mine. You had faith in me to figure it out when I didn't even know I had the figurin' to do. Not many men will stand by you even when you're right, Ezra, much less when they're as completely wrong as I've been. You've done me a great service and I'm beholdin' to you."
Ezra smiled rakishly, but was surprised that his own emotion choked off the flippant words that rose in answer. He didn't want Josiah to feel beholdin', and it was the first time in his life he hadn't leapt to take such an advantage. Maude would be prostrate with despair; perhaps that would make it worthwhile. They worked in silence for a few moments before Josiah went on conversationally.
"My Pap always told me nothing good would ever come to me, that I was a sinner, irredeemable in my wandering away from the Word, in my love of the secular, literature, music, fine cuisine ... women. And as much as I disagreed with him, as much as I hated him every day of my life, it turns out I had more faith in him than I did in God Himself; can you imagine a greater fool."
Heavy words said with a rumble of guilt, but there was a peace in the bright blue eyes turned to Ezra that made something in the gambler unexpectedly warm.
As he bent to take up the last saddlebag, Ezra said, "It has been my experience, Josiah, that the mere fact of procreation does not a render a parent fit to raise a litter of puppies." A soft bitter honesty. "Sometimes gettin' out from under them is the most stunning achievement an offspring can aspire to in this lifetime."
Judge Orrin Travis reined in at the top of the crest and surveyed the broad valley, and the city of Davis, below. His jaw rode forward as he crossed his forearms across the saddle-horn and stretched his legs with a restrained groan. Worry furrowed his brow under the severe straight angle of black hat-brim, and though he would never admit it, his hips ached ferociously from being so long on horseback, a man his age ... hell ... his mouth set hard - a man his age obviously still had a lot to do on this wild frontier. He squared up and pushed the discomfort out of his mind, didn't have time for it now with lives in the balance. These seven men were the last of a breed of which he was an old bull himself, they'd done well by Four Corners and by him personally, and he wasn't about to let them be railroaded onto a scaffold.
"Are you alright?" He nodded shortly in answer to Mary as she drew up beside him, wishing he'd been able to convince her to stay in Four Corners but admiring her spirit as well as her graceful seat on a horse. A woman of abiding character and beauty, his daughter-in-law, courageous in ways few men were and fiercely, if naively, intelligent. He'd often thought that marrying such an unconventional woman was the bravest thing his son had ever done - there was nothing placid or passive about her, hard-headed and high-minded with a lamentable propensity for seeing things in stark black and whites. She'd been his son's delight and his exasperation from the first day to the last, and her father-in-law loved her deeply for that.
Vin Tanner being worried had been enough to set her in motion - in her mind, a threat to the seven was a threat to the town that needed them, and by now she had cause to justify her determination. She'd managed to obtain enough suggestive information to prod her father-in-law into motion, raising his temper at having been used to draw the seven out of Four Corners - the report of outlaws in the territory was the first thing she'd proven false. That fact cast doubt on everything Vickers' had done. But it was the telegram she'd received back from the newspaper editor in Davis that had gotten him on this damned horse.
The tracker had been accused of murder, and all the seven had been caught up in it and declared fugitives. There was a manhunt in progress and he still wasn't sure how he was going to proceed. Travis looked to the mountains in the west with a hard eye; they hadn't met them on the trail from Four Corners, so the seven had to be there. A cruel place to be hunted, but he couldn't think of seven men more likely to survive it and wreak havoc on their enemies in doing so.
The story Mary had received from her colleague in Davis was as grim as anything he'd ever read: Tanner arrested, witnesses that included Colonel Vickers and his attache, evidence. And the dying accusation of a woman cut and beaten to death - that was the first thing he had not believed.
Travis was a man who'd spent his life in the law, and the responsibility of judgeship was an awesome and consuming one. Any man who presumed to judge life and death for others had better, for the sake of his own immortal soul, have a true instinct for character: Judge Orrin Travis could read a man brought before him as well as the pages of law governing his fate, and he had read all seven the day he'd hired them and knew the depth of character each possessed. Tanner was capable of a great many things, saw matters with a pragmatic callousness natural to the frontier, but he could never have tortured and murdered a woman, it simply was not in his character. The boy had a nearly Biblical sense of honor that was iron-deep in him, and if the other six had helped him escape, it had to be because they knew the accusation was false.
That Colonel Malcolm Vickers was leading the posse was the second thing he'd found highly suspect, as he was learning that the Colonel was not at all the sort of man to abandon crucial business dealings in altruistic or principled pursuits. The wild west might be Orrin Travis' domain, but he was eastern-educated and by no means cut off from the government that empowered him or the men who ran it. He had his sources. The chaos following the war had created opportunities for unscrupulous men, even criminals, to attain positions of power and influence in the post-war south, and he was privy to several ongoing federal efforts to expose and remove such corruption. Vickers, it appeared, was not an unknown figure in that investigation. Though some of the replies had been circumspect enough to warn him of the influence Vickers wielded, and perhaps the deadly lengths to which the man might go to preserve himself, Travis knew well how to read between the lines.
Vickers' commission as Colonel had been bought, which was not so unusual, and his war-time experience had been primarily in supply. He'd spent an inordinate amount of time away from his troops, however, and reliable rumor suggested shady dealings in war-time materiel, particularly weapons - dealings that may have included smuggling and murder.
An insidious sort of corruption, that was, where money could carry men ruthless enough to exploit the horrors of war into the insulated corridors of true power - too long there, and it would be impossible to remove them, they would grow like a cancer in the healthy body of this new nation. Well, Orrin Travis was here to say that would not stand, nor would any more innocent men lose their lives.
"We should have some telegrams waiting for us in Davis." Mary said, grateful that her father-in-law had taken her seriously and praying those telegrams supported the suspicions she had brought to him.
Judge Travis had not yet shared with her his own correspondences - she was too impulsive to consider how important circumspection was until he had a better grasp on who Vickers' allies might be. He wanted more than that one rotten apple.
"Mr. Tanner could not have done what he is accused of," Mary said with a firm shake of her head. "I just don't believe it, not for a moment."
"Nor do I, Mary. Don't worry, we'll get to the bottom of it."
Side by side they proceeded down the slope. Confident as he was they could do just that, the Judge also worried about whether it would be in time to do any good. As telling as the responses he'd received were, those he had not heard from were more telling still - apparently Vickers enjoyed some influence even in the judiciary, which made Travis wonder what the man might have in the way of blackmail to have accomplished that.
Nothing incensed him more than corruption in the justice system he'd given his life, his youth, even his family to serving. It was the backbone of a free society and must remain above reproach; without justice, the United States of America would degenerate into petty fiefdoms and savage kingdoms, and he would do whatever he could to ensure that the great democratic power being forged in the world, the first of its kind and destined to change that world forever, flourished.
Mary's passionate insistence was as much loyalty to friends as a journalist's instinct after a story, and a need for justice that sometimes overruled her common sense. He understood her outrage; they had both been helpless to save Steven, unable to bring his murderer to justice. It was a wound that never quite healed. But this time her father-in-law knew that another part of her concern was the gunslinger, Chris Larabee. Of course, she would never admit that to herself much less to Orrin, as if he might feel her notice of a man was disloyal to Steven. As if she might feel that way herself.
His daughter-in-law's interest in the gunslinger surprised him as much as he suspected it surprised her. Wryly he thought it probably made her furious with herself as well, illogical and inappropriate as it was. Disorder of the worst kind in her neatly ordered life. But she had to see the same fatalistic nobility in the man that Travis did, understand him to be a good, if damaged, man under the prickly moodiness, with instincts to kindness when his demons weren't driving him to irrational and usually self-destructive violence. Mary would feel a kind of kinship with his loss, a sympathy she couldn't help - the fact that he was handsome as the devil, ruggedly masculine and extraordinarily capable didn't hurt, but Mary Travis was not a woman to fall prey to purely physical attraction. She was, however, deeply passionate, and any man she gave herself to she would have to love just that way; this was the source of his unvoiced concern, an urge to protect her even from her own heart.
They'd lost Steven so suddenly, so violently, and if it hadn't been for Billy, he didn't know how Mary would have gotten through it. A man like Chris Larabee was almost certain to die violently as well, and too soon; he'd seen such men all his life on both sides of the law. Mary certainly realized that, it was probably the reason she'd kept her distance so far, though she and Chris struck sparks like flint and stone when they were near each other and there were lingering looks the other never saw. It was a volatile and unpredictable thing, that attraction, as like to harm both as save either. Perhaps it would go no further, they were both stubborn as mules and Mary was as much a creature of intellect as passion. He suspected, with surprising regret, that Larabee might be beyond that kind of love.
He glanced at her as she pressed on down the slope, the pure rich profile leaning urgently forward, brilliant eyes intent on the city as if she would wring answers from the stones of the street if she must. It was something he had always approved, the unflinching willingness to find the truth even when it was painful, even when it could be truly dangerous. There was where his ambiguity over the surly flirtation between his daughter-in-law and the gunslinger came to a head - a woman like that would never back down from danger, never surrender, plunge headlong after her heart and therefore always need a man to protect her. God, she would snap his head off if he ever said that out loud! Nonetheless, it was true, and he was not a young man any longer, and spent more and more of his time away from the frontier in serving it. Only since the seven had come to Four Corners did he feel secure leaving her there alone. An exceptional woman, as Chris Larabee was an exceptional man - which did not infer compatibility. He'd seen stranger balances struck, though. He shook his head at his own romantic ruminations; he would stay out of it, as he should.
The pair went immediately to the Sheriff's Office through the busy streets, and there found only one young deputy behind the desk, a livid bruise on his temple.
The boy leaned back in his chair, feeling quite important as they entered; a stunningly beautiful fair-haired woman in a dusty blue travel costume, and a dustier old man stiff-legged in preacher black. Both looked as though they'd come a long way on horseback, and both had an air of somber urgency about them.
"Somethin' I can help you folks with?" He said, trying for the casual and vaguely threatening authority Sheriff Saunden exuded.
"Where is the Sheriff?" The old man asked sharply; the Deputy was a little insulted not to be mistaken for that very personage, he set his feet on the planked floor behind the desk and laced his fingers together on top of it with what he hoped was a suitably masterful demeanor.
"He's out chasin' a pack of murdering outlaws just now. I'm in charge."
The old man pursed his lips and looked down at the toes of his dusty boots, his hands in his pockets and the tails of his black broad-cloth coat held back from a fine silk vest. No guns, the Deputy noticed. "I see." He said, then looked up with an unexpectedly piercing look, his jaw thrust forward aggressively.
"The case against those ... murdering outlaws ... I want to see the evidence."
"Well, now ..." The Deputy smiled and spread his hands with regretful condescension, "I'm afraid that's just not possible. I'm sorry, mister, but it ain't yer place t'be seein' any such a thing - them are court documents, you know, you have to be an official of the court ... like a deputy. We'll be having us a fine hangin' soon enough, though, ifn' you and the lady here want to spend a few days. Don't expect it'll be any longer than that, the number of men out there huntin' for 'em."
The old man didn't move, his posture remained as it was, hands in his pockets, back slightly rounded with weariness. But his eyes seemed to harden into stone and suddenly he seemed like a man used to being obeyed. The hair on the Deputy's neck prickled.
"Young man, I expect you don't know those seven very well if you think any of them will come to your 'fine hangin'' easily." Briskly he withdrew his hands from his pockets and approached the desk, a revealing sternness on his stubborn-set face. The old man looked down at him like it was the one chance he would give him and said curtly,
"Deputy, I am Circuit Judge Orrin Travis, and as a federal representative conducting an inquiry into this matter, you are under my authority. I have an implicit right to review those legal testaments, and should you refuse me one more time, I will place you under arrest on federal charges of impeding an officer of the court - the presiding officer at the moment, I might add - in the pursuit of justice. Now get me what I have asked for."
The woman said nothing, only stood at the old man's ... the Judge's - shoulder like an angel with anxious and angry blue eyes. The Deputy stared up at him for a moment, his mouth open and his eyebrows twisted suspiciously.
"Now, boy!" Whereupon the Deputy shot to his feet like his ass had been singed and crossed the room to a chest of file drawers from which he withdrew a leather portfolio. When he turned back around, the Judge had assumed his seat behind the desk and put forth his hand expectantly; the Deputy had no doubt of his authority now, one piercing glance of that dark eye was enough. He gave the papers over, and as the old man untied the binding cord and began to scan them on the desk in front of him, he ordered in a crisp no-nonsense tone,
"Please bring a pot of coffee and a meal for myself and the lady, and then bring the witnesses to me. I intend to depose them to corroborate these statements."
"Ummm ... well, sir, your Honor, I can't do that, sir."
Travis turned to him, one iron-black eyebrow challenging and his chin moving even further forward, impatience like a knife-edge in the air. The Deputy said quickly,
"Oh, I kin git ya dinner n' a pot of coffee, happy to, sir, but the witnesses all left town pretty much the same day as the lady was kilt - " He pointed toward the papers in hopes of forestalling the anger he saw rising in this increasingly fearsome Judge, "But they left all these statements, you know, and that bandana there, it's evidence."
Mary's eyes widened at her father-in-law's meaningful glance.
"All left, is that so? None of these witnesses were residents of Davis? And the trial - if, indeed, there was ever any intent to convene a court and endanger your fine hangings - would be conducted based on these statements? Don't you have a lawyer in this fine town who could advise this office of the meaning of hearsay? Of the right of the accused to confront and cross-examine his accusers in open court? Have you yet contacted the state authorities to even convene a legal proceeding?"
Obviously the Deputy was in way over his head, and the Judge gave him a shark-like smile, waving him into the chair in front of the desk. "Well, then, you'll have to do, won't you. Sit down there, young man, and consider yourself duly sworn. I'm going to ask you some questions, and you're going to answer me truthfully and completely."
"Well, yes, sir, I guess so ..."
"Mary, why don't you pay a visit to that editor, see what you can find out."
His daughter-in-law did so at once, obviously eager to be doing something useful. Orrin knew she'd get far more information out of the newspaperman than he'd ever intended to give; she had a way of disarming men with her beauty and then latching on to inadvertent revelations that she would chase down past any ability to dissemble. He wished the editor a mental good-luck for the scolding she would deliver over his biased reporting, and turned to the young deputy.
That Deputy was obviously befuddled as to how his authority had been turned on its head so quickly - one moment he was in charge and feeling pretty big about it, and now he was perched on the edge of this hard chair feeling like a criminal himself. This judge looked like he could bite through bones if he wanted to ... funny how he suddenly reminded him of that gunslinger who'd given him this bruised head and busted his friend out of jail.
Malcolm Vickers stalked the perimeter of the camp nearest the canyon mouths like a pacing panther, waiting on victory or disaster and plotting ways out of the latter if Travis should arrive before the deed was done. He could say he had no way to call the posse off no matter what law or logic Travis offered. He could play regretful, he could be amazed to be told Marie-Laure had lied to him, rail against besmirching her good name, there wasn't a truth that could be construed to prove anything against him. He glanced back at Orson's tent, increasingly picturing a liability there. Orson could not be allowed to meet Travis.
All night he'd been stalking this path, for two hours into the morning. Waiting. That was not something Vickers did well, not with so much riding on it. They were supposed to raise smoke during the day if they caught them, he strained his eyes against the shadows of the mountains in vain hope of it.
Six of his bodyguards were left in the camp, a baker's dozen of the hired posse getting ready to ride relief when the night riders came in, eight wounded in the mess tent. His servants moved like ghosts in the dust keeping the food going for the constantly changing shifts, and though exhaustion made them all dull, not one had dared complain. Indeed, even his own men watched him like he was a teased bear on a chain too thin.
Orson remained in his tent, petrified. He did not mistake the speculation in his employer's eye, and the Comanche were acting very strangely, an increasing hostility in their demeanor that Orson was worried no one else had noticed. Today, the warriors had split up singly among the groups and were all out at once, which they'd never done before, always traveling in pairs and leaving at least two in camp to serve as lookouts. It was as if they were watching and ... waiting? For what? Certainly Orson felt disaster looming over his head, he had halfway convinced himself to try to escape on horseback after dark if he could only manage to survive through the day. Staying out of sight until the opportunity presented itself was all he could think of doing.
Another hour Vickers paced, the fury simmering. All this turmoil, this mortal risk, for one blue-eyed Indian who'd discovered his conscience inconveniently. Years of work, of sacrifice, hundreds of thousands of dollars, layer upon layer of allies bought with blackmail and graft, all in danger of collapsing around him like a house of cards because of Vin Tanner. No. It was not going to happen.
Finally Vickers saw dust approaching from the canyon mouth and he strode forth, his heart hammering, to meet it ... not his posse, but the Comanche, in pairs appearing out of the dust-choked throats of three different canyons trailing strings of three to four saddled horses. The one who spoke English raised his hand to him and pulled up as the rest thundered past to the remuda.
"Fresh mounts ... the seven are deep."
"Dammit!"
"They are close." Big Tree said, knowing the white man assumed it to mean his posse was close to taking the seven, and had Vickers not been lost in frustrated thought, he might have seen the flicker of a smile in the Comanche's black eyes.
They were, indeed, near. Five men white men creeping like smoke toward this camp, men with blood in their eyes as a Comanche warrior understood and approved. This unexpectedly warlike tactic added a nearly mystic dimension to what Big Tree already intended, his heart was so light it was hard not to laugh out loud. The hunted would find the camp of the hunters in confusion and easy to take, and in return they would help keep the men there from giving chase to the Comanche, at least until he and his warriors were deep enough into the canyons. The posse was nowhere near finding the little camp where the preacher and Tanner were, his warriors had seen to that, as they had also seen that the boy stayed on the right track the night before. But Big Tree had also seen how much blood had been spilt on that cliff when he had gone for the body of the fierce one, and that troubled him.
He looked down at Vickers, florid and pompous and a power in his world, and was again sorry to know such men would one day drive his people from their ancestral lands. Men like this would take the Comanche from the mountains and plains that harbored the bones of their fathers to the beginning of time, even the echoes of epic battles and contented camps overcome by the brassy noise of the white hoards that came in an unstoppable tide from the east. It was an ever-lasting ache in his heart, this terrible truth of what would be.
But that would not happen today. Today, Vickers would witness a world in which he was nothing. Big Tree suspected it would be quite a surprise! Today, Big Tree would show this one powerful white man what the Comanche valued that had nothing to do with what could be grasped in the hands or surveyed as a kingdom.
"Well?" Vickers snapped, glaring up at the wide placid face, long glossy hair hanging in two wrapped streams by his black-striped cheeks and the scalp-lock defiantly offered in challenge to any who might dare try to take it. Did he see amusement in those flat black eyes? "Get to it, then, you've got half their horses there, I need all the men horsed! Get the rest in there as well if they're so close, I want this done!"
The Comanche nodded with a strange formality and obeyed.
The first sign Vickers had that something was wrong was a faint angry shout from behind him, he looked back to see the remuda startle violently into a scene of sudden chaos. The Comanche seemed to be milling the herd, still leading the strings of saddled horses, and dust rose in a choking column above them - was it a stampede? Had something spooked them? Were the Indians attempting to bring them under control again? His men came running from wherever they'd been in the camp and he started back toward the melee with a disgusted oath to take the matter in hand himself. That was when he heard the first pistol-shot. The Comanche were firing - to turn the herd? Why were his men running away?
Those of his men closest to the churning remuda were being knocked down as the herd swung past, the rest went running for cover as the circle of bobbing haunches and heads opened up and came streaming across the camp - right toward Vickers. The earth shuddered under his gleaming boots, he didn't know which way to avoid them or even if he could be seen in the slow sweeping curtain of dust that rolled out toward him, wondering desperately how the Comanche would get the animals under control. Realizing a moment later with a chilling amazement that they were under control - the Comanche, duplicitous savages, were driving them, trying to steal his horses! Fury was his first reaction, it had been so long since anyone had dared to openly defy him that he no longer believed it possible. Did they think he would let them steal from him? Ruin the only chance he had to kill the seven before the Judge got there? Compromise his entire future? His eyes went flat and cold as a coiled snake; like that white Indian before them, these ignorant savages had no idea who they were dealing with.
Colonel Malcolm Vickers drew his pistol from under his coat and squared his impressive shoulders, showed his fine white teeth as he faced them like an immovable monument and took steady aim at the first Comanche warrior he saw, coming fast to his right. He fired, and had the satisfaction of seeing the Indian disappear, turned calmly to the one riding up fast on his left screaming "Rah, rah, rah!", as if he would be frightened by the barbaric war-cry. He had led armies! Seen battlefields that stretched for miles in bloody gore and ruin!
The first few horses parted ten yards ahead of him, as he'd known they would, he was no fool and knew horses would avoid running into an obstacle if they could - they had misjudged him, and he would prove a far more formidable obstacle than the Comanche realized! Bringing down one or two of the horses in the front line would turn the rest, a glance said his men were grabbing for what mounts they could on the far side of the camp ...
He leveled his pistol in vicious satisfaction at the warrior barreling down on him, it had been so long since he'd been able to indulge the pleasure of killing his enemies himself, face to face ... A hand hooked like an iron claw into his right armpit and he had a fleeting glimpse of that Indian he'd thought he'd shot as the snarling man swung up from under the neck of his horse. The pistol fired into the air and just as he started to spin into the man's horse face-first, he was caught up from the left as well and jerked off his feet violently, battered breathless against the leaping shoulders of the horses as they swept him up and carried him along with them. For a terrorized instant he thought they would drop him beneath the sharp hooves, but instead they held him in their gouging grips jouncing and thumping between them as helpless as a sack of grain. Remuda, Comanche and Colonel Malcolm Vickers disappeared into the canyons.
The five men and Charlie moved through the night like beads on a string, one after the other on the back-slanting walls of the canyons the boy had followed to come to them. Blind as he'd been traveling, the moon had proven a lucky point of reference to have brought him so close in so short a period of time. Like the kid was going as the crow flew, Chris thought, wondering idly about fate and chance as they went.
Quiet as ghosts, they drifted between groups of searching hunters like the spirit of determined judgment itself, intent on reaching the camp ahead between the influx of men coming after a night hunt and those going out to relieve them. Chris refused to think Vin might yet die before they got back, the lack of water, food ... he saw that worry clearly on Nathan's troubled face and it fueled an anger he let stoke and build inside him. Rage had carried him many times when reason could not.
The day had been full for at least two hours by the time they reached the dusty lower canyons, and the five heard a faint thunder and looked as one up into the clear blue sky in confusion. Quizzical looks went among them. J.D. guessed a rockslide, but it seemed unimportant in what else had to be accomplished. Just now they were hiding in the narrow mouth of a steep declivity about twelve feet up the canyon wall to avoid being run over from behind by a group of eight men coming up at their backs, also heading out of the canyons. Chris peered down at them, curious as to why they were doubled up - had they lost horses from a fall or something? None of the men seemed to be wounded, but it seemed something had gone wrong in the maze ...
Buck groused softly, "Shit, Chris, this puts that many more guns in the camp ... we're low on shells even with what we've taken off 'em so far, let's take 'em." His gun was in his hand, long fingers almost caressing. They were at the end of their strength and running on adrenalin and the need to get it over, whiskered and dirty and eyes too bright. Chris held Buck back, and his own impractical urge to blood-shed as well.
"Buck, we start shootin' now and we'll never be able to even stick our noses outside that canyon, they'll hear it in the camp easy." Chris stared downtrail thoughtfully, and a slow and very nasty smile gradually slipped onto his face. Buck wasn't far wrong ... he'd been wondering how they'd make it across the open ground between the canyon mouth and the camp itself, no way they wouldn't be seen and, on foot, cut down long before they got there.
He turned back from his vantage, eye-teeth flashing wolfishly; "Less than two t'one odds, Buck, hell, ain't hardly a fight there. Too easy just t'shoot 'em ... figger you poor starvin' little things got gumption enough t'get ahead of this bunch n' take 'em down quiet-like? Maybe we just sort of help ourselves to their horses, hm? And maybe their coats n' hats, too?"
One by one, like lights winking on, grins answered. Chris shoved at Buck and they all moved back where the narrow passage widened into a little slanted bowl where they could talk.
"Hell with the horses n' coats, Chris, I'd slit their throats about now just t'get at their canteens." Buck said, and Ezra's gold tooth gleamed. J.D. looked at him like he wasn't sure if he was serious, because he didn't really want to know what he might do himself for a drink. Water had been uppermost in his mind for so long he felt like he'd never had another thought in his head.
"That was sort of the idea. We can send Charlie here back with a canteen for Vin and Josiah, he'll get to 'em in four or five hours horsed."
Charlie didn't like that, glared hard and set his chin stubbornly; "Look here, I'm goin' with or without you all, you ain't keepin' me out of this! You leave me here n' I'll find my own damned way!"
Chris went down in a crouch in front of him so close his hatbrim touched the top of Charlie's head, understanding the need for revenge that burned in his own heart. "Kid, you takin' some water back there might just save Vin's life, keep 'im 'til we can get back for 'im. One of us has to go, n' I don't expect you can handle a gun as well as any of us." When the boy opened his mouth to protest, Chris took his thin narrow shoulder under his hand and gave him a little shake, and though Charlie had expected anger, the gunslinger's eyes were almost gentle. "I know you wanna fight, boy, I know you ain't afraid. You get some growin' done, Charlie, n' I'll be proud t'have you at my back."
Charlie couldn't believe his ears, couldn't find words for the feeling that swelled up inside him as he looked into those pale eyes and that man's face. He'd looked at all of them and hadn't argued after that. Not because he was afraid of Larabee, but because he realized with a shaky sort of wonder that if he went with them, these hard and dangerous men standing around him with war in their eyes, they would risk their lives looking out for him. So he nodded, feeling strange with a numb sort of gladness he didn't understand. He sat down and watched after them as they went back into the split that faced onto the canyon, close together in a murmur of masculine voices. He wanted to say something to them, thank them in some way, but they were gone too quick and all he could think of was a clumsy but heartfelt prayer.
The five men crowded up into the tight confines of the split, holding their breath by unconscious consensus to hear the faint thud of hooves coming down the gulley.
"J.D." Chris reached back for his arm, pulled him up the narrow space past Buck and bent close eye to eye. "You're the best with horses, so you get ahead of us and keep them from bolting out of the canyon." J.D. forgot his thirst in that - Chris Larabee saying he was good at something, giving him a crucial job like he never had a doubt J.D. could do it. And damned if he wouldn't do it for him, he'd do it if it killed him! The corner of Chris' mouth twisted to see that in his face, a smile only J.D. saw and would never forget.
"The rest of us are gonna have to take down two men each before any of 'em can clear leather."
"I've always kinda liked two on one ... course, that's with women." Buck cracked, sparking with excitement. The opportunity to do some immediate damage put a feral light in all their eyes; even Nathan, slow to anger and reluctant to kill, had Vin's suffering to put him in mind of doing whatever it took. He had to get Vin out of there as fast as he could, Lord, every hour counted.
Buck half-reached for J.D. as they climbed up and out of the crack to tell him to be careful, but there was a focused look on the boy's face that was as serious as he'd ever seen him. 'Let the man work', he remembered telling J.D. that cold grey morning with Peso trying to break Vin's back, and he smiled tenderly at the back of that dumb dusty bowler hat and took his own advice.
They went along the outcroppings like rats scurrying along rafters above the weary group below them, dangerous going as fast as they had to move to get ahead of them and be quiet in the doing. When they got to a spot where the walls narrowed enough to force the doubled riders into a single-file, J.D. went on and disappeared to find a way down ahead of them. If the others failed to stop the posse, he'd be on foot right in front of them when they came on through the pass, but it never crossed his mind.
Strung out along the rocks above, Chris, Buck, Nathan and Ezra caught their breath. The posse walked into the narrow gorge not a minute later and they came down from the rocks like a silent human avalanche, Chris flying into the lead pair with the tails of his duster winging out behind him like a great grinning bat. The heel of his boot crashed into one man's skull and the other was unable to keep from bashing himself almost senseless on the opposite wall as he got knocked violently out of the saddle. Buck landed astride the broad croup of the second horse in line and looped his left arm around the throat of the man riding behind the saddle, his right hand grabbing hard into the coat of the man in front as he let himself slide backwards and dragged them along with him. Nathan came down with his arms widespread and swept both astounded riders into the wall on the other side, cushioning himself against the stone with their bodies, and though Ezra tried to do the same, he lacked Nathan's reach and weight. He took out the rider in the saddle, but the one behind managed to keep his seat and shoved the gambler over the saddle and into the opposite wall.
For a few minutes it was utter bruising chaos. The element of surprise had helped, but they were tired and suffering thirst and hunger against double odds, it didn't go as smoothly as they'd hoped. The lone rider in the rear tried desperately to force his horse forward, and though he managed to jam the animal into the haunches of the one in front of him, there was nowhere for him to go. Ferociously fighting men thumped into the rocky walls, into the horses rising and jostling in the narrow space. Nathan barely avoided being crushed between the stone and a dusty haunch, but he managed to drag that last man in line off the horse before he could draw his pistol, struggling to keep Ezra from being trampled at the same time.
In the middle of the formation Buck was engaged in a fist-fight that his wounded left hand made too uneven, he had a wicked left when he could use it, but it appeared once was all it had in it just now. Though one lay unconscious at his feet, he took a punch to the face that made blood burst bright from his nose and staggered him back, the horse behind him all that kept him from going down. Nothing made Buck madder than having his handsomeness damaged, he glanced at the blood on his fingertips and there was blood in the toothy smile on his face as he came back at his opponent like a stung panther.
Finally the violence dissipated into a gasping stillness and Chris straightened up at once to count heads over the horses, holding his throbbing right arm.
J.D. had been bounced off the wall pretty hard by the lead horse, but he'd stopped him and didn't seem to notice the rocks had scraped the skin off his cheek and the back of his hand. He took Chris' look with a grin that would've lit a city, and Buck was laughing, "Damn, that felt good!", leaning forward with one hand on his knee and the other wiping the blood off his face with his bandana. Nathan was moving away out from the wall where he'd been braced.
"Where's Ezra?"
"I got 'im, he's alright." Nathan disappeared behind the horse and Ezra was heard to groan with elegant dismay; "Now this is just becoming tiresome ..." Both men reappeared as Nathan helped him up, the gambler stepping with disgruntled disgust over the man Nathan had clubbed unconscious with one blow of his doubled fists. Ezra was holding his right forearm and the shoulder had that odd bulging angle that said he'd dislocated it yet again, and his tone was aggrieved,
"Are you entirely incapable of rendering a lasting repair, Mr. Jackson, or is it just that you enjoy so much havin' me at yoah mercy?"
Nathan grinned without answering the petulant question and took hold of Ezra's right wrist. "You know how it's done by now, Ezra. I'll count t'three, alright?"
The gambler grimaced and looked away, bracing himself.
"One ... " A sudden jerk, a loud sucking pop that made everybody wince as the dislocated shoulder jumped back into the socket, and Nathan helped Ezra sink slowly to the ground until the pain eased, swearing with breathlessly imaginative fervor.
"Your mathematical skills are as abysmal as your ability to keep this god-forsaken bone of mine where it belongs ..."
"Ezra, every man's responsible for his keepin' his own bones where they belong ..." Buck crowed softly, but his lanky legs were not too steady as he went for the canteens; there was water, not too much, tepid and metallic, but they crouched in the bottom of the gorge and drank and not a man did not close his eyes as the life-giving elixir slid down their throats.
Chris took one of the canteens, about half-full, and the last horse in line back down the gully to Charlie, who came scrambling down the incline on his heels and butt into the gunslinger's up-reaching hands. "C'mon, kid." He said, and swung him up onto the tired horse's back trying not to feel how like Adam the weight of him was to his arms, that he was no older than Adam and yet would go alone into the night with hunters all around. He gripped Charlie's knee.
"Get there." Was all he said, and it was command and wish and all the hope he had. Charlie only nodded gravely, not trusting his voice but hoping his eyes told the promise his heart was making. Chris stood in the gulley watching until the horse disappeared, thinking of Vin back there in such bad shape and help a long time away.
Then he turned back, eyes burning, to the only other thing he could do anything about.
Their search for food was disappointing, obviously the posse was getting their meals in the camp. Finally, they stripped their victims of their coats, hats and every handgun and bullet they had, and tied the six who had survived in a crack so tight they wouldn't work their way out of it before morning.
"Ugly cusses, ain't they, Chris?" They were a nasty-looking bunch of desperados, "God, I hate ugly." Two men had died: One had his skull crushed by the impact of Chris' boot-heel, and another had a clear hoofprint in the middle of his chest from having been stepped on. Grimly they wedged the bodies in front of the living as an added obstacle. By Chris' contemplative look at the one who had awakened and stared, wide-eyed over his own filthy bandana, out of the shadows, it was also a warning.
"Oh, really now - " Ezra held the coat Buck had tossed him at arms length between two fastidious fingers, "I can see the vermin crawlin' on this crude excuse for a garment, the smell alone is enough to turn a swine ..."
"Lemme help you, Ezra." Chris walked up from behind him and snagged the coat, had it sliding up Ezra's right arm so fast the gambler didn't dare move for fear of aggravating his shoulder; "We ain't got time for your delicate sensibilities just now - n' hey, ain't that a good fit?" Ezra smiled sourly and let him help him the rest of the way into the vile thing, his aquiline nose wrinkled. Chris shrugged into a dirty grey coat and dropped his hat back on the latigo string so he could put on the one he snatched up off the floor of the canyon. Burning to go and they were game, every one of them, but he restrained himself and let them rest a minute, gather their flagging strength. Let Buck ease them with the perverse glee he took when pushed to violence - if he had to fight, he was damned well going to enjoy it, and it was so much like the old days that Chris grinned at him and had that grin returned. Their faces were gaunt, even J.D. no longer looked like a boy, his cheekbones striking under the patchy whiskers, but they were ready to take it to fast and furious.
When they were all dressed in the grubby coats and hats of the posse, Chris laid his hand on J.D.'s shoulder with a rough grip and addressed them all,
"Alright, we take 'em at a walk, keep to the perimeter so they don't see our faces right off, split off real casual like n' try t' get to the far side of the camp. Maybe we can spook the remuda for a distraction, hold 'em off n' keep 'em from running anywhere but right into these damned canyons if nothing else. The Judge'll be here soon if he's got Mary nippin' at his heels." Buck and J.D. laughed, but the humor quickly sifted out of Chris' eyes. "In the meantime, nobody kills Vickers."
None of them envied Colonel Malcolm Vickers once Chris Larabee got hands on him, but a couple of them envied Chris.
"Well, then ... shall we proceed to do the heroically impossible once again?" Ezra smiled with a courtly bow toward the horses.
They came out of the canyon at a slouched but sharp-eyed walk, Chris in the lead followed by Ezra and Nathan, Buck and J.D. riding drag. He slowed down even further at the first sight of the confusion in the camp, men knotted in the middle of the dusty expanse engaged in what appeared to be a heated argument. Others went hurrying here and there after loose horses, a wagon overturned and the load spilled, an air of unsettled recent trouble. In the distance behind the camp, a lone and very ungainly rider went pelting down the widening slope toward Davis.
The other two horses closed up around Chris at a rocking walk, all eyes sharp.
"What's going on in there? Where's the remuda?" Nathan asked, but Chris was busy marking where everyone was.
"The Comanche ain't there." Buck observed with speculatively narrowed eyes. "Maybe that's why the remuda ain't, neither."
Chris had noticed that, too, and the disorganized look of the camp - like discipline had broken down and nobody was in charge. Like the master was gone. That started something really furious on the boil in him.
"Well, let's find out." He said quietly and set his heels to the horse, sweeping the borrowed coat out and back behind his pistol. The rest had no choice but to follow.
Deputy Randall Potts rode behind the Judge and his daughter, as confused as he could ever remember being. Not just by the events of the day, though the Judge had set the town abuzz as if it was his to do with as he liked, but by his own feelings.
All afternoon he'd witnessed Judge Travis questioning various townsfolk, he fetched them from the hotel where the murder had occurred, the livery, the stage office and the telegraph office and the saloon, people trooping in bewildered and sometimes disgruntled obedience in and out. Individually, their answers weren't very revealing, but Randall finally figured out as the facts stacked up that the Judge's questions were. Travis didn't believe the tracker had killed that woman and he had set out very methodically to prove that. By the time they'd left town to go after the posse with eight local men behind them, Randy was very surprised to find himself agreeing with the old man - Colonel Vickers was looking pretty suspicious.
Vickers had paid for the stage tickets the witnesses used to leave town, had hired the horses from the livery the posse was using and bought the supplies used to entice the Comanche to join them. The telegraph operator's logs showed no telegram from the Sheriff to the state authorities, and he knew himself no trial had been planned, Judge Travis was here on his own. Saunden was his boss, and he'd sort of admired his imposing presence, something Randy had never really had, skinny and gangly as he still was even at 19. But he had to admit it looked like the Sheriff was willingly in Vickers' pocket. Saunden had looked the other way more than once when rustling charges were brought against certain men, when horses disappeared or saloon fights left passing cowboys dead, when squatters got run off. Randall figured that was how it worked. But this Judge would never do any of that, and yet the man had more steel in him than Randall had ever seen. It was a righteous sort of power he found himself envying. He'd wanted to be a Sheriff since he was five years old, but he'd discovered today that he wanted to be a good one, too.
When the Judge had turned to him after the last interview was over and asked him to gather some men, he'd been willing. He was surprised that he still was even after it had sunk in that he would be going against the Sheriff and Vickers and that whole damned posse. It all made him think differently about that gunslinger, too, and the plainsman he'd come to rescue.
"Rider ahead, sir!" Randall stood in his stirrups and pointed at the single horse pelting down the slope, a small man bouncing atop it so hard he'd be bruised for a week and clutching the saddlehorn as if he had no idea what the reins were for. The horse was pulling and tossing its head, out of control.
"Stop him," The Judge said with a flick of his fingers, recognizing him, "Before he falls off and breaks his neck."
It was Vickers' man, the mousy little fellow, and he was stark-white and terrified, babbling with relief as Randall intercepted his mount and took the reins. He slowed the horse and brought him to an obedient trot directly to the Judge.
"They took him! Judge Travis, the Indians took Mister Vickers, they took all the horses and they took Mr. Vickers!" Orson was shaking and breathless, his words stumbling over and into each other, "Sir, he intends to kill me, I know he does, because I know he killed Marie-Laure, it wasn't the tracker, he made me lie, he made me ..."
"Calm down." Travis snapped as he pulled alongside, eyes sharp with distaste at the man's hysteria; Orson was disheveled and wild-eyed, his coat torn under one arm and his neck-tie askew like to strangle him.
"Give him some water." Travis said, and Randall passed his canteen to the trembling rider, who took a hasty drink and closed his eyes trying to control the racing of his heart. His only chance at living was if Malcolm Vickers was killed or arrested, and Judge Travis was the only man Orson knew with the authority to do the latter; he had to convince him!
"Judge Travis, I had no choice, he threatened to kill me if I didn't corroborate his story, Miss LeBeau was already dead when I got there, he'd made it look like the tracker killed her ... he was ... cutting her. My God ..." Orson moaned tearfully, dropped his face into his hands. "I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry ..." He murmured, rocking slightly in the saddle like a distraught child.
"He'll kill me, he'll find me and he'll kill me, just like he's going to do to those seven men, keep a clean board, no loose ends, I'll never live to testify against him, my own father won't protect me!"
"You leave that to me." Travis said firmly, knowing the value of the witness in front of him that outweighed every written deposition and piece of evidence. What he'd had without Orson was circumstantial, a lot of it very difficult to tie together without bringing Tanner into it and having the Toscosa matter being brought up, Vickers had to know about that. Now, however ... he looked hard at the shaken man in front of him, the desperation in his eyes. He had his witness, but Vickers would know the same thing. If the Colonel managed to elude them, Travis was as sure as Orson was that the clerk wouldn't live out the week, even a Judge would not be safe, nor his family.
"You and you ..." Pointing to two of the men with them, "Take this man back to town and check him in to the hotel. Stay with him, and don't let anyone near him, have his meals brought to the door and check them. I'm charging you with the life of this witness, gentlemen." They nodded somberly and bracketed the wobbling little man watchfully.
"Deputy ..." Travis said, and Randall pulled up beside him, apologetically displacing Mary, who didn't seem to notice as she looked out in the direction Orson had come from with her hands fisted on the reins, anxiety plain on her beautiful face. Randall had long since figured out that one of those seven was mighty important to her, he was kind of curious which it might be.
"You witnessed that man's confession, and I don't think you can disagree that it was believable. Therefore, I intend to proceed to arrest Vickers and your Sheriff. Do you have any objections to that?"
"No, sir." Randall replied promptly, holding Travis' examining gaze and clearing his rifle from the sheath, well-cared for and workman-like. Travis smiled a little, then.
"It may be very dangerous."
"Sir, beggin' your pardon, but your daughter is with you, ain't she? I figger I gotta be at least as brave as a woman. No offense, ma'am."
Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law.
Romans 3:28
Early that afternoon, Big Tree walked into the little camp, his hands straight out from his sides to show the burly white man that he bore no weapons despite the lance and bow on his back rising over his dark head.
The white man had his gun in his hand, aimed and cocked, standing with his mighty legs braced protectively over the fallen warrior, but he did not shoot, as most white men in such a bad way would have. Not a natural enemy to the tribes, then. Indeed, he had a bone-bead necklace around his powerful neck, and bead-work of several plains tribes on his trousers, his belt. Big Tree shook his head, regretting anew what they had been led to. The man looked back at Big Tree fearlessly and without any real rancor despite having been hunted into desperate deprivation by the Comanche warriors, but his defiance was for the sake of the man who lay by the coals. It was that man who drew Big Tree's attention, the slow shallow rise and fall of his bloody chest, the bruised pallor of his face.
Josiah saw the Comanche's interest in Vin, the cock of his head as he studied their tracker's face with what was not unfriendliness, and might even have been warmth.
"This is the shootist from the cliff?" Big Tree asked in heavily accented English, expressionless, but not hostile. Josiah nodded, kept his gun aimed, which seemed to perturb the Comanche not at all as he crossed the small area with the silent directness of a cougar in its own den, crouching down so close to Vin and Josiah that the preacher had to shift to keep a .45's length between them.
Big Tree allowed gentleness to his posture, moving slowly and with calm purpose as he took his pipe bag from his waist, decorated with sacred symbols and prayers. He kept his hands clear by resting his forearms across his knees as he opened the bag and unwrapped first the pipe bowl from a bit of hide, then the bone stem, from which dangled sacred objects, holding them delicately between his fingertips as he joined them with a somber formality so the white man would see it was not a weapon. The preacher recognized the invitation to talk, and though he was very wary and kept the gun in his hand, it was for the defense of his friend and Big Tree did not mind.
In patient silence the preacher waited while Big Tree stuffed the red stone bowl of the pipe with chanshasha, which was willow tree bark, then sage and sweet grass. He lit it with a bit of charcoal plucked with his bare fingers from the fire and dropped into the bowl and pointed the stem east, south, west and north before drawing on it himself. The white man offered the same honorings of the directions with some understanding of the ceremony, and Big Tree regretted again having been at war with these seven on behalf of so undeserving a man as Vickers.
The memory of Vickers' face as he and White Wolf had snatched him up would make him smile for many years to come. They had dropped him on his finely-clad ass a mile away, and amused themselves awhile poking and prodding at him with the butts of their lances as if he were a harmless curiosity before growing bored with mocking his outrage. White Wolf had taken the fine coat, and Big Tree himself now wore the satiny vest. Vickers had threatened, tried to bribe them, cajole or intimidate them, but every tactic had only resulted in wilder hoots of laughter. How fitting it was that they, a people Vickers despised, had reduced him, at last, to begging for his life. Once that had been accomplished, they had set him free, knowing soldiers would chase them for his death as they might not for taking the remuda.
Big Tree looked up to find the preacher watching him expectantly, and he pressed the point at the base of the pipe-bowl into the soil next to him with the stem pointed upward such that the pipe did not touch the ground. This done, he looked up at Josiah and said, "I knew this one when he was a boy." He tipped his head toward Vin with a twist of full brown lips, for even then, Tanner had been already a man, hard and fast in his spirit. "A worthy warrior, with great pahu."
Josiah knew the term, and Big Tree was glad not to have to explain it, his warriors were waiting with the restive remuda not far away, and he wanted to cleanse himself of all these white men's doings and smell only the sage and the wind for awhile. Once, the Comanche had driven this Tanner from among them because he was white, adopted many seasons before and a respected warrior, ferocious and solitary but known for his kindness. Big Tree had been outraged at their insistence that the white man would draw them into the white man's conflict, for the Comanche made no distinction between natural born and adopted sons, white or otherwise. And Big Tree did not believe the words spoken in council against him by several young chiefs who masked envy and fear behind concern for the safety of the clans. They had told him to go because he was a white man, they told him it was for fear of being drawn into the white man's war, and Big Tree, while understanding their logic, had still been ashamed of what other purposes were served.
He had harbored his suspicions, knowing too many of those young chiefs were afraid this white warrior would rise above them, too proud to imagine it. There was also the matter of a certain important daughter's eyes that fell longingly on Tanner while other eyes fell longingly on her.
Big Tree had carried the guilt in his heart for these thoughts against his own people, but he had said nothing until those same young chiefs, eager for war-honors and the white men's gifts, had gone to parlay as allies with the rebellious white men. They would have brought the Comanche into the white's civil war but for the surrender of General Lee, and the unexpected end of that mighty conflict.
That parlay had been wrong, and very revealing. Big Tree had said it then, spoken out the contempt in council, and condemned them for driving out a warrior more worthy than they, a warrior they might someday need and had tossed aside for no reason but their own vanity and need for power. Indeed, Tanner had come to be a warrior strong and wise enough to have led these six dangerous men so well. He had outwitted the best the white and red commanders both had to offer, and had his victory now at hand even brought low. Still, death sat close to him; he said to Josiah, "He might not live."
"I know." The white man said, grief unhidden, frustration at having no water, nothing to give him strength. Big Tree respected the affection he showed, and the pride.
"Why does he hate the white Colonel? What is their quarrel?" Because this was very important to him, nothing could be decided for certain without this information.
"He is a good tracker, a good hunter. The Colonel used him during the war to kill men who might have been innocent."
Bluntly put, and so to the very heart of Big Tree's discontent!
"This Colonel is a creature of such habits, I have learned." Big Tree said, sure now the spirits had led him correctly to do what he had done. Then Big Tree laid a small painted-leather bag on a thong onto Vin's chest. "This belongs to him." Without saying Tanner had left the medicine bag behind when he'd been forced to leave, with his bow and lance and everything but the raiment on his body, the rifle and the horse he had brought with him. Too proud, this one, but a man's history was his own to tell. Another small leather-wrapped packet he offered to Josiah, placed it in his hand with a gently reassuring bob. "To put into a drink for him ... " and before Josiah could despair of having no water with which to mix it, "There ..." he directed Josiah's attention to two quilled and beaded parfleches in the shadow of the rocks, "Food, and there are water-skins also."
Josiah went for them eagerly, without apology - indeed, with a hard look at the Comanche for not offering them immediately when their need was so apparent. Not a man afraid of offending anyone, the Comanche thought with a small smile. Big Tree found it telling, however, that the preacher did not immediately drink himself, but came back to the wounded man and lifted his shoulders to wet his sun-split mouth.
Vin's hands jerked spasmodically as if to pull the canteen back when Josiah drew it away, and Josiah returned it and let him drink as much as he dared. Only then did he take a long grateful draught himself, his relief clear. They were strong men to have survived this so well, Big Tree thought. After such a hunt, still they were standing, still dangerous. Such men were becoming rare as the frontiers retreated and disappeared.
Vin roused as Josiah was laying him back down and he squinted, not sure he was awake or that the cool stream of moisture seeping through the dried husk of his body was not a mirage. Slowly the bronze disk resolved into a Comanche face, and that startled him but for Josiah's hand on his chest and the reassuring calm of his voice.
"Vin, this is ..."
"Big Tree?" A hoarse croak. Hazy flashes of dark laughing faces by firelight, the bold glance of a sloe-eyed girl slender and graceful as a doe ...
The warrior's face split in a happy smile and he answered in Comanche, "I am honored to be memorable, Tanner." Speaking the name Tanner had refused to have usurped even by the honor the name-giving was meant to be. He remembered the quiet passion in Tanner's explanation to the chiefs of what the name his mother had given meant to him, and the honor it was to her to never be known by another. It was strange, but they had respected his wish.
Josiah was flabbergasted, but neither Big Tree nor Vin took their eyes from each other to explain, and spoke in Big Tree's tongue.
"The Comanche are not your enemy here any longer. White Wolf was tricked by this Vickers. He is ... " Pointing east with his chin, and Vin rasped,
"We know ... the boy is leading the rest in to the camp now."
Which Big Tree appreciated, that was a bold and clever boy he'd wanted to take, but the young one had been fated for another duty. "The Colonel will not be there." He said blandly, which obviously confused Tanner; Big Tree did not tease him too long, but it was in his nature to enjoy the giving of his favors, and he had a remarkably sophisticated sense of humor and irony.
"I have brought your enemy to you."
An attentive gleam came to the fever-glazed blue eyes that Big Tree approved. This was not to say he thought the tracker could carry out the revenge that burned in him, but that matter was not his. Of course, Big Tree hoped he could, it would be a good story.
"He is in the canyons a mile east of here. Much of his posse is afoot, though his men search for him ... we brought him along so they would not chase us. I brought him as a gift for you, my brother." Plainly Tanner appreciated the full meaning of those words, he forced his scattered thoughts to coherence, struggled to focus on the chance that had so miraculously been delivered from this Comanche's hands. Big Tree knew it was a chance he would find a way to take, though his face betrayed no expectation of either success or failure. It was enough to acknowledge that the tracker would not let his gift be lost, this they understood between them as Comanche, as warriors. This Colonel had done more to Tanner than use him to kill innocents, the hate was hotter than the fever in his twilight sky-colored eyes, the kind of hate that allowed men to do impossible things.
Josiah looked back and forth between them, feeling how significant the conversation was but not understanding the language. Vin was fighting to stay conscious.
"My friends?"
"Will succeed. In the camp they run about like headless things without their master among them."
Vin regarded Big Tree somberly for a very long moment, and finally closed his eyes with a sigh and fell quiet. The warrior smiled and invited Josiah with a gesture to help himself to the food, but again it was the tracker the preacher thought of first, melting blocks of pemmican, made of rich bone marrow and bits of dried flaked meat and berries, in a tin cup of water on the coals. He took a piece into his mouth and it melted on his tongue, the richness sinking like balm into the rough dry membranes, leaving flavorful meat and the tang of berries to chew. His enjoyment made Big Tree smile with pride.
"My chief wife is very proud of her pemmican." He said, with a fleeting sadness following, "But there are not enough buffalo to store for winter anymore. We hunt the snows, now." A time that should be spent in the close smoky warmth of tepees, in laughter and story-telling and hands busy with stringing bows and fletching arrows and making cartridges for spring hunts. A time for the making of shirts and leggings and moccasins - and children.
Josiah sat on a low stone by the fire waiting for the cup to warm, his out-thrust leg awkward and painful. Vin had been a buffalo hunter, one of those responsible for decimating the herds, though he had quit that trade when he'd figured out the government was annihilating the beasts to starve the Indians who'd lived off them since the beginning of the world. He wondered why Big Tree held no ill will towards him for it, or if he even knew. He wondered why Vin had done it in the first place, having lived among them. What history was there here that he had only a glimpse of? But more than anything, each time he looked at the water-skins he wished the rest could also drink their fill and have a meal warming their bellies, thinking of them out there running on will alone.
"Your friends, they were close when we left the camp, an hour from it, moving well. There are 2 score hunting, maybe 12 and five at the camp. Six of those men who Vickers' owns. Riders were coming from Davis, three hours out."
"Reinforcements?" Josiah's heart clutched, but Big Tree only shrugged and answered,
"More white men."
Josiah worried about it as he sat down behind Vin and pulled him up against his chest to set the rim of the cup to his lips. The tracker had a mouthful, and though he didn't open his eyes, a shaking hand came up over Josiah's to hold it there and Josiah felt the tremble that ran through the tracker's body. A small sip at a time, starving, the flavors bursting into his numbness, the warmth itself as much strength as the nourishment. Before the cup was quite gone, though, his hand slipped away.
Big Tree's chuckle stilled the immediate flare of terror in Josiah.
"Like a baby, feed it and it sleeps ..."
Indeed, Vin was asleep, even as Josiah discovered that himself the tracker pressed back into the comfortable warmth of his burly body so Josiah didn't move away, just finished what was in the cup and sat it down with a longing glance at the dried meat by the coals. Big Tree got up and fetched a piece to him wordlessly, had some himself.
"What were you talking about with him?" Josiah asked, the question itself an opening for explanations that Big Tree did not take. The Comanche chief only looked blankly back at him, thinking his own thoughts.
If he remembered Tanner correctly, he would do whatever he must to try to use the opportunity Big Tree had given him. But the dedication of this friend of Tanner's might stand in his way, he would not let Tanner go for fear of his dying. Tanner would not fear this, of course, a warrior's life was his to risk, but among white men, friends often held each other back from harm whether it was wise or not.
"Why are you helping us? Is it a trap?" Impatiently the preacher asked that outright, and Big Tree spread his hands.
"It is the least we can do in payment for the fine herd of horses that the man Vickers will no longer need. And I carry a debt of my people for a dishonor done to this one long ago." Josiah knew he wouldn't explain that further, but wondered at the connection between their tracker and this formidable Comanche chief.
Josiah shook his head as a grin spread across the Comanche's broad handsome face and he rose to his feet, Josiah right after him, still uneasy.
"Well ." The preacher said with an awkward shrug, "I guess this means you don't plan to take our scalps."
Big Tree reached out and tapped Josiah shoulder with a droll laugh, his smile tweaking to one side, "We have eaten together, we have smoked the same pipe. We keep the same friends." This with a glance down at Vin, and his eyes, when he raised them to Josiah again, were pointed; "It would be uncivilized for me to kill you now." A white man after all, even if not his enemy. Josiah took the barb with a smile that was truly warm, and then Big Tree was gone back to his warriors, to the land that was still the Comanche's for a little while longer.
They had come slowly down the slight incline of the canyon mouth onto the vulnerable open ground leading into the camp looking like tired hunters interested in nothing but a meal, a drink and a bedroll. The weary horses walked with their heads hanging, caked in sweat and dust, and the men looked no better. Indeed, they looked far worse had anyone noticed it. Between them, they had two extra pistols each from the desperados, a couple of whom had been wearing double-rigs like J.D.'s, and seven rifles. Buck and Nathan each carried a rifle across their arms and one in the saddle sheath, they would be furthest out and needed the range. Chris, planning to be in the thick of it, had two gunbelts over his left shoulder like they were tack.
The rough half-acre where the camp lay sloped upward toward four or five steep canyons such as the one they had emerged from, to the north and south it was embraced by downreaching arms of rock and other small tributary canyons, all stretching in a frozen flow downhill. Only on the east was a distant view of the high end of the valley visible in a greening smudge miles below. A slight upthrust rim of harder stone marked the eastern camp boundary, sandstone worn away around it by winter floods and winds, and past that the mountain stepped down and down in a seemingly endless and ever-broader decline. Escape lay that way, but escape wasn't what they had in mind. Getting Vin out of the canyons alive, and keeping Vickers from killing them all, was.
A good twenty men were preoccupied arguing in the center of the camp amid the chaos of scattered horses being rounded up and tents and wagons being righted. One such tent had been collapsed and it might've had wounded in it by the pitiful noise as others tried to lift the heavy canvas. Nobody paid them much notice as one of the three horses meandered to the left and another to the right of the sprawling camp, the solitary rider pacing slow and straight through. No one noticed how much those five riders noticed.
Idling along on the left toward the southeastern perimeter of the camp, Buck felt J.D. swivel behind him at the smell of fresh bread, quivering after it like a starving puppy. He'd spotted the trestle table among the mess tents there, sides rolled up against the heat and the cooks scurrying around setting pots right that had been knocked down in the fracas they assumed had to do with the absence of the remuda, and tending cook-fires. Buck leaned back casually and murmured, "Go on, boy, just slide on down and get some like you got it comin', then amble on to those rocks up there like you're gonna relieve yourself." J.D., about to drown in his own saliva and surprised to have that much fluid in his body, obeyed immediately; he slid back off the horse's rump with his eyes locked on the food, but checked himself from running. Remembered to look inconspicuous and keep his eyes sharp to what was around him other than that bread. They would have to place themselves to cross-fire the entire eastern perimeter to keep Vickers from escaping; the spot Buck sent him toward was about forty yards from the canyon mouth and elevated a bit on the spine of a descent, open behind to a wash that shallowed out quickly further down.
The cooks didn't hardly notice him, and he managed to wait until he was walking away toward that stand of rocks before he took a bite; Buck tipped his hatbrim to hide a grin as the kid stopped dead for a second, chewing blissfully before he remembered where he was. Didn't blame him a bit, Buck thought with a rub at his own concave belly, he didn't think he even had a stomach any more. Buck rode on at a lazily rocking walk, marking Ezra and Nathan on the other side of the camp, a good fifty yards across and getting wider. Chris took his horse in at a weary slouch that would pass near the group in the center, searching for Vickers with blood in his eye.
Across the way, Nathan let Ezra down from behind him, lowering him smoothly by a strong grip on the gambler's left arm and passing down a rifle without stopping. Ezra walked calmly on toward a spot across from J.D. inside the canyon mouth where the arm of one of the finger canyons put up a sloping line of rocks, and Nathan rode on, pacing Buck on the other side toward the north edge of the canyon mouth.
Chris came parallel to the crowd of men and took the dangerous chance of stopping his horse there to listen, the height giving him a good look at their faces. What he heard gave him a moment of naked fear that he'd put the five of them into the frying pan for nothing. Vickers was gone, the hostage he needed to stop this so they could get Vin out, so they could all get out. But fear had never done much for Chris but piss him off, and the intellect of survival engaged with a cold clarity he had never questioned: Their purpose was unchanged. The hunt had to be stopped, the Judge was still on his way and Travis would demand their safety and Vin's even if the charges against them stood. They had Charlie as a witness for that, so all they had to do was survive 'til Travis got there and have faith Vin would, too. That reality accepted, he started figuring how to accomplish it.
Just now the posse was headless even with the Sheriff among them, most of their mounts gone, half their number evidently on foot in the canyons. Some of the men present wanted to send to Davis for more men and horses, even soldiers; there was frightened talk of the Comanche somehow being allied with the outlaws they hunted. Chris wanted it over without any escalation - twenty they might be able to take, even a few more if the servants and hostlers got into it, but many more than that would be more than they could handle in the shape they were in. He sat there a few long minutes, looking around the camp, gauging their chances; at the very least they could keep them pinned and away from the canyons, and Vin. He was going to stop this right now, one way or the other, if he had to kill every mother's son in this fucking camp. Buck kept a close eye on Chris, feeling a familiar slow tingle up his spine at his forboding stillness, the strange quiet detachment that always came before a gunfight.
When Chris finally legged his horse on toward the east, he answered Buck's inquiring eyebrow with a hard shake of his head; his old friend saw that Chris' face was hard-cut as granite and so he knew, with an almost involuntary glance back at J.D. making his way to the rocks, that the worst was what they had to contend with. Vickers was gone. Buck straightened up and loosed the coat from over his holster, moving a little more quickly and warning the rest as he did so - by habit they looked to him to read Chris. Nobody mistook the sign and each took an anxious breath as their spines tightened: They'd passed a few terse words on the long open slope into the camp of possibilities, this being the one they dreaded most. No hostage, then, but the whole camp to be taken. Grimly they picked their spots, knowing the impossible was going to be a lot harder than they'd hoped; the planned skirmish was now a war they had to win.
A darting look of Buck's deep blue eyes marked everyone, Ezra and J.D. on both sides between the camp and the canyon walls, Chris thirty yards ahead of them and right in the middle of the tramped-down pass the posse and wagons had made climbing up to this site, the last place this high on the mountain where such a camp was possible. Nathan nodded at Buck from across the camp, too far away to see his expression but his posture ready as Chris made to pass three men on foot walking in the opposite direction, trouble in their rising eyes.
They left it to Chris to spark the explosion, and he did that the instant the first fool to die recognized him and went for his gun. From horseback and close enough to put powder burns on the man's shirt, Chris shot him through the heart, loosed his foot from the stirrup and kicked him away into the other two. Buck's spurs startled his exhausted mount into bolting for cover to one side of the broad trail as Nathan did the same on the opposite. The animal nearly went down on his haunches as Buck flung himself off and down behind cover with bruising force, rifle rising.
All hell broke loose, and the gunslinger in black stepped down off his horse into it like a shadow of death, still shooting, two down in less than a heartbeat. Suddenly every man in range of his casually deadly guns was too busy trying to keep him from killing them to draw a bead and shoot straight.
By the time the posse found cover and return fire started up, they discovered there were more of them than Larabee already among them, and that they'd flanked the entire east side of the camp, cutting off escape into the valley. That was confusing enough, and at the moment no one was sure where they were in all the gunfire, only that their rifles were proving highly fatal; the tide of men rushing toward Chris ebbed back sharply under that volley into what cover could be found in the half-ruined camp. Chris dropped one empty gun at a dead run and in the same motion reached across his body to draw the next from the holster over his left shoulder, firing without a break as he went for cover behind a stack of grain bags and water barrels too heavy to carry further than necessary and so placed right at the trail-head.
"Damn it!" Sheriff Saunden fell to the ground behind an overturned wagon, shaking as he tried to reload, amazed terror making him clumsy, "How in hell did they get in here? How in hell!" The road to the valley was covered tight. "Why ain't they runnin' for it?" He demanded of the two men behind the wagon next to him, both too busy shooting to answer. "They could get off easy, why ain't they?"
In fact, Saunden was afraid to have that question answered, because these outlaws, who had already proven to be tougher and more canny than any he'd ever run across, had dug in very strategically and were fighting with a dedication and determination that said they had a plan. Trapping the camp against the open ground between it and the canyons was obviously a good part of that plan, somebody was picking off anyone who tried to run in that direction like bottles on a stump. Their prey had come among them, clawed and sharp-toothed and deadly - why didn't they run? Good as they were, they couldn't hope to hold out forever against three times their number! That they hunkered down to fight was a terribly frightening turn of events - my god, were they crazy enough, vengeful enough, to be set on killing everyone in the camp?!
Nathan, on one knee adjacent to Chris' position, kept up a steady rhythm of rifle-fire to drive those on his side of the camp back, the second rifle on the ground next to him ready for use. To his dismay, he saw men rushing out of one of the larger tents, two carrying a strong-box between them - eight, nine, damn it, ten of them, and a hard-bitten bunch where most of the others had seemed to be townsfolk.
"Chris!" He shouted without taking his eyes off those men, "Chris!" The healer's strident tone reached him and Chris pulled back sharply, his pistol following the line of his sight thinking Nathan was in trouble, but Nathan pointed to his left and kept on shooting. The gunslinger darted a look around the grain-sacks and saw them, then, too, with a vicious curse - the odds had just gotten unexpectedly worse. Those ten were not rushing to the defense of the rest of the posse, the camp payroll was the prize they'd used the confusion to take. Their pure self-interest could be deadly; in their position, Chris knew what he would do - take out whichever one of the five blocked the easiest escape route, which, from their course, seemed to be Buck. Without taking his eyes off them he laid his pistol down and took up the rifle, ignored the gun-fire striking wood-chips off the barrel beside him, and took careful aim.
No way in hell those bastards were getting out of this camp, no way in hell men who had driven the seven nearly to death, maybe even killed Vin, would celebrate this day in safety drinking up stolen blood money while the honest men of this posse died for a cause they didn't even know was wrong.
One of the two men carrying the strong-box plowed face-first into the dirt as Chris shot him, the other took a bullet to the forearm that made him drop the heavy box and scramble for cover, leaving the payroll in the open and and a trail of blood in his wake. He kept the bait of that iron box in the corner of his eye as he returned to the battle closer at hand, killing another as he tried to retrieve it and keeping them occupied with that prize rather than Buck. Time, a little time was all they needed ... Keep them focused on the box and the threat they represented diminished considerably. But not completely ... a few of their number valued their lives beyond gold and left the box without a backward glance.
Judge Travis heard gunfire while they were still several miles away, a exploding racket of thundering rifle-cracks and the lighter snap of pistols reverberating off the mountains as if an army was engaged in furious battle. Mary and he broke into a run in the same moment, and the six men with them scrambled to keep up. As they got closer, the sounds broke off into the uneven rhythm of skirmishes, and as they came within sight of the smoke and dust rising off the encampment above, the pitched battle suddenly included them.
Bullets sped like angry wasps by them, Travis caught a glimpse of the layout of the camp and took a guess as to who might not want reinforcements to get through.
"Mary! Take your hat off!" Travis shouted at her as bullets whistled around them, and though her expression was frightened and bewildered, she did so. The moment the bright pale flag of her hair leapt into the wind, the fire coming at them stopped and Travis knew for certain that the seven were there, and that they were not running. It made him smile with a wicked sort of pride.
The gunfire in the camp itself was hot and furious as any field of war, gunsmoke hazing blue into the brown dust. The entire camp seemed to be involved, wagons overturned and tents collapsed, one burning, bullets flying in every direction as the posse fought to keep from being driven back into the canyons. Travis slowed, and slowed Mary's headlong rush as well - "We can't just go riding into the center of a firefight, they'll get themselves killed trying not to hit us and the posse won't be so careful."
"There's a wash up this way, Judge." Deputy Potts reined in beside them, pointing, "It'll get you within maybe twenty yards of the camp, you'll have to go on foot where it cuts up - but Judge, if there's a man shootin' from up there, you're gonna get shot."
"Not if it's our man." Travis replied grimly, having correctly guessed from the cessation of gunfire in their direction that one of the seven was on the valley side of the camp and had been attempting to keep reinforcements away in shooting at them before Mary revealed their identity.
But before they'd gone twenty paces into the wash the Judge took a rifle-shot so close over his head he nearly broke his nose on the horn ducking, and another hard after it, driving them back. Mary scowled with frustration, her horse dancing against the back-pulled rein as if feeling her urgency to go. Her father-in-law strained to see where it was coming from; two shots in exactly the same place and neither had hit him.
"Deputy, any of you boys have a spy-glass handy?" Randall turned to the men behind them, knowing them and getting what he asked for, passing it to the Judge, who leveled it carefully at the eastern-most side of the camp. Tall and slender and all in black standing dangerously plain and looking right back at him as if they were eye to eye. Chris Larabee didn't want Mary in here and had warned the Judge in the only way he could; Travis couldn't fault him for it.
"Mary, you have to stay back here ..."
"I certainly will not! I'm as capable ..."
"Mary, you are as capable a woman as I've ever met, but you are a woman."
The Judge's Slate-gray eyes blazed from under thick down-drawn brows, his jaw thrust forward as it was when he would not be budged even in the open-mouthed face of her umbrage. Defiantly Mary drew the rifle from her scabbard with a look that dared him to say anything.
"Think, Mary. And not with your heart." She drew back with shocked surprise, unable to break from his dark eyes that knew things she had yet to admit to herself. Color burst onto her flustered face and so many emotions, guilt, embarrassment, denial, fear, rushed through her expression. He almost regretted saying the words she wasn't yet ready to hear, but there was no choice.
"I can't risk you, Mary - and he won't." Her expression changed subtly at the intimation that her father-in-law had sensed something from Chris as well as her. "I'll leave a man with you - wait, wait ... to stop anyone getting around behind them, they're on this side of the camp." She realized then exactly who had been shooting at them, looking back and forth between the camp and Travis and the Judge moved quickly before she composed herself, going again into the wash, this time unimpeded.
A motion of his hand sent the men with them into flanking positions on either side, and as they approached the camp riding low along the steepening bottom of the wash, the Judge rose up in his stirrups and spotted J.D. Dunne, crouched behind a slumping finger of rock, his bowler hat on the ground beside his knees as he snapped off pistol-shots at three men in the cover of a wagon. One of those men apparently mistook Judge Travis coming up behind J.D. for reinforcements and he stood up to shout the good news at his comrades in another area. J.D. took him out without blinking. The Judge swept his rifle out of the scabbard and saw his motions repeated on each side as they dismounted and began the clambering climb up to J.D.
It was a scene of mayhem like he'd never seen, gunfire deafening as they reached him. Randall began returning fire as soon as he was in a position to do so, and the other two men followed suit. J.D., gaunt and hard-used, still grinned over his shoulder in greeting the Judge, talking without taking his eyes off the battle.
"If your men can move toward the middle, there, we'll have 'em pinned good, unless they want to run into the canyons. Got a couple tryin' t'sneak up on Buck n' they just might make it."
Not thinking about giving orders to Judge Travis, who did not think twice about taking them.
As the bullets plocked into the wagon in front of him and kicked up rooster-tails of dust on either side, Sheriff Saunden realized that there was more gunfire coming at them than there had been a moment ago. Bracketed on one side by a surprised corpse and on the other by a man looking desperately for a way out and deeper into the camp where it might be safer from those merciless guns, he snarled, "The outlaws have reinforcements? What in hell is going on here? Who are they?"
There were those among the posse, however, who were not inexperienced at ambush and murder, and those men were on the move, as determined to save their own skins as the outlaws they'd been paid to hunt were to ventilate them. Outlaws themselves, understanding the brutal reality of safety in numbers; some would get killed, but others would get through - the criminal life was all about odds.
Ezra was taking such withering fire that he could barely peek his head over the rocks to fire back, and Buck would soon be forced out of cover by four men more daring - or more desperate - than the rest. They had rolled across the open space to the cover of the last mess-tent in line and were working their way to an angle that would expose Buck to their fire. Buck saw them, and J.D. had noticed as well and was providing what discouragement he could, but he was too far away for accuracy with his pistols. Routes were considered and discarded as Buck kept up a mortal stream of lead; one dropped one writhing into the dust but three made it, another ten feet and they'd have him. The only cover was in the camp itself, the perimeter on either side of him was all open ground ... hell, might just do a whole lot of damage in there, close up and all. "I like close up!" He said out loud, grinning at the notion of jumping right down their throats, and he went diving out from behind cover a moment before the first bullet passed where he had been. Long legs reaching, the rifle blazing in his right hand and a pistol in his wounded left; it hardly hurt a bit to pull the trigger.
Ezra found that if he scrambled up and down behind the uneven row of rocks he could pop up to fire in different spots so they couldn't anticipate where he would appear. It put him in mind of a carnival shooting-gallery amusement but, he thought with a wicked grin, that darlin' row of ducks didn't shoot back to kill. That he was well and truly pinned himself didn't matter so much as long as he could still fire back effectively.
The five of them fought valiantly, stubbornly. But in the end, they were, indeed, only five exhausted and driven men against overwhelming and increasingly desperate odds. The line finally broke, so many men had pressed forward toward the canyon mouth that they couldn't kill them all, and bit by bit, step by step, the posse started making it through to positions where they could inflict their own damage.
Nathan was driven out from cover and ran for Chris' position, going down halfway there but rolling to his feet and hobbling on while Chris provided some cover. J.D. was fairly safe, but only because the Judge and his men reinforced that position - a position that became less and less valuable as the fight moved forward past them.
"Shit ..." The kid swore, moving further and further out of cover; Chris and Vin had both told him a man didn't shoot another man in the back, but what about when he was behind men who were trying to kill his friends? Hell with it, they wanted to yell at him later, let 'em, at least they'd be alive to do it.
"Judge, we gotta do somethin' here, they're getting' too close t'the trail! We kinda figgered you'd bring more men with you ... " Not placing any blame, but increasingly panicked; "I can't see Ezra at all, Nathan's gone, I don't know if he's down or what, Buck ain't where he's supposed to be - hell, this is going to shit real fast!"
Which Judge Travis could see for himself. They fought like mythic warriors, they fought as though even death would not defeat them, there wasn't an ounce of giving up in any of them nor any intention but to carry the battle on to the bitter end. He couldn't allow them to be killed, not when he had the proof of their innocence, not when it would serve no one but Malcolm Vickers.
Behind the rocks, Ezra looked with despair at the last of his cartridges, his hands shaking with fatigue and starvation and the gun-fire coming closer to him in increments. Blood from cuts caused by rock-chips stung his eyes, his right shoulder was an ache so constant as to be nearly unnoticed, but his body suffered the drain on his strength and coordination. No one understood the odds better than a gambling man, and the tide was turning against them ...
Chris darted out to grab Nathan and yank him back behind the barrels and sacks, whipping off his bandana and jerking it tight around Nathan's right calf as the healer protested, "It's alright, Chris, just tripped me up, ain't nothin' ..."
"Jeez, Nathan, you never believe us when we say that ... you tellin' me you're just fine?" Grinning, Nathan was astonished that Chris was grinning and meaning it, a mad light in his eyes as he turned back to the battle with vicious energy.
But even Chris knew it was a battle they were losing. Maybe they could run for it and hope the Judge could settle things so they could get back for Vin and Josiah, though the risk of being shot in the back if they tried to run now was pretty good. Anger built into rage and boiled higher into fury as their options narrowed and disappeared, his eyes blurring at odd moments, all of them driven too far and long ago past any reserves of strength. No matter how fast he shot, no matter how many men already lay dead between him and the camp, there were always more. Nathan's dark eyes were deeply worried as he opened fire on the other side, they were shooting to survive, now, beyond any other plan.
"Chris ... I can't see where Buck went ..."
"I know, dammit, I know!" Killing the enemy, then, if that was all he could do, killing them as fast as he could.
At the moment, Buck was on his back over a table in the wreckage of the mess tent fighting off a man as tall as he but at least a hundred pounds heavier, his exhausted condition telling in his inability to keep the man off him, or keep the rifle stock from creeping hard up under his chin. Bit by bit his head was forced back, his toes left the ground on either side of his attacker and he couldn't push him off for the life of him, his left hand had no strength in it anymore. Black and white spots started popping in front of his eyes.
"They're giving up!" Vaguely he heard the Sheriff's voice crowing victoriously and he didn't believe it, though his heart broke and his spirit sank, "Cease fire! They're giving up!"
Saunden peered, squinting with barely suppressed hope over the top of the wagon as more and more of the posse noted the white surrender flag waving from behind the rocks. Visions of a multiple hanging, of dime novel legends immortalizing his name, the Sheriff who took down Chris Larabee and his murdering gang ...
"Cease fire!" That call became more strident, he didn't want the seven shot down now before he could parade them before newspapermen and justice officials!
Just as Buck was about to go under, the pressure was gone and he rolled off the planked boards onto the ground wheezing and coughing, furiously aware of the man's boots still standing above him as he looked across the camp where more and more of the posse were rising from hiding in the tapering off of gunfire. The silence was strange and heavy, drawn tight as a noose around them all. Smoke hung sullen in the air, dead men sprawled on the ground, more than five men should have been able to account for in so short a time.
To Sheriff Saunden's great dismay, however, it was not any of the outlaws who advanced up the road under that white flag - it was a severe and barrel-chested man in a good black broadcloth suit followed by Saunden's own deputy, Randall Potts, with his grimy white shirt tied around the barrel of his rifle.
There had been no other way, the gunfire was too loud and the battle too widespread for Travis to hope his voice might be heard, so he took the chance that the posse would think the outlaws were giving up. No one moved from their positions as he strode without a flicker of concern into the middle of the trampled and bloody ground, Randall Potts, someone many of the posse knew for a Deputy, at his shoulder in his long-john sleeves and suspenders.
"Potts!" Saunden cried furiously, "What in hell's goin' on here? I told you to stay in town ..."
"I am Judge Orrin Travis." The Judge declared, planting himself in the middle of the battlefield and turning slightly to address the camp at large with indisputable authority. "And this is over!" The declaration rang over their stunned heads. "This cause of action that this posse was empowered to serve is hereby declared null and void, you men are relieved of your obligation with the gratitude of the state, and disbanded. Put down your guns!"
"Them outlaws will shoot us in a second!" Saunden cried from behind the wagon and Randall shook his head, a sweep of his arm indicating those who had already stood up out of cover and were laying down their guns in obedience to the Judge's order; "They would've by now, Sheriff! You men listen ..." Randall spoke out in a voice he hardly recognized as his own, but he was proud of the steadiness of it, and the conviction. "We got a witness says th'tracker never killed that lady. It was Colonel Vickers."
This news drew more men up in a gradual wave from behind whatever cover they'd been in, suspicious, looking to one another, but having in common a profound relief that the shooting had stopped and they no longer felt the target of these outlaws who, it seemed, were not outlaws at all, but innocent men. Some of the posse, primarily the townsfolk, were appalled, and their blame went to Saunden as he looked around in disbelief, gone from hero to fool in the space of a sentence from his own most junior deputy.
Chris Larabee stepped out from behind cover himself, then, holstering his gun with a sweeping look that warned of his ability to get it out and blazing again in a heartbeat, and he walked toward Judge Travis.
"Randall, get the posse gathered and get that tent raised before those men die in there." Wanting Saunden and the remnants of the posse as far from Chris Larabee as he could get them, the man had the heat of battle ferocious and undimmed in his pale eyes. Travis extended his hand as Chris got near and was relieved to have it taken, but not by the look in the gunslinger's eyes - by his expression, this was far from being over. Travis saw Ezra approaching, Nathan limping out from cover, J.D. coming with two of the men from Davis to help Buck to his feet, steadying him as they came. One by one the five men gathered around the Judge, as beaten-down and hard-used as any men Travis had ever seen, deprivation and wounds old and new, the shaky sway and burning red-rimmed eyes of men driven far beyond where most men could endure.
And he was afraid when none of them looked around expecting the other two of their number. Vin Tanner and Josiah Sanchez were not among them and he asked outright, wanting to know the worst if the worst if was.
"Sanchez and Tanner?"
Chris jerked his chin toward the canyons, his face drawn, the whole of his long lean body trembling like a done-in hound still determined after the prey.
"In there, Josiah's alright, but Vin's in a bad way."
Nathan's worried regard confirmed that, "Judge, we gotta go after them right now, we've got to get Vin out of there, and we need to hurry."
"And Vickers?" By Chris' sour mouth, the gunslinger hadn't had the pleasure of killing him, and he wasn't giving up on that for a second. He needed answers; turning, he stalked toward Saunden, who froze in his tracks as the dusty gunslinger came at him, reaching for him, twisting his fingers into his coat with eyes that seemed nearly able to kill him by themselves.
Chris hauled the numbly cooperative man back to the little group standing watchfully around the Judge and thrust him in front of the man, hovering at his elbow as if eager for any excuse to kill him. Saunden faced the Judge hesitantly.
"Where is Colonel Vickers?" The Judge snapped, and Saunden answered quickly; "He ain't here, he's in there, in the canyons. Comanche snatched him up when they stole the remuda about an hour before we got back t'camp."
And if the Comanche hadn't killed him, Chris plainly intended to, already staring into the canyons as if he would pierce the walls by force of will alone.
Randall stood back a little way watching the five men as the Judge quizzed Saunden, all slump-shouldered and torn up, men hunted to the edge of death but still hard-eyed and keen on what was being said. Five men who'd taken on this whole camp with the ruthlessness and precision of an army, and they weren't done yet. He shook his head, knowing he was seeing men he'd misjudged, not murderers and desperados, but men of a caliber that would take on this camp and not run, and not stop until it was finished. He'd be proud to be such a man himself one day.
Buck, rubbing his throat with a grimace, knew from Chris' face what came next, and he was as ready for it as Chris was. He slapped J.D. on the back of the arm and said, "J.D., lets round us up some horses n' canteens." The two of them moved off, and after a moment Randall followed. Chris spun, gun leaping to his hand, at the sound of horses coming fast up the trail: Mary and her escort, and he went to meet her, holstering his weapon as he went.
Mary's heart squeezed in her chest at how bad he looked, and an anger in his eyes and the set of his face that was both glacially cold and blisteringly passionate. His hand rested a gentle moment on her thigh, flustering her in the unaccustomed intimacy he seemed not to notice he had taken. As if it were natural to touch her so, as if he'd done so a thousand times, and something hummed all through her body in amazement.
"You oughtn't t'be here, Mary." He said, and she felt the lingering warmth when he took his hand back, looked down at him with a distress she couldn't hide at his haggard and blood-stained raggedness, so relieved to find him alive.
Her horse shied at a popping snap from the burning tent and it was then she noticed something, looking around her for the first time, that made her shiver with sudden forboding.
"Where are Vin and Josiah?" She asked, as direct as her father-in-law but fear of his answer showing plainly in her face, in her nervous fingers on the reins.
"In there. Vin's hurt bad. We're goin' for 'em now." In there. The pitiless and barren landscape of cracks and gorges and cragged heights . Of course they were going, a glance told her that, all five of them standing up on willpower alone, without food for God knew how long, wounded and battered by man and elements both. Yet despite the glaringly apparent extremity of their suffering, they thought neither of rest nor food nor pain because two of their number remained endangered. This rough loyalty had always tugged at her heart, almost an envy that seven men so different in nature and temperment would walk through fire for each other even on such a short acquaintance. Steven would have liked them. Steven would even have liked Chris.
She looked to her father-in-law in the desperate hope that he could convince them to rest, to eat, but the Judge just shook his head. Close to dropping from sheer exhaustion, swaying where they stood, clumsy and gaunt and bruised and bloody, but there was never a question that they would go, now, and together.
It took J.D. and Buck only a few minutes to round up horses fresh enough for the task, Randall and the men who had come with the judge helping with the outfitting so that, too, went quickly. Urgency burned in them now, the dread of Vin dying when they could have saved him, dying with the cloud of murder hanging over his head when they could have relieved his soul and told him who'd done it, what had happened, all the unknowns that had to be tormenting him. Although the Judge continued to question the Sheriff and issue orders to get the camp re-organized, the wounded cared for, the five peacekeepers from Four Corners were done talking. Randall mounted himself, and waited quietly in the background.
As if by unspoken accord, they all swung into their saddles together; Mary, running from the mess tents where she had gone as soon as Chris had turned away from her, came between them and the canyons, but not to stop them. One by one she handed up hastily assembled slabs of beef in bread, having known they were starving and yet were not even realizing it any more, all of them focused only on Vin and Josiah. They accepted the food dumbly, Buck with a spark of a smile and a tip of his hat, a man who was never too deprived to appreciate the efforts of a beautiful woman. Chris looked into her earnest face with an unreadable expression and wordlessly turned their trail back into those deadly canyons. They chewed without tasting, ate without relish, their eyes and thoughts and hearts only having strength for the task ahead. All that mattered now was getting Vin out of there alive, and making Colonel Malcolm Vickers pay.
...'for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.'
Matthew 17:20
When Vin woke, for the first time in he didn't know how long he was truly aware of being awake. Sky above, mid-afternoon by the shadows. Faintly he remembered the taste of food and realized the ache of starvation was a duller edge. Sensations registered one by one, as real as the pain in his shoulder that throbbed every beat of his heart and the strange visceral hurt low on his belly - that one held him still with threatened discomforts he didn't want to risk. It was the first time he really knew for sure where he'd gotten hit. Should be dead, he could tell that, too, having been there before and recognizing the odd sensitivity of his skin and joints. Of course it had to be Nathan who'd staved off the grim reaper for him; he hadn't really expected it could be done and was a little surprised to be alive.
Maybe enough life left in him to finish what he knew he had to finish. Big Tree had been no hallucination, and Malcolm Vickers was too near to let him slip away again.
He lay quietly, and when his vision finally settled and cleared, he looked carefully around the little camp through slitted eyes. Josiah sat half-turned away from him on watch, his craggy profile a strange and powerful comfort. Methodically he located the horses, his gunbelt, the Winchester rifle. Waterskins; thirst woke sharply to seeing them, but he wanted to let his mind run the course of things and find the way to do what needed doing.
Josiah could keep him from it if he told him what he intended, and would. It would take nothing for the big preacher to stop him from even sitting up right now. Vin didn't like what he would have to do to get around the mountain Josiah's opposition would be, but he figured sardonically that he owed Josiah one anyway. If he had to crawl, he was going to do this, like he'd crawled up out of the earth at Andersonville, and out from under the depraved ruin of a man that was all Vickers had left him. Do it or die trying.
A long quiet while he lay there feebly testing his body, what worked and what didn't, swallowing the hurt sounds that wanted to come. If he died doing it ... Lord, he had to stop thinking, he was making himself dizzy.
"Josiah." He had to say it twice before the sound would carry and Josiah's head snapped around, the preacher rose immediately to come to him. "What can I get you, Vin?" Josiah crouched down beside the tracker, intently examining the lucidity of those round blue eyes with rising hope. Vin's mouth tweaked into a ragged little chevron of a smile, but it was the strength in his eyes Josiah felt good to see.
Vin let Josiah give him water and the Comanche healing herb tea, and he kept the canteen beside him. He took more of the rich broth, as much as he could make himself drink, and swore he felt the strength running into his bones. It was very fine pemmican from some proud woman's hand, probably Big Tree's wife. He wanted jerky, and Josiah gave it to him, but damned if chewing it didn't tire him out. He slept again, woke a couple of hours later but feigned sleep so Josiah would not turn from his watch. After about twenty minutes, he started to move.
It was late afternoon when Josiah heard a softly agonized grunt behind him and glimpsed the dull gleam of the rifle butt that swung wildly into his head. He went down like a felled tree, but Vin went down along with him as something tore low in his stomach. The pain blinded him and the Winchester fell from nerveless fingers as he knotted up hard around that hurt, grateful he had no breath to voice the scream that was choking him. He'd hit Josiah square, the big preacher wasn't waking any time soon - which was good because it took a long time to get up, he had to do it in stages, setting the rifle-butt onto the ground and gripping the middle of the barrel like a staff. Growling with stubborn effort, he finally managed to gain his feet but he couldn't straighten completely once there.
The horses, so near, still looked to be a hundred miles away. Like an old man he shuffled toward them, saddled in case they had to run. Peso, ever keen to weakness, started stepping around, never too tired to be contentious, but Vin only swore at him; "Damn horse, shape I'm in, you'd kill me n' feel purty big about it. You wasn't gelded already I'd sure be pleased t'do it myself ..." It made him feel better to grumble at that cantankerous horse, and it was Buck's placid gray he wanted anyway. He was a tall rangy critter just like Buck himself, quick and durable and blessed with a quiet gentle nature - unlike Buck. It felt good to be doing this, it felt right. Destined, maybe.
He leaned the rifle against a rock and the pale horse let himself be led to the edge of the little bowl so Vin could angle up the steep slope for height. He did it very carefully, made sure his feet were set well before he reached up for the horn and the cantle and felt himself going over backwards into red darkness before he could even get a grip. Saddle leather slipped through his fingers, caught, feeling the burn of every breath and the pull of something vital inside he instinctively dreaded distressing. His fingers clutched, everything clutched and for a minute or so he just tried to breathe and stay up. He could do this, he had to do this, his duty was clear as ever it had been.
"Lord ... help me ... " A shaking breath of words he never knew he spoke aloud. If Vickers escaped, none of the seven nor anyone he knew in Four Corners would ever be safe. All would be targets because of what Vickers would suspect they knew, or tools to use to get at him if he survived this mountain.
He almost tried to mount again and then remembered his weapons ... that wasn't good - was he thinking just to ride up to Vickers and scare him to death? He didn't recognize the soft wheeze of his own laughter, shaking his head at his foolishness as he picked up the rifle and made his slow shambling way to the mare's leg; if he came across Vickers in the narrows, he'd need the shorter gun. Then he realized how far down his side-arm was in being on the ground and looked at it accusingly, knowing he was going to have to get down there to pick it up.
He went about it slowly, balancing his weight on his right arm and that hand around the rifle-barrel, and trying not to compress his torso while his left hand groped after, then caught the belt. Christ, when had his rig gotten so heavy? Stabbing pain that threatened to be much more in the wounded left shoulder kept him at a half-crouch, but he couldn't take the rig with his right, he needed his right hand to lever himself back up and he only had two ... After a moment of painful indecision, he figured it was either fall over or get up. Hurt like to put him on his face, but he pushed through it, shaking like he was lifting a hundred pounds.
After he'd been standing a moment and had his legs as secure under him as they would get, he leaned the tall rifle along his hip and got the belt on, buckling it low where the pressure on the wound gave it a little support, maybe keep what he was sure were meticulously neat stitches from tearing open. Nathan was going to be hard enough to live with after this as it was. If he lived himself, that is. It didn't seem important.
God, he felt like an old woman! Every step and breath and move having to be thought of and measured and still costing him tangible bits of his strength. The Winchester was so heavy he nearly dropped it getting it into the sheath, too short for it, but no way he'd be able to trade tack.
For a minute or so he stood staring up at the saddle raising the nerve to make that stretching move that was probably going to make him wish he was dead. The gray swung his lean head around at knee level and looked at him as if wondering what he was waiting for; Vin knew he laughed that time. Holding on to the back edge of the fender for balance, he got a gingerly step up the rocks, then another, and when he thought he could, he laid his left hand flat against the saddle-skirt and used his right, fisted in his pants-leg at an awkward reach across his body, to help pull the left leg up and set his toe into the slightly twisted stirrup. That went alright, hurt like bejesus, but he managed it alright.
It was the reach up for the horn and the cantle that really hurt, he got his hands into position by moving quick and not thinking about it, but then he just stood there halfway between the ground and the horse, his left leg bent hard in the stirrup and the right still barely on the ground. If the gray had moved, he would've fallen and likely never got up again. But the smoky horse stayed stock still as if sensing how crucial it was that he did so, nostrils flaring inquiringly as he watched, head low and arched to the side.
"Well, hell ... c'mon now, Tanner ..." The first time he tried to pull himself up he didn't get six inches off the ground before he had to go back down, sucking in uneven rasping breaths and swallowing hard over and over to keep himself from blacking out. He rested his forehead against the hard leather just below the saddle-seat with his eyes closed. He called on his Lord again without the breath to say the words, but with all his conscious will. Then he methodically examined the agony, figured where it hurt most and how to work around it.
The second attempt he bounced on the ball of his foot a couple of times for upward momentum and managed to time to pull himself high enough by horn and cantle to lay his chest and belly over the saddle-seat. He paused there a second like a sack of grain flung halfway up, the pressure on his stomach a sick sensation that would not pass until he got his weight off it. He let go of the cantle and reached for the right pommel, working his fingers around it as hard as he could because he was barely up, and one wrong move would send him toppling backwards to the ground; God bless this horse - Peso would've been dancing around on his corpse by now.
Vin finally pulled himself in a punishing diagonal slide further across the saddle where he could drag his right leg across and over, losing the stirrup and bruising the inside of his knee and thigh on the hard high rise of the cantle but not even feeling it in the rush of other agonies that accompanied the motion.
By that time all he could do was lay along the gray's neck precariously, his left hand trapped between his ribs and the horn and the other holding onto the pommel until the white blindness passed and he could almost take a full breath. It felt like he'd been at this for hours, though the shadows weren't that much longer. For the first time despair threatened, an avalanche suspended over him waiting to hammer down the impossibility of finishing this.
Hell, he'd done impossibilities in his life, now hadn't he. His Ma always said Tanners were the stubbornest creatures ever born of woman, and killing Vickers was a need burning hot and urgent in the rock-stubborn Tanner heart of him. It had to end, that was all, simplicity itself.
Finally he sat up as much as he could, grimacing and shifting to find the balance that hurt the least and giving up after a bit because it all hurt. It had hurt lyin' down and it hurt sittin' up, nothing to do for it. Slowly it became tolerable. Buck's stirrups were too long for him, but he'd ridden Indian bare too long to worry about stirrups, though he was glad of the support of the saddle under him. Being bent so far forward, though, meant he was a breath from falling off, he had to get his legs down or he'd never make it a step much less down the incline he had to go down. Painfully, grunting with the effort, he dragged his legs forward one by one until his calves were in front of the front-most saddle skirts, then he pushed back and up on them so the front edge lifted and he could tuck the back of his calves between that edge and the gray's body where the skirts acted as a wall to hold his legs there. Uncomfortable for being bent almost double, but he wouldn't fall off and he figured he wouldn't know the meaning of comfort for a long damned time to come anyway.
Then he realized he'd left the water-skin behind, but that was where it'd have to stay, he didn't even consider getting it now. For a moment more he closed his eyes in dread of the gray's first step, breathed deeply a few times, and then lifted the reins off his neck and let him go.
Just about broke his knuckles on the horn when that first down-shifting rock came and he knew he made a choked noise at the sensation, heard the long humming moan that followed as the gray got under way. Every nerve was panicking with pain, every motion a jolt significant somewhere. He hardly knew this body, things hurting deep inside where a man was a vulnerable mystery, his shoulder a sharply throbbing ache. Now he wasn't worried about how he'd find Vickers, not wondering about how he'd fire the rifle, his only concern was staying conscious from one moment to the next. The longer he did so, however, the more secure he became.
The gray went gingerly, as he'd hoped, immeasurably grateful for that small mercy; Lord, this was a kind-hearted horse! He'd seen him side-step before to balance Buck's reeling weight when he was drunk, and he breathed a glad prayer when the same sweet instinct held for him.
Don't fall, don't fall, don't fall - oh, the dread of that had his knees aching and his rein-wrapped fingers white on the horn. A long way down from this horse's back and it would probably kill him. Wasn't ready to die, not quite yet. Couldn't sit up straight, that pulling hurt kept him bent and he was content to be close to the warmth of the horse where he also felt better balanced. He prayed all the way down that narrow pass to the deep bottom of the gorge, one hand fumbling for the locket without knowing it as if the once-familiar gesture would conjure her to his side, call her to bide with him and keep him. Dazed and consumed, movement a nightmare he had no choice but to endure.
The bottom of the gorge was heavily churned, as though a herd had gone through, some shod, some not. His eyes marked the trail-sign before he consciously recognized it, Big Tree's work in stacks of stones that said by their number and configuration where to go, how far, how many were where. Hours old, but it didn't matter. He was going to shoot Vickers on sight before he died trying.
But two other lone souls wandering these canyons found each other first:
Vickers found Charlie.
Charlie figured he was nearly there and was pretty darned proud of himself for remembering the way back. He checked the canteen strap over the horn for the hundredth time, more precious than gold, and from which he hadn't taken more than a mouthful even though he was as thirsty as a boy could be. For the whole time, all the way wending these increasingly narrow splits, he'd been trying not to think about those five men going into Vickers' camp. He wished the Judge there fast with every breath.
The horse turned the bend and startled back, Charlie more stunned still as Vickers' big hand clamped onto the bridle. Pure shock at the state of him rendered the boy dumb and frozen, he'd never seen the Colonel any way but impeccable, and the grimy sweat-stained and disheveled man before him bore very little resemblance to the man Charlie knew. He had a fearsome burning rage in his eyes that scared Charlie very much, the madness of a mighty man falling and willing to wreak any mayhem to stop it, any cruelty to punish those he believed had caused it.
Before Charlie could even blink Vickers had snatched the canteen off the horn, blocking the horse from forward motion with his body. He drank greedily, the precious liquid running down his neck as Charlie reached in helpless horror.
"The plainsman needs that!" he cried before he knew it, and his hands clapped onto his mouth as if to keep the words from hitting the air at the sudden keenness in Vickers' narrowed eyes. Oh God, oh God, what had he done?
"He isn't dead? And you know where he is?!" Vickers hissed, gripping Charlie's leg so the pain of it made him jerk, but he clamped his lips together and tucked his head down between his shoulders. Not another word would this murdering bastard have out of him, not from him! Came a time a man had to stand for something, and Charlie figured the plainsman's life was reason enough. Vickers laid hands on him then and dragged him out of the saddle, but Charlie had been hit plenty before and knew how to take it.
"N' I say we backtrack on outta here n' take these horses n' skedaddle." Vern Hack was sick of being hungry and hard-run day after day searching through these damned puzzles of canyons and as like to get shot and never even know which one of those seven had killed him. Like ghosts, they were, like devils that couldn't be found and wouldn't die.
"C,mon, Gordy ... " Vern insisted, "these fellers've already killed nine or ten men we know of, n' how many just never come back fer supper? Shit, I wanna go home t'my wife." With a meaningful scratch at his crotch.
Riding slowly through the rocky gorge ahead of Vern, Gordon sighed. "Vern, yer makin' my ears hurt. I say again, since you obviously went deaf sometime this afternoon, it's five damned dollars a day. We ain't seen that kinda scratch in six months n' winter'll be here before you know it. You gotta feed that wife, too, y'know."
The third of their number, ahead of them both, ignored them completely, still keen on the hunt because he, as one of Vickers' private body-guards, earned a good deal more than five dollars a day. His loyalty to the good life equaled his loyalty to Vickers, and the reward offered for these seven men would see him through far more than a winter, and feed more than one woman. There were a lot of hairpin turns and dog-legs in this section of canyon where a man could run up on getting himself killed before he knew it, and Josh McKnight was way past thinking any one of the seven men he hunted wouldn't do just that. He couldn't ever remember such a wily bunch of outlaws, in strange territory without water or food or any help whatever, and yet picking off the posse almost at will and vanishing like smoke. He had a healthy respect of such men, as he had a healthy respect for Colonel Malcolm Vickers and all men ruthless enough to wrench their wants from the world without concern for what lesser men suffered.
So when they turned that corner, Josh knew his master and recognized the brutality with disinterest, curious only about how the Colonel had come to be here but not expecting any explanations. It was Gordon who cried out and spurred forward in protest at the sight of the bedraggled man methodically striking a small skinny boy, shouldering by Josh's horse without a second look, though both he and Vern had been very wary of the hired gun thus far.
"Here now! You! Stop that!" Gordon demanded, outraged; the boy fell at the man's feet and didn't move. Gordon kept his gun aimed and cocked, gorge rising with a bitter fury to see blood on the young face. A man who would beat a child was a low-down coyote and someone Gordon could kill without a qualm, and he nearly did until the man turned, snarling, and he realized who it was beneath the sweat-streaked grime. Vern cleared his throat, remaining very still as he called his friend's attention to the shiny silver barrel of McKnight's pistol poised an inch from his head. No expression in the man's face, just doing his job.
"What in hell is goin' on?" Gordy said, still outraged. Vern had come up on his far side looking very nervous, but he didn't say anything nor did he draw his own gun, obviously confused and not a little scared by the unwavering focus of Vickers' hired gun.
Vickers spoke only to that hired man, his presence calming the Colonel as if all his power was returned in that one obedient servant.
"Tanner is here, somewhere close. This boy ..." A jerk of his head without bothering to even look at Charlie, "Knows where. Take watch on the trail ahead, you two move on back. Little brat is going to tell me what I need to know." Menacingly, and though Gordon wanted to protest, Vern grabbed his sleeve and tugged on it, used the bulk of his horse to come between Vickers and Gordon and push Gordon back.
"This ain't our affair, Gordy, the boy b'longs t'him, he run off, he joined up with the outlaws ..."
Gordon was not convinced, but the cool level gaze of Josh McKnight made it clear that did he make a single move to interfere, his blood would be staining the stones and McKnight would be watching him die with the same cool level gaze. Something almost like tears burned his eyes as he saw Vickers bend down for the boy again, and McKnight turned his back on them all to guard the trail ahead, certain Gordon was sufficiently cowed.
The gray stopping woke Vin from a nodding haze he hadn't realized he'd fallen into, his head jerked up, making him hiss in pain at the sudden move. The shoulder had broken open and begun to bleed, probably when he'd mounted, he hadn't noticed until the vague breeze of their forward motion had chilled the sticky wetness on the front of his shirt. He almost nudged the animal on until he noted how hard his ears were standing, how curious the spread of his nostrils was. Someone was there, around the bend, and it was someone Buck's horse didn't know. Vin's breath stilled in his throat, his fingers remembered the reins as he edged the horse closer to the wall into the long shadows of late afternoon. Damn, he wished he had that water-skin, he was hot, sweat trickling down his spine and in a sort of distant confusion he couldn't shake entirely.
The thought of dismounting brought a moan before he could stop it, but dismount he would, there was no way to get up the bend undetected but on foot so he could look around and see who it was. 'God, my Lord,' he thought with sweeping despair, 'on my mother's soul let it be Vickers, because I ain't got a lot left but the wantin'...'
He had to take a few moments to steady himself, grateful that whoever, or whatever, was around that bend ahead wasn't moving, by the gray's placid attention. Finally he got a hard grip on the horn with his right hand and slid as smoothly as he could out of the saddle. Not as smoothly as he liked, he ended up face-first flat against the horse, legs wobbling like there was no bone in them at all and his weight hanging by his right hand. Buck's gray stayed still for him yet again, he promised breathlessly into its dappled hide that he would give it sugar and apples every day for the rest of its life if he lived through this.
Finally he rested his palms on the warm sweaty hide and pushed himself away, teetering momentarily but finding his balance, his body instinctively accommodating to the needs imposed by his injuries. His left hand trailed along the rough rocky wall as he went forward and he was suddenly assaulted in that motion by the faint memory of collecting splinters doing the same thing not long ago. Josiah had taken him down, though he hadn't known at the time that the freight train that clobbered him was Josiah. But that was over, wasn't it? Josiah knew it wasn't him who'd killed that woman, didn't he? He thought so, but he wasn't sure, everything but the will to kill Vickers was going muzzy and uncertain. Josiah had to know, because someone had to tell Chris and the boys, someone had to tell them, he couldn't stand them thinking ... hell ... he was driftin', his mind fogging, and he caught it. Now was not the time for worryin' what anybody thought, even for caring if he survived to know it. Now he had this thing to do and it meant more than any other thing he'd ever done. He lowered his head, breathing with purposeful depth, slow and regular, and keeping his eyes open because closing them made him dizzily nauseous. He'd hunted hurt before, he'd run from hunters nearly dead himself, damned if he couldn't do this ... damned if he wouldn't.
By the time he reached the bend, he was all focused instincts, eyes wide and intent as a cat with prey in reach. He reached up to take his hat off so the brim wouldn't give him away, then realized he wasn't wearing it. The mare's leg came into his hands with a little trouble, his fingers seemed a uncoordinated, but he finally got it out, slowly thumbed back the hammer. There was a large outcropping of stone that had been undercut by flash-floods, and it was there he stooped to look, feeling no pain now, feeling all his senses reach after the prey ...
Some twenty yards down the pass he could see the legs of a roan horse moving as if mounted. Feet in good boots filled the stirrups, well-set and experienced, and as he looked under the horse further into the split ... he heart stopped, then began a rising hammer. Vickers. Bent over something on the ground, doing something he couldn't make out. Two more riders faced the opposite direction past the Colonel. He wanted to swear out loud to have his prey shielded behind the single rider guarding the near end, if he went around the bend, that man would surely cut him down before he got off the shot ...
Oh, but the drive was too strong, and he was used to thinking on the fly for his life ... he looked up the wall, passed his hand inquiringly up along the rock when his eyes refused to focus clearly ... it angled inward, it rose about twenty feet up and then topped out, still projecting into the split, at least thirty feet below the rim. A man up there would have a shot at whatever was on the other side of this bend and a good piece of the pass on both sides. Course, one of the four would likely get him after he took that shot, but Vickers would be dead and that was all that mattered.
He looked up the incline with a visceral shudder, but his hunting mind had put the pain at a distance to work. It was all there was to do, there was nothing else. It was what he would do.
Josiah could see Vin trying, fighting to clear his eyes as he lay on his stomach braced up on his elbows on the top of the huge stone trying to aim the Winchester down into the split. The preacher had found Buck's gray right where Vin left him at the base of that rock, having hoisted himself up from standing in the saddle onto the incline. The leather was smeared with blood, and the rocks spattered where he'd gone up. He stared at it in amazement. Sundown was lowering a gold line down the canyon wall and showed him in crimson streaks and flecks where Vin had gone - and now, standing up behind Vin, he could see the tracker's target. Nothing could have surprised him more than the sight of Malcom Vickers bristling and shaking in a white-fisted froth above a small knot of blood-stained clothing wedged against the wall. One man stood watch in their direction, two more further down, so he understood why - if not how - Vin had come up here.
And now he watched Vin struggle to keep his trembling arms steady and failing, failing like to kill him to know by the frustrated sound he made. How had he gotten up here? Where in God's name had he found the strength?
The little knot of clothing moved, and Vickers kicked at it so it fell still again ... my God, it couldn't be ... but it was Charlie, God almighty it was Charlie! At that realization Josiah no longer had any questions.
It no longer mattered how Vickers had come to be here and how Vin had known it to take this foolish and maybe mortally noble cause onto himself. Josiah knew with a deep sorrowing fury that Charlie hadn't told Vickers where they were, had suffered and was suffering still in standing for men he hardly knew - God, if the boy had only known they weren't there anymore, but here!
It was the sound of an anguished sob stifled as Vin's forehead dropped onto the stone in abject and miserable frustration that finally made Josiah step up behind him.
Vin hadn't heard him coming even when he stood right behind him, and when he caught Josiah's movement out of the corner of his eye it made him start so hard he hurt himself, eyes bright and threatening as he twisted over half onto his back to swing the long rifle around. Blood marked where he was laying, pooled under his left arm and smudged under his belly. They were mounting below, getting ready to move.
Vin knew that, too, but he couldn't see right, couldn't aim, couldn't ... despair washed down on him like a flood and he looked up at Josiah with that despair naked in his eyes.
"Ain't no time ... Lord help me, there ain't ... no more time ..." Vin's broken rasp was as much talking to himself as to the man who'd come up on him, the gloaming light behind him casting him in a golden halo that gradually defined itself as Josiah.
Josiah leaned down, unafraid of the wobbling barrel of that deadly Winchester, and took the rifle from Vin's hands, gently but firmly against the refusal that Vin wasn't strong enough to make count.
"Let me do this for you, Vin." Bending down with determined tenderness, close and quiet and certain as these mountains. "Let me do this. Slay your demon, as you've slain mine." Eyes blue as twilight stared up at him, searching for a hope he hardly dared, confusion, refusal ... Josiah leaned down again and grasped Vin's uninjured shoulder, trying to convey with a touch what he could not put into words.
Then Josiah mounted the rock like it was a pulpit, Vin's rifle cradled in his arms. He looked down at it, workmanlike and beautiful in its simplicity, perfectly balanced and true as Vin's heart.
"Lead by ... 2 feet from this distance ..." Vin gasped, there was no choice but faith in Josiah, looking down into the split at the men who were moving off, Charlie laid like a saddle-bag over the withers of Vickers' horse.
Josiah knew that Vin would always wonder, was he the one to take the shot he was himself lining up with purposeful care, whether he'd killed Vickers out of his own vengeance or for the sake of justice. It would torment him lifelong; that much a good soul would suffer, even doing right. Vickers had slain Marie-Laure, who was Josiah's false hope, had come near to killing all seven of them just to safeguard his ill-gotten riches and power. Had perhaps killed that innocent boy - Lord, my Father, quiet the anger in my heart - he waited to fire until it calmed, unwilling to have anger taint what was a clean true justice.
The penalty Vickers owed was clear in his mind and at ease in his heart as the man of God looked after the life he was ready to reap. But only for his own sins did Josiah condemn Malcolm Vickers, and only for his own sins would Vickers die. Josiah's father was no longer with him, the spur of that bitter voice was at last silent.
Vickers was plain in the sights of Vin's rifle, Josiah's hands were calm as he slowly thumbed back the hammer. Vickers was all Vin could see, was all of his concentrated focus, he'd crawled to the wall at their right and was clawing his way up it single-mindedly. The lone report cracked like the thunder of God into the quiet canyons. The two men furthest bolted immediately and disappeared, the other drew his gun but was looking at his employer. When Malcolm Vickers wavered, staring in disbelief at the bright red plume spreading outward from the center of his bedraggled shirt, Vin used every shred of strength he possessed to stand up so he could be seen. Vickers' eyes rose to him as if hooked on a line, McKnight's followed with keen interest.
Vin Tanner alive and on his feet was the last sight Malcolm Vickers' eyes beheld, and he toppled from the saddle like a rag-doll with that vision fixed forever in his staring eyes. Vin slid down the rough wall slowly, almost without realizing it, eyes fixed on the bloody scene below, strength and will and purpose gone.
Josiah lowered the rifle then, slowly, in full and weighty consideration of the man whose death was testified to by the one who had not bolted immediately upon hearing the shot. He sat his horse a moment, his gun in his hand, and looked at the two men standing high above the split, that tall rifle he knew to be Tanner's. With slow clear gestures he holstered his pistol and gathered the reins of Vickers' horse from the pommel, dropping them in front of the animal for a ground tie without looking at the boy. Then he turned and rode away without a backward look, this loyalty ended.
As Josiah turned, Vin lay himself down on the stone, laid his head down on his hand with a bone-deep moan, and an incongruous small smile that frightened Josiah. As if Vin could die in peace now that this thing had been done. Vin's body shuddered and then relaxed all at once and he closed his eyes as if he would never open them again.
The five of them made their way through the canyons in purposeful order, knowing the way well enough by now to put some speed on it. There was a current, a connection running hot between them that Randall could feel. No one had said anything to stay him from coming along, and he kept up easily - these canyons had been his playground from the day the first of his friends got a horse. He watched them, riding high in their saddles when they should be beat down to the ground, different as he'd ever seen riding together but all of one deadly mind just now. They looked every inch like outlaws, had every such capacity between them, but they were not. They were something Randall had never met before, and the sight of them made a powerful impression. Only a fool would dare them, the Judge had been right about that.
Just ahead of him rode the tall rangy black man with powerful shoulders and a piercingly open gaze, and the trim gambler who managed to look like a dandy even with his fine clothes dirty and ripped and bloody.
The youngest, maybe a year older than him, maybe not, affected a bowler hat Randall might've thought silly if he hadn't seen him fight, and was easy on a horse as someone who'd spent years there. Randall glanced back at him riding drag, eyes skipping alertly up and around, the heel of his free hand resting ready on the bird-head grip of one of two Lightening colts. One of them, no matter how much younger he was, and Randall wondered how he'd earned that.
But it was the gunslingers ahead his eyes kept going back to, riding knee to knee like men who'd covered a lot of trail together. Both tall, one rawboned and handsome with a wide-open kind of charm Randall knew was deceptive, and the other, the one who'd come to get the tracker from the jail, whip-cord narrow and hiding nothing of his dangerous edges. A deadly man, scarred past most sorts of mercy, but he'd come on his own into Davis and he'd taken his friend out without killing a soul. Strange, he didn't know what to make of that, nor any of them really. It was a feeling akin to envy.
Not one of them said a word, yet everybody knew what to do, where to go as they snaked around corners in a split-pair pattern to lay crossfire against anyone ahead. One was always looking back, another always eyeing the skyline, smooth and quiet as a pack of winter-starved wolves intent on a blood-scent. They were all business, and Randall became a little afraid to recognize their intensity as a thing of life or death. The man in black had told the Judge their tracker was in a bad way, he figured that to be too true.
Three hours they went, from sandy canyons up to rocky gulleys and then slots floored in solid stone, the setting sun drew deep black shadows up from the bottom of the ravines. Ever more distant above them, the sky was a narrowing stream of gold, then pink, then deep blue shading to black. Randall's admiration grew as his own tiredness made itself known - after one day in the saddle and in battle - how many more had they endured without rest, without food or water, bearing wounds and unimaginable hardship? How were they doing it still? Yet rest never came up, was never even thought of that he could tell; they would not stop until the tracker and the preacher were safe, and Malcolm Vickers was dead. Randall was under no illusions that they intended to capture him for trial, and he didn't think the Judge figured they'd do that, either.
When they slowed as darkness fell, less sure and obviously frustrated by that, Randall finally dared approach the gunslinger who led them.
The man glanced over at him as he came up on his far side, keeping a space between them despite the often narrow pass. For a moment the razored edge in those pale eyes made Randall wish he'd stayed in the rear, but he felt himself as guilty as anyone for this hunt, the tracker's arrest, everything, and he gathered his courage to try to put it as right as he could.
"Sir ..." Randall said, cleared his throat, "If you describe for me where you're going, I could probably get you there quick even in the dark. This is where I grew up."
He could hardly see the gunslinger's face under the flat black hatbrim but for the hard-set mouth and a glitter of piercing eyes. On his far side the other man cocked his head curiously at him, listening.
"What's your name, kid?"
"Randall Potts, sir."
Chris examined him like he was dissecting something only vaguely interesting: Non-descript brown hair, a yoke of broad bony shoulders and big competent hands on the reins, legs long and sinewy as Buck's. He'd be a big man if he got the chance. Earnest brown eyes, and a confidence that said he was being truthful. Chris needed every advantage, but he was a deeply suspicious soul.
"And you figger I got reason to trust you?"
A flush rose to Randall's face deep enough to be apparent even in the growing dark, but Buck noticed he didn't break his eyes away, and he answered pretty directly, "Well, we know the tracker didn't kill nobody. And I guess I owe you for not killing me that night in the jail. You could've."
After a moment the gunslinger said with a vague gesture ahead, "Take point, then."
Randall did.
They came upon a group of five men on foot trudging the other way and had no trouble from them once Chris put a slug in the shoulder of the first one to draw. They disarmed them, and J.D. thought to take their boots as well, Buck grinning wickedly at his shoulder indulging the kid's urge to punish. It was an urge they all felt, but J.D.'s was the least lethal.
Randall showed the men his badge and told them briefly what had happened at the camp. Then he charged them with telling that truth to any others of the posse they ran across. He was struck by the reversal of hunted and hunters, a glaring contrast the posse felt as well; ranchers and farmers facing five stirred up gunmen, bristling and showing their teeth, eyes vivid.
One of the posse, it took a second for Randall to recognize Gerald Grady, a smithy in Davis, stepped forward as the mounted men turned to go on their way, Buck and J.D. stepping up into their saddles. The expression on his coarse square face was both brave and ashamed.
"We didn't know none of this. We ain't men who'd ever hold with huntin' innocent men, it don't do. Nope, it just don't do, n' we was lied to is all." This rough apology he delivered in a gruffly grudging tone, but with a sincerity that had nothing to do with fear.
J.D., whose horse bore their boots, regarded him a long moment with an ancient judgment in his eyes. Then he mounted and legged his horse into a slow walk; without looking back, he let the boots fall, all the forgiveness he could manage.
When he caught up, he extended a hand to Randall and introduced himself, "You done us a good turn getting us this far so fast, n' that was smart, thinking to use those men to warn off the rest of the posse." Like he was twenty years older than Randall and yet the Deputy couldn't argue he didn't have the right. He might be a kid, too, but he rode with these men and Randall respected that. Then J.D. told him in a brief ticking of his finger who was who so Randall had names for the men he was riding with, and dropped back again, trail courtesies done.
Chris figured they were within a half hour of Josiah and Vin, hooffalls thudding dully on the packed earth washed into the floor of the ravine. Ahead, Randall Potts suddenly yanked back on the reins and his horse stopped dead, the rider staring without understanding at the feathered lance quivering in the ground right in front of him.
The sound of guns clearing leather came in a single quick wave, and before Randall could take a breath his horse was jostled aside as Larabee shouldered past him, Wilmington on his heels. The Deputy's knee impacted hard with the wall on his left but he barely noticed. There was no one in the pass ahead that he could see, the air was undisturbed as the gunslingers opened away from each other and hugged the walls on either side in a slow walk, eyes scanning hard, while the rest held. The soft click-click of hammers being pulled brought Randall's glance back to the other two, all of them quivering with alert determination. Nothing would stop them, they would kill whoever got in their way and never think of it again. Randall trembled to be among them, feeling like a farm dog among a pack of hunting hounds. On his own, that lance would've sent him running fast as he could.
"They are not there."
As one they jerked toward the voice that drifted down from above them, disembodied in the shadows and echoes, yet unmistakably Indian. Four gun-barrels trained in the most likely spot and, when nothing happened, two moved to range behind and beside in perfect defensive concert, leaving Randall to watch the rear. He drew his gun, hoping they hadn't noticed it was still holstered.
"Who ain't where?" Larabee snapped, without a shred of patience for being delayed, "And whoever you are, you better come on out n' say what you're gonna say before we just shoot hell outta this whole canyon and move on over your dead body."
Above them on the right wall of the slot a Comanche warrior emerged from the rocks onto a small ledge, maybe ten feet over their heads, looking down at them warily but with his hands empty. Chris lowered his pistol suspiciously, knowing those at his back would not.
"I am White Wolf." The Comanche's long glossy hair was caught in front of his shoulders in wraps of what were probably wolf-hide, black stripes and darkness masked his brow and cheeks. "Your friends are no longer in their camp."
"What? Why not? Where in hell are they, then, and what do you have t'do with it?" Hostility immediate, the pistol leaping to true in a motion so swift and smooth that White Wolf could not follow it even so well as a snake-strike. He smiled and subtly thrust his broad barrel chest forward in defiant invitation. Perhaps he had not been able to kill these white men in the days past, but neither had they killed him.
"If you go this way, you will miss them." Conversationally, the bow over his shoulder shifting as he did.
Chris' head tilted up so he could see from under the brim of his hat and he thumbed the hammer of his colt down, but did not take the pistol off aim.
"Where are they? And where's Vickers?"
White Wolf shrugged, that endlessly expressive and infuriatingly obtuse Indian gesture that meant everything and nothing at the same time. "Your friends are not far, but Vickers I do not know. I have been busy tending my new herd of horses." With a bland broadening of that smile that surprised Chris by calling up an answering bark of a laugh.
"The remuda?"
"Do you speak of my new herd of horses?" The Comanche's smile grew wry, one black eyebrow tweaking in theatrical befuddlement and Chris let the gun down, holstered it. Damn Indian was enjoyin' this too much to feel himself in any real danger.
"So, where?"
White Wolf nodded at a narrow split on the right ahead of them that less careful men would have missed; both Buck and Chris had peered at it and Buck's gun already ranged in that general direction.
"Why should we believe him, Chris?" Nathan asked, confused, and when Chris had no answer but his instincts, the healer turned to the Comanche warrior with blunt doubt and said, "What reason you got to be helping us? You been tryin' t'kill us for days, why are you helping us now?"
The warrior's head pulled back with humored insult, "A Comanche warrior does not help his enemy! No. I help my brother, Big Tree. I could not refuse him this favor."
"And who is Big Tree?" Chris snapped, getting tired of the Comanche's having fun at what felt to be their expense, and wanting to get to Vin more than he wanted to unravel this riddle.
"I am that man." A tall roan horse stepped out of the mouth of that split as Big Tree let himself be seen. In their momentary distraction, White Wolf disappeared from above and Big Tree jerked his chin toward where he had been with a fond smile, "The favor he does is for me ... a debt owed that he is glad to repay swiftly."
Chris legged his horse right up into Big Tree's, glowering dangerously, his temper on a short and very frayed leash.
"Look, I got no time and not a bit of patience for games, you got somethin' t'help us, give it or get the hell outta my way."
For a moment the two men regarded each other eye to eye, then Big Tree moved his hand, inviting them to follow, respecting the impatience in the pale eyes because they could not mask the love of a friend.
Josiah was torn between going down for Charlie and finding a way to bring Vin down; he'd had a hell of a time getting up here as it was with his wounded leg and had no idea how he would get down again carrying Vin, too. Peaceful as the tracker looked, he was growing alarmingly pale, and he was still bleeding.
"Lord, grant me wisdom and strength ..." He muttered finally, turning Vin over and working his hands, then his forearms, beneath him as gently as he could. Vin never moved nor made a sound, somewhere far beyond pain.
He was struggling to his feet with Vin cradled in his arms, surprised at his lightness and afraid of the emptiness of his expression, when he saw the Comanche below approaching the horse with Charlie on it.
"No!" He cried helplessly, unable to reach his gun without dropping Vin, unable to keep the Indian from taking the horse, from taking Charlie if he wanted to. "Stop!"
The Comanche looked up at him, unperturbed, and then his dark gaze shifted to his left where Big Tree appeared by increments as he climbed up to him. Josiah was too tired, too numbed and drained to be startled and utterly unable to do anything but trust that this Indian meant them no harm now, as he had not earlier.
Big Tree's keen eyes focused on the bruise on the preacher's temple that disappeared into his close-cropped hair. A direct man, Tanner, his solution had obviously been blunt, if not sufficient to keep his friend at bay entirely. In fact, Big Tree was astounded at what Tanner had accomplished; Vickers lay dead in the bottom of the ravine, it was the single portentious crack of that long rifle that had drawn he and White Wolf to this place. Surely Tanner's pahu was both powerful and purposeful! At his suggestion, White Wolf had been very willing to remain in the canyons with him and render whatever help Big Tree had determined to give to the white men, glad to discharge the debt owed his brother. Plus, he was extremely curious about what had happened to the Colonel and the gunmen he'd been hunting, men Big Tree had expressed open admiration of. This was not an honor Big Tree bestowed lightly, and White Wolf had long since learned to trust his friend in his judgments of men.
Big Tree saw that the preacher's face was stark with grief, his mighty hands and arms gentle and trembling as if with tears unshed, but Tanner was not dead: Blood dripped from his dangling fingertips, bright living blood, and a dead creature did not bleed so.
Josiah just stared at him, nearly overwhelmed by the emotional and physical distress of this day, and when Big Tree directed him to the front of the rock rather than having Josiah go back down the way he'd come up, he could find no strength to refuse. Numbly he followed, moving slowly in trying to keep Vin from jarring. The path was a true path, if steep, and led down into the ravine; the Comanche turned and walked almost sideways, extending his left hand behind him and bracing it against Vin's hip to slow the burdened preacher's forward momentum on the sharp angle and provide some balance.
When they reached the rocky floor, Josiah saw that the other Comanche warrior had not touched Charlie, though he stood at the head of the horse with the reins in his hand. Big Tree tilted his head at this, but White Wolf's face was unreadable. The preacher's eyes were tormented, torn between the friend he bore in his arms and the child too still across the neck of the horse. Vickers lay beside it, and neither Comanche nor white man spared his corpse even a look.
"Up a mile yonder ..." Big Tree indicated the right fork of the canyon ahead of them, "is a split through which you will find a fine and well-hidden camp, one of those only The People know. White Wolf will show you. We have brought your horses and camp-gear." Indeed, White Wolf had trotted around the far corner and was even then drawing the seven horses to them. He led them on past, but the preacher did not follow, conflicted over the plight of the boy and that of his friend. Impulsively, understanding his dilemma, Big Tree extended his arms, and when their eyes met and Josiah looked into the dark depths, he passed Vin over without a qualm and went for Charlie.
His huge calloused hands wrapped achingly far around the thin body, the brittle delicacy of childish ribs, matchstick limbs and knobbed joints. A soft cry escaped Josiah as he turned him over and saw his face, swollen and bruised almost beyond recognition. Then he looked at Vickers' corpse, wishing him alive so he could kill him again. Charlie's shoulderblades were like the fragile wings of a bird against him as he cradled him in his left arm and felt gently for breaks with his free hand; small enough he could hold him that way, smaller than he'd thought, waifish under the filthy clothes.
White Wolf helped his brother horse himself and the tracker together, but he watched Josiah closely as Big Tree went ahead, wanting to lay Tanner down as soon as he could.
Charlie stirred when Josiah touched his shoulder, the collarbone likely broken, but no other broken bones he could feel. The small split-lipped mouth opened on a ragged gasp that seemed to hurt him to take in, one dark eye opened, the other being too swollen for it. And one small bony fist shot straight up and clipped Josiah under the chin with such surprising force that the preacher nearly dropped him. Suddenly Charlie was bowing and kicking and wriggling like an otter, fighting as hard as he could. White Wolf grinned to see it.
"Charlie, son ... don't, it's me, Josiah ..." Josiah struggled to catch the flailing hand and control the boy without hurting him further, and though White Wolf almost moved to help him, he realized that the sight of his face surely would not be calming to the boy. Heh! The urge to help the white man at all surprised him!
Josiah finally managed to catch Charlie's fist and the boy lay in his arm then, staring up at him in disbelief. When he saw it truly was the preacher, that Vickers was gone, he shocked even himself by gripping the big man's shirtfront and burying his face against him, bursting into mortifying tears that he just could not hold inside. Josiah felt the sting of tears in his own eyes as he cupped the back of Charlie's dark head in his hand, curved the child more firmly into the certain safety of his body and swayed slowly from side to side in an instinctive rocking comfort.
"I ... never told ..." Charlie hiccupped defiantly, furious, or at least trying to appear so. Tears washed the dirt from under his eyes in messy streaks, his nose was running bloody. Josiah nodded and said, "I know, boy." His voice vibrating comfortingly in the beefy chest Charlie couldn't seem to make himself move away from - he was acting like such a baby! But his stomach hurt a lot, his arm even worse, and he knew his face was a mess because it was numb and felt all puffy.
"You're brave as any man I've ever met, son, by God, and a true friend to Vin Tanner, and to us all."
That he so obviously meant it calmed Charlie considerably, he wiped his eyes with the grubby fingers of the arm that didn't hurt like hellfire and nodded like they were man to man no matter the position he was in.
Josiah mounted, then, and followed after White Wolf, noticing with a profound pang that the boy didn't make the stubborn effort to be put down that he fully expected, voiced no disdainful protest at being cradled and carried like an infant. He was hurt, and Josiah did not know what he could do for him any more than he knew what to do for Vin. Desperately he wanted to know where the other five were, what had happened. That they were all alive and well, he prayed - as he was learning he could do with the heart that had been opened.
Night had fallen when they finally came to the split, and the camp was indeed well-hidden. It lay at the bottom of a spring water-fall, a nearly round space gouged deep into the rock over the ages from those seasonal forces, the bottom thick with sand. The slot they came up had once been a layer of sandstone sandwiched between two harder upthrust plates of rock, that softer layer washed away over thousands of years by the unstoppable urge of water to flow downward. Vin was lying on Comanche sleeping-skins when he came through into the camp, and a smaller pallet had been laid for Charlie. There was a fire going that warmed the little enclosure significantly, and their horses stood nearby, unsaddled and well cared for. Josiah blinked, hardly able to believe it.
"It did not seem enough ..." Big Tree said from his seat near that fire with a vague self-deprecating wave of the two sticks he was using to drop heated stones into a sweating skin-bag dangling from a tripod over the edge of the coals. The fragrance of fresh meat made the preacher's mouth water despite a numb lack of appetite. "We have a fine new horse-herd, we were glad." Big Tree said, "But my brother owed a debt that would have been very difficult to repay, it would have worried at him. So this seemed the best thing to do."
Josiah had no reply; he put Charlie, who had fallen fast asleep, down where White Wolf pointed and turned his attention to Vin. Stood a moment over him feeling as though he were looking at a dead man, and one very dear to him. He had to do whatever he could to keep that from becoming true, Vin was crucial . if Vin died, Lord knew something fine would be irrevocably crippled.
White Wolf brought strips of soft leather and mosses and laid them beside him, a water-skin and another piece of leather for washing. Because he could no nothing else, Josiah set to that task. He unbuckled the rig that held Vin's mare's leg and gently slid it out from under his hips, finding Big Tree there to take it. The front of the tracker's buckskin pants was streaked and sticky with fresh blood overlaid on the black stains from the original wound, he would've liked to take them off entirely and find something clean, but could not. Under Vin's blood-soggy shirt, the bandage was sodden and heavy. He removed the shirt since it was a ruin, catching his breath at the utter absence of muscle-tone as he gently maneuvered the tracker's hands and arms out of the sleeves. All the stitches but one or two in his stomach seemed to have held, though blood had poured through them and was still a sluggish trickle. Those in his shoulder had not fared so well, but he could not fix them, all he could do was wash the long narrow body as clean as he could, dry the pale chilled skin. Vin never moved. Hardly breathed.
Big Tree gently moved the white man aside when it came time to lay on bandages; by then Josiah was too clumsy, his hands shaking and tears he was entirely unaware of streaming down his craggy whiskered face. The sewing was interesting to Big Tree, tidy stitches holding the skin together, and he skillfully packed moistened mosses and herbs against both wounds and wrapped first the shoulder, and then that one low on the narrowing descent of his belly, snaking his hand and forearm under the small of Vin's back to wind it around his small hips. That wound worried him most, an angry color.
When he was finished, he sat back on his heels and looked at Tanner critically, feeling the preacher doing the same on the other side. Seeing death in the dark-hollowed eyes and sallow color, in the terrible shallowness of his inaudible breath. No spirit animated him now, not even that which could be seen in the faces of sleeping men; his spirit wandered, and Big Tree could not know if it would ever return to his body.
Charlie had wakened and allowed White Wolf to wash his bloody face and bind his arm across his body. He'd nearly peed his pants when he'd seen him coming at him, but Josiah was right there and seemed at ease with them, and the Comanche's touch had been firm, but gentle. Charlie endured his ministrations wide-eyed, a wondering thrill of terrified pride blooming inside to see a smile in the dark mysterious eyes - the warrior approved of him, and that was all it took for Charlie to let him do whatever he wanted. He swallowed his whimpers and pretended it didn't hurt, he examined the painted leathers and fur, the fringed and beaded knife sheath at the Indian's hip. Then White Wolf gave him a cup of bitter tea that he drank without complaint, and passed his big hand over his face when he had finished it, and then over Charlie's so he'd understood he should sleep. Feeling safe for the first time since he'd left the five going into the camp, Charlie slept in peace.
White Wolf sat beside the boy and rested himself, a strange possessive pride deep in his childless heart.
Randall was dumbfounded, but he followed along into the lightless split, which was barely wide enough to accommodate them and lowered so abruptly over-head that they all had to duck. Just as a visitor to a Comanche's tent would have to duck to enter, rendering him vulnerable, Comanche hunters liked this camp for that reason. The grim pale-haired man behind him bent his head without a word and his warriors followed suit as they picked their way after him. It was darker in there than the night that had fallen, the incline so sharp the horses would not have made it but for the sandy purchase of the floor. Randall could hardly see the gambler's shoulders in front of him despite the horses being in a tight nose to tail line.
As they went in the close quiet, a faint sonorous murmuring became audible over the soft chuff of hooves in sand. A somber cadence echoing down to them from some enclosed space ahead. Their heads lifted, one by one, attentive to the deep tone that gradually became a voice they all strained to hear:
" ... say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust. Surely He shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence. He shall cover thee with His feathers, and under His wings shalt thou trust: His truth shall be thy shield and buckler."
Bemused, Randall recognized Psalms - his mother was particularly fond of the songs of David.
"That's Josiah ..." Nathan murmured, a sort of expectant forboding tightening his spine.
"Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday. A thousand shall fall at thy side, and then thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee."
"He's chosen an odd time to indulge in soliloquy." Ezra remarked with a nervous humor that broke the silence almost rudely, unsettled by the slow heartfelt majesty of Josiah's voice - it reminded him too strongly of words being intoned over a deathbed, or a grave.
"Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the Most High, thy habitation; There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling. For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone."
"Buck?" J.D.'s inquiry was quiet and high; it was the first time Randall had noticed him to look so young. The mustached gunslinger didn't turn around, but moved his left hand out from his hip in a calming gesture and murmured, "It's OK, kid." Which he couldn't know. Which he didn't know.
Randall realized with sudden clarity that they were afraid.
The voice was so beautiful, the scripture so poignant, he didn't know why they found it so disturbing, but the sharpened set of their shoulders and the crackle of sudden nervousness that shifted among them said they did. The man had a voice like dark velvet that seemed to slide in sinuous currents through the close air of the split and breathe warmly into his ears. There was something about Bible words that sometimes just sort of poured over a soul, he listened gratefully.
"Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder: the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet. Because he hath set his love upon me, therefore will I deliver him: I will set him on high, because he hath known my name."
Chris was white as a sheet and felt a terrible sharp shivering deep in his gut that he'd felt only once before. Had never wanted to experience again, something bad coming, something bad ahead ... Only the jostling of the horses behind him kept him moving, he wanted nothing so much as to stop in his dread and not know for certain what he could barely stand to even suspect.
"He shall call upon me and I will answer him: I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him, and honor him ..." (Psalm 91:2-16)
At the sound of their approach the voice stopped, the words slithered around them and vanished in the darkness. Without warning, the split belled out on either side into a space almost twenty feet wide, dimly illuminated by a fire on the far side. It was open in a star-spangled ring thirty feet high to the night sky and their horses stood, heads up and alert, to their on the other side of the split. A large shadow rose slowly from beside the fire as if mesmerized by the sight of them, his Bible in his hand, watching keenly as they emerged from the split. Moment by moment his heart rose as they appeared, one by one, all of them, all alive, thank a merciful God...
Chris was stepping down off his horse before it stopped, and Nathan, grappling behind his saddle for the bag he'd appropriated from the medical tent, came right after him. Faster than men that exhausted, that long on horseback, should have been able to move, but only Jackson went on past the broad burly man Randall figured was the preacher. Larabee stopped before he'd gone two paces, staring at the preacher and leaning forward as if against a barrier. Randall straightened, they had all dismounted, yet only to stand hesitantly where they were at the sight of the preacher's face, their distress palpable. Randall shifted awkwardly, feeling like an intruder.
Josiah looked at them, eyes deep-set as if hiding from a grief they could still not help expressing, and it was that which had stopped Chris in his tracks, kept his eyes hard-fixed and away from the lanky sprawl he knew to be Vin back there near the wall.
"Jesus, Josiah, tell me he ain't dead." A more fervent prayer Josiah had never heard, and he wished he could offer more assurance than the fact that Vin wasn't dead yet. The expectation of death was in the sag of Josiah's broad shoulders, it was in his sorrowing eyes and he could not hope to hide it.
"Josiah?" J.D. whispered in disbelief, and Ezra dropped his head. Buck watched Nathan reach Vin with a savage blankness in his expression, the healer was the only thing moving or likely even breathing just then. Chris' eyes looked trapped, horror darkening, shockingly deep, Josiah could hardly bear to look at him but had no choice.
Nathan knelt beside Vin, quickly examining the Indian handiwork and recognizing it as good, but so furious he couldn't be still, "Why in hell did you move him, Josiah? It'll kill him, I told you that, it could have killed him already." But Josiah was shaking his head,
"I didn't move him, Nathan, I only followed him. He went after Vickers."
"Where is that son of a bitch?" Chris snapped, seething himself because he was so afraid of Vin dying and so furious to be so afraid of it, a man who didn't need anybody and never wanted to anymore, either.
"Dead." Josiah replied, understanding Chris' refusal to believe it. Vickers being dead wasn't enough by half by the violent and bloody need in those pale eyes. Chris had wanted to kill him himself, wanted it as much as he wanted to kill the man who'd taken his family from him. He wasn't ready to have that burning vengeance snatched away from him, he had nowhere to put his rage, now, and no rage in which to hide the cold visceral terror in his heart of Vin dying.
Be merciful unto me, O God, be merciful unto me: for my soul trusteth in thee: yea, in the shadow of thy wings will I make my refuge, until these calamities be overpast.
Psalm 57:1
Vin was alive. They all held to that simple fact as though the depth of their hope would somehow anchor him among them. No one looked past the next minute, and there were no words to be said as they stood around him, intent on his oblivious form as if their very presence might call him back.
But they had to sit down, they had to eat and rest or die where they stood, not a one had steady legs under him. Big Tree called them to the fire and handed them savory chunks of beef out of the pot, which they ate without tasting, faces drawn and haunted.
Chris couldn't eat, sick inside and wound so tight it was a wonder he could get a breath into himself. He didn't know what to do, how to stop it, couldn't face down and slay what threatened them now. How had the thought of a man dying in this killing frontier become so unimaginable? Men died out here every day, he'd killed more than his share of them and knew that lives ended in a heartbeat no matter how precious you held them. But he couldn't bring himself to believe it now even when it was right in front of his eyes, he seethed with the need to do ... Something ...
Buck sat a bit apart from him and the others noted it and kept back any hopeful words or gestures they might have offered. They edged around him in a brittle quiet as he sat staring into the flames wishing it could burn away the image of Vin's empty face. He wanted to ask Josiah what had happened but he didn't find the voice for it, or the heart to bear hearing it.
Nathan insisted he would stay by Vin awhile, and Randall volunteered to take that first watch with him so the others could rest. To the Deputy's amazement, however, they got up after Larabee with stifled groans and grunts and followed on stiff leaden legs to unsaddle the horses they had ridden, not even their own. Randall stilled the urge to offer to do it for them, sensing it was something a man even driven so far had to know himself man enough to finish. Two of the horses went down to roll in the sand as soon as the men stepped away, bearing their tack and saddles like they were boulders.
Only then did they lay out their bedrolls, scattered loosely on the far side of the fire but close enough to reach one another with outstretched arms, and lay down with the fragile care and soft wincing sounds of men at the final limit of their strength. Some pillowed on their saddles or saddlebags, and within a minute every one but Larabee had relaxed and gone still as the dead.
Chris laid closest to Vin out of Nathan's way, staring at the stars straight above him, but even he was finally pulled down into the sleep his body now demanded.
Randall had grown up on a ranch and knew what sleeping men sounded like, but they were so exhausted they made nary a sound nor moved a muscle. It had to be the first true rest they'd had in more days than he could imagine and he shook his head in sympathetic admiration.
The healer looked up with a grateful nod as Randall handed him down a cup of coffee. A sad thing, the way the mans' dark eyes wandered anxiously from bruise to wound to the pallid face as if searching for something he could help.
It was the first time Randall had been near the tracker and he was startled to see how young he was. A weeks' worth of gold whiskers and bruises and hardship, but under it he couldn't be but three or four years older than J.D., the rest he thought to be thirties and forties or more. How did a man so young earn such loyalty from folks he'd known but a few months, even a Judge? How gain enough knowledge and skill at his age to be so admired among men years deep in experience? All Randall Potts knew for sure was that it felt like a turning point to have met these men, and he knew he wouldn't ever be the same himself now that he had.
Big Tree observed them from near the split where he was awaiting White Wolf's return, his heart heavy for them. With warriors such as these, the Comanche would ride their free lands forever.
He had set a signal fire atop the nearest rim when they found the tracker, and had seen dust in the twilight east of them. That signal fire was the sign they were to have used to inform Vickers of the capture of the seven, and now it was a sign to other eyes with far more merciful intentions. There was a great deal of irony in the pattern of events that had unfolded in the last few days, Big Tree thought somberly, examining it with great satisfaction.
The black healer had the patience of the most devoted mother, wetting the tracker's mouth again and again with a cloth because he would not swallow. Most telling to Big Tree, he used both the Comanche herbs and the white man's medicines from the black bag, a man who would not spurn any help in the cause of healing.
But eventually, Nathan's head began to droop, and Randall touched his slumping shoulder.
"Mr. Jackson, sir, I think you need t'lay down now, I'll wake one of the others now. Don't worry, I'll give 'im water like you been doin' and wake you should anything change, my word on it."
This reassured Nathan, who could no longer keep his eyes open. Just to lie down and let his battered body go limp was a relief so profound it nearly brought tears to his eyes. Tired as he was, though, he took a moment that was all aching heart to look at his friend's quiet profile and pray Vin would be alive when he woke.
Randall never did wake any of the others. He looked over to Big Tree, who seemed to agree the two of them were enough to watch over the seven tonight. It felt to Randall like a respectful thing to do, and odd as it was, he thought the Comanche agreed with that, too.
It was the arrival of those who had followed that signal fire into the canyons that woke them in the hour before daybreak, groggy and disoriented but every hand baring a gun at once. Chris and Buck were up on their knees before their eyes were even focused, finding Randall already standing defensively in front of them, his rifle shouldered and eyed on the split from which the dusty black shoulders of Judge Orin Travis unexpectedly emerged. The Deputy's mouth fell open and the rifle fell to his side as the Judge's beautiful daughter-in-law came through after him, then White Wolf and two more men trailing four heavily-laden packhorses.
"Vin alright?"
Randall nodded at Nathan in answer to his question, not surprised by this time to know they were all waiting on that answer before anything else, "Ain't been no change I seen."
Nathan went to Vin and the rest untangled themselves from their bedrolls and went past Randall to meet the Judge and Mary. The Judge dismounted with a stiff roll of his shoulders and turned to help his daughter-in-law down, addressing them wryly over his shoulder as they approached,
"She's brought nearly the entire camp with her, gentlemen, couldn't stop her. She reasoned if Vin was bad hurt, we wouldn't be able to move him for a day or so and you know how she is about her comforts ..."
Mary ignored his teasing, seeing at once that all was not well and her own worry racheting up several notches. The camp felt crowded and too vivid, as if their arrival had broken a silence that waited to descend again. She looked for Chris, and Randall was not surprised to see their eyes lock, unwillingly, but each reading the other far too clearly for either's comfort. Mary despaired for Vin, seeing Chris and feeling his anguish like a cold fury burning him up from the inside.
She went toward the fire where Nathan sat, but even the sorrow in his glossy eyes couldn't prepare her for how awful Vin looked. A tear-choked gasp burst from her throat and she could not keep from going to her knees beside him and reaching out to touch his face. Trembling, her pale lovely hand curved across his brow, ran down his unbandaged arm to the long still fingers so she could take them in hers for a long prayerful moment. This was the silence that had waited, and was falling again even now, the weight of their grief palpable. The rest of them remained by the split, but she felt them all watching her and forced herself to remember how many times Vin Tanner had done the impossible. She had a choice between having faith in his survival or being too stricken to help see that it happened.
She took a breath and leaned down to touch a kiss to the cool arch of Vin's cheek; "You're alright, Vin. We're all here, you'll be home soon. Nettie told me to bring you all home and I don't dare do otherwise." Almost she told him the truest proof of faith there was, but she had promised Nettie she would not. That Nettie had come into town only hours after Vin had left and suggested to her in words so few as that Malcolm Vickers needed some looking into. Then she'd turned her wagon around and left again, all that way to say so few words. It was Nettie who had started Malcolm Vickers' life unraveling under Mary's knowledgeable hand.
In the dim light of the coming day she set the men to unloading the horses and setting up canvases on tent poles as shade against the heat of the day to come. Caskets of water, boxes and bags of food, grain for the horses, two camp-beds and four chairs. Once they were doing that, she put beans and fat-back on a sturdy iron tripod over the fire - for which she'd brought fuel, split wood on the last horse and two sacks of coal. Then she turned to what her woman's heart cried out to do for them, deny it as she might - feed them, flesh out the suffering hollows and give them the strength to hope. It was that fine smell that woke Charlie at last, and Mary was astonished to have a boy she hadn't even known was among them turn up at her elbow with hungry eyes.
"My God, what happened to you?" Horrified at his bruises and swellings, but he only ducked his head and shrugged, "Man gets hurt in such doin's, sometimes, ma'am ..." A cagey sideways look gauged her sympathy. "Doin' the right thing n' all. Ain't nothin' some good food wouldn't help ..." With a hopeful look that was all boy, and she kept him with her, knowing he hurt more than he was showing, feeding him slices of bread and apple and cooked beef in exchange for his willingness to answer the questions she couldn't ask the rest. He had no problem with that deal and rattled it off like he was telling a tale that had happened to someone else, never noticing how at times her hands would still in their labors to understand what the seven had been through.
Daylight broke on the western wall of the canyon, much of which would be in shade on one side and then the other through the day, only the few hours around noon would take it all. Doggedly she worked over the little folding table, cutting steaks off a slab of beef appropriated from Vickers' private kitchen, slicing apples into a pan with sugar and dotted sweet dumplings. Cooking was something Mary could do, feeding them was a help they needed desperately. As she worked she saw the Judge watching her with a distant affection, and remembered his wife rising sometimes in the middle of the night to feed an unexpected return of one of his posses. She'd always wondered why her mother-in-law had never complained about it no matter how fast it got eaten or whether they noticed how fine the meal was. Her smile at him across the camp said she now understood, satisfied to see tired men without a decent meal in longer than they could probably remember tucking into plates of steaming food with forks and cups and a sweet smell of spices and apples bubbling on the coals.
Charlie, not full by half despite dragging the story out as long as he could with the angel-faced lady, settled down between Josiah and Randall as though the plate in his hands was laden with gold. They ate in silence, Randall along with them and the Comanche to one side enjoying the white woman's skills. The two men who had come with them had a meal and shook hands with Randall the the Judge, taking their leave to go home. It was a story that would be halfway across the state before the seven even set foot outside the canyons.
"Vin do that?" Buck said, gesturing with his fork to the livid bruise upside Josiah's head as he noticed it in the growing light. Josiah nodded ruefully, fingering it with great care, but Charlie took a truly admiring look at Vin and piped up, profoundly impressed,
"Geez, he don't even wait to quit bleeding t'get his paybacks, does he." Chris hadn't said a word for so long that at first nobody recognized the sound of his raspy laughter, it broke like glass against the rock walls around them and everything shifted as if suddenly freed. Then they were all laughing, even the Comanche. Charlie had been serious, but for the first time in his life he didn't mind being laughed at. They wouldn't be laughing if they thought the plainsman would die, and knowing that made him want to laugh himself. Mary lifted her head from her work at the sound, her heart lifting as Chris unfolded in a sharp glide to his feet after another piece of bread with a sudden awareness of hunger, shaking his head.
"Well, Charlie, you pretty much hammered that nail straight. Tanner IS the stubbornest son of a bitch I ever met." He said this with a small smile and a set to his shoulders Buck liked to see. Chris Larabee understood stubborn as well as Vin Tanner any day, both would set their teeth into the neck of death himself like it was a fight he intended to win. Buck reclined back onto his saddle with a languorous sigh and felt his spine unkink a bit.
"Kid does have a point - Vin ain't died yet. Hell, we thought he was done for once n' he still managed t'take his revenge on Josiah n' get himself all this way."
Ezra dug up a slightly tattered cigar and snipped it neatly in half, handing one to Chris, who took it and lit it and smoked it with the relish of a man too long without.
"Don't s'ppose you got a cold barrel of beer anywhere on y, Ezra?" Buck asked hopefully, and Ezra grinned around his own smoldering cigar and drew forth two silver flasks, handing one to Buck and one to Josiah on the other side of him.
"That I do not, sir, but Mr. Vickers had an educated palate for fine single-malt whiskey ..." Indeed, the heavy flasks had a fanciful 'V' engraved upon their curved faces, beautiful things, but the contents all the men cared about just now.
For the first time men who had been too afraid to look into each others' faces for fear of the despair they might see, or reveal, looked at one another as they passed the flask to and fro. Remembered who they were, and the cause they had for faith in believing nothing was impossible.
By the time the apples were done, all six of them had stretched out and fallen asleep again. She smiled awkwardly at the Comanche warrior who politely brought the plates to her washtub and said to him, "They're like babies, aren't they? Feed them and they fall asleep." A broad grin met that stray nervous comment that made her smile grow genuine as well.
By the time the day was lowering to dusk, Vin still hadn't died. He'd lived through the day in a good camp-cot off the ground, Nathan on a stool beside him. The healer had been glad of that canvas roof, though the heat hadn't warmed Vin at all. Nothing seemed to warm him, and though he'd been afraid of fever, that Vin's skin remained so cool worried Nathan even more. The medical bag was a glory to him, but the stethoscope only told him Vin's heart was sluggish and uneven, his breathing very shallow. There were compounds within it that he didn't know the use of and that frustrated him deeply - suppose one should be what he needed and Nathan didn't know it?
But Chris was right; he had not died. He had not.
They'd each come to sit with him during the day as they all slept on and off, seeming lost to have nothing to do after so many days of urgent violence. They had spelled Nathan one by one and all of them had felt compelled to touch him in some way, Big Tree noted that. More and more he realized that whatever Tanner had suffered for being turned out of the clans, the Comanche had suffered the greater loss. One brushed back his hair, one hand lingered on his bare shoulder as he spoke to him. Larabee squatted beside him a long time, face hidden under the brim of his hat and his fingertips resting gently on the center of the tracker's chest.
Josiah saw prayers passing from those hands as eloquent as any words a man could ever speak.
Randall, although accepted among them, still felt himself an intruder in a powerful current he had no reckoning of.
That night the tracker swallowed, and to his friends it was as if he'd leapt from his sick-bed and danced. Mary made a broth to which Nathan added willow and other herbs, and between them they got three cupfuls into Vin in as many painstaking hours. Though he did not wake nor do anything but swallow, Mary could smile into Chris' eyes as he came again to check.
"It's encouraging, Chris, Nathan says so." Looking at him so near to her as he crouched close enough for her to feel the heat of him through his coat, looking down at Vin. She could feel how hard he was struggling to hold his hope and she slipped her hand over the one he'd fisted on his knee. For once he did not spurn the comfort, though he didn't look at her.
Randall had already figured out the gunslinger was the one the beautiful woman cared for - he'd also seen that it wasn't an easy thing between them, the almost angry way they edged around each other like they were being drawn against their will. Why would a man resist loving a woman such as that? It made no sense to Randall, but he'd already learned how little he really knew about things.
Sometime before morning they decided to chance taking him out, Nathan could do nothing more here and he wanted for carbolic - the one thing he had not found in the doctor's bag.
"Chris, he ain't feeling any pain right now, we mights' well take advantage of it. You know how troublesome he can be conscious."
Which teased out a flick of a dry smile.
While they were discussing it gathered close around the fire, Big Tree and White Wolf also made ready to take their leave in the morning. White Wolf offered the uneasy opinion that if the white man's body died while his soul wandered the canyons, this camp would be haunted evermore. Big Tree nodded solemnly, but there was nothing to be done about it. There was nowhere a body could be taken that a soul determined to live could not find it. But he sensed this was not what White Wolf had most on his mind. Big Tree let him come to it in his own time as he cleaned his pistols and set whetstone to his broad blade.
"My daughter is married now." Which Big Tree knew very well, having contributed several horses to her bride price; she was a favorite and had called him Uncle all her life.
"My wife is unhappy." This made Big Tree's lips twitch before he mastered his face again; Small Flower was a merry soul and a favorite of the children in camp for her stories and clever games.
"Is this so?" He replied with a sideways look at his old friend. "Unhappy. She hides it well, brave woman." White Wolf squinted at his lightly veiled sarcasm and got to the point.
"What will they do if I speak to the boy of it?" He finally said, and it was an earnest question that Big Tree honored by thinking carefully on it before he answered.
"He does not belong to them but by choice." Which was not the obstacle of the formidable men the boy was among that White Wolf expected to face. He realized at once, however, that Big Tree had found the only obstacle that mattered. White Wolf nodded, and got to his feet.
Charlie wasn't surprised to see White Wolf approaching him, he'd taken care of his face and his arm twice each day, but this time the warrior's face was different. It was hard to tell how, exactly, because the Comanche were hard to read, but he'd always had a sort of gladness about him that Charlie liked. White Wolf sat down across from him with an odd formality and rested his big square hands on his knees.
"Among our people, a boy such as you is not known."
Charlie bristled a little at that, like he was an oddity, and his straight dark eyebrows flattened defensively. But White Wolf just kept speaking as though he had a run of words to say and would take them start to finish without deviation.
"You would be out of your mother's tent now, and some man would have accepted the task of teaching you what it is to be a man. How to honor the spirits and the land and the people of your camp, how to fight and hunt and make things you need. You are like Tanner was when he came to us, when he came to dwell among The People, and a Comanche man stepped forward for him. That man is dead now, but he was a man of skill and strength and wisdom. It is from him Tanner learned the ways of the mountains and the deserts and the forests."
Charlie's head had slowly tilted to the left as the warrior spoke, like a dog hearing something he didn't recognize but which didn't frighten him. White Wolf's face was almost without expression.
"I would stand for you."
Then he waited, watching the feelings flow across the boy's face like clouds racing before a hard wind. Want and fear and an abiding thirst to know what the plainsman knew. A spark of terrified excitement that made White Wolf smile inside. A world not his, a people not his, yet he could imagine it.
Charlie's heart felt like it would rattle right out of his chest, he was breathing fast and feeling like he didn't know what was happening. White Wolf wanted to teach him? Wanted to? Wanted him and was asking? Hard as he stared, scowl as he did, there was nothing in White Wolf's face but invitation and that warm look deep inside his eyes that he'd seen the first night. He was thinking how he could ever have been afraid of this warrior, yet he startled when White Wolf leaned forward and with some ceremony placed a necklace of blue beads and badger claws around Charlie's neck. The boy fingered them admiringly without yet understanding their significance, without yet knowing of the tenacity of the badger, pound for pound among the fiercest of creatures once forced to turn and fight, and the most stubborn. Like the boy himself. The Comanche stood up in a single graceful motion and looked down at the boy kindly.
"It is a thing a man should search his heart over. Talk to his friends and hear their counsel. It would not be an easy life, but you would be welcome at my hearth, and your mother among us would be glad of you."
The concept of a mother was too much to process, he felt dizzy.
"When next the moon is big ..." His hand swept overhead and Charlie followed the gesture with dawning wonder, seeing it full overhead tonight, "I will come to Four Corners. I will light a fire on the ridge to the west, and I will wait two days. You will come or you will not." And whether he came or not, he knew deep in his heart that the Comanche warrior White Wolf would never be his enemy.
White Wolf smiled at the boy's expression, equal parts rapture and terror, and dared ruffle Charlie's glossy hair without any protest being made. Then he went to his bedroll and lay down to sleep. Charlie knew they would be gone in the morning when he woke, and he laid down himself with things so huge moving in his soul that he hardly knew what to make of them.
Tanner had to live, he had to, because he had to talk to him about this, nobody else would know what to do.
They left Vickers' finery in the dust and wind of the canyons, his tent and his brass-fitted chairs and tables, his silver whiskey flasks, left them like bitter ghosts in the dusty wind-teased silence of the canyons.
Josiah held Vin on horseback in front of him, Chris with the leads in his hand so Josiah's were free, they set him sideways across his Josiah's thighs and Vin's slipped over the high horn to keep him from sliding out of Josiah's grip. The tracker never moved or made a sound as they got him up there, his head dropped forward under Josiah's chin like a sleeping child, nor did he as they walked the empty slots and creekbeds out of the was meant to be their graves.
His mother's voice was often in his ears, he was not lost where he wandered. Vin walked the purple mountains of his refuge; here he had healed in the heat of summer and the freezing cold of winter, and he was glad to be on the beloved trails and to taste the berries in their seasons, hunt and take his prey with thanks. Here he had stood in the wind with his mother's song curling around him and a man's peace filling him up to last forever. There he had laughed around winter fires and loved a young widow who had chosen to show him the magic men and women could make, the feel of moss and sleek skin and the mist of a high waterfall, fish lying silvery and forgotten beside them. To Vin, it was and would always be heaven, those high forests and rocky mountains where he'd found himself once ... it seemed right to wander there now. Oh no, he was not lost, never there could he be lost, but where he longed with every exhausted fiber of flesh and soul to be. Where the forest spoke it's many languages to his understanding ear and his heart was free to rest.
They took one of the wagons from the camp and made their way back to Four Corners without stopping. He seemed to be disappearing right before their eyes, growing thinner and paler in utter immobile silence that, despite their determined optimism, began to seem dismally inevitable.
They came to Nettie's place in mid-day in openly desperate straits; Vin had stopped breathing twice in the last two hours, and the second time Nathan had openly wept as he ground the heel of his hand into Vin's wounded shoulder to provoke his body's instinctive gasp of pain. Chris had walked away from the frantic knot of activity, his head low between his shoulders and his hand white-knuckled on his colt, murder in his eyes and nothing to kill for it.
Nettie, standing on the rise in her vegetable garden, straightened up from the basket half filled with pale yellow squash and long green beans and shaded her eyes further from under the brim of her hat to make out the cause of the dust coming up the road down-slope, half-a-mile away. A wagon and riders - her heart leapt to see Mary's blue habit and she started down out of the field toward the house as they approached it from the other side. Chris, straight as a slender black flame in a windless room riding point, Ezra a few paces behind him to the left, J.D. on the right. Casey would be relieved - in fact, she burst through the front screen below just then and went pelting down the road. Nathan right beside the wagon, Josiah at the reins of the team. Judge Travis, surely his old bones were feeling every mile. But nowhere that easy slanted slouch even running full out, she would know Vin horsed ten miles away - An urgency in their posture, yet they came in slow measured paces that struck her with a sudden chill as funereal. Lord, God ... no, to pray for it put words to the doubt, and she would have none.
Chris came in and stared at her as if he weren't sure where he was and had no idea what to say.
"Miz' Wells." The gambler pulled his horse up in front of Chris, she had a glimpse of J.D. climbing down into Casey's arms with a hard-held edge to him that stilled the girl's excited jostlings at once and her throat felt full; she clamped her jaw and Ezra said,
"We've brought him home alive, Miz' Wells."
"Well of course you did." Snapped pistol-quick, her head tilted back to examine how hardship had stripped away Ezra's gaudy artifice and was showing a heart she suspected he himself did not realize he possessed. Mary met her as she strode through the grim-faced horsemen toward the wagon, running her hand absently against horses as she was always compelled to touch living things her heart held dear. She did not look at Mary's face, though she felt her distress, felt it in them all and had to firm the chin that wanted to quiver.
She said nothing when she stood at the side of the wagon, Josiah turned on the seat above her; Vin was bloody and frail to make her heart break, but he was not dead and would not be, God Willing and all she could do against it. The steely eyes she turned to them all had nothing of fear in it.
"Get him into my bed, Casey, git down t'the spring house and bring up the ham n' butter, J.D., you go along with. Mary, get some water on, coffee's standing ready. The rest of you - you got horses t'be settling and such, get to it, time you're done, there'll be food on the table. Git to it now, everybody!" If Mary had been impressive, Nettie was a force of nature and her determination blew through their hopelessness like clean air.
The Judge rode on back to Four Corners to send out supplies, he had a list from Nathan for items from the clinic and another from Nettie for everything else. He went alone because no one else would leave Vin, and he rode out with a terrible unease. He'd never known them to be so quiet even in times of great calamity, they had an edge that seemed to just get sharper the worse things got. But now ... they waited. It was all they could do. Waited.
Josiah was with him when he finally woke, like a dreamer still deep in a dream but his eyes fluttering open, wandering, his face tightening in growing awareness of his plight ...
He was sure he'd heard her calling him here ... abide, he'd heard her say, abide, and he'd come to that voice as he always had, belling across the meadow behind the shack, warning him off of danger, calling him softly out of nightmares in the dark. The purple mountains faded the winds stilled.
"Vin?" The quiet question hummed in the silence and Vin saw Josiah. He felt like he was looking at him from a mile away but he could see the fine high color of his eyes.
"You hear me, Vin?"
Nathan came through the door in his stocking feet, Chris appeared there after him but stopped thereat the entrance to the room, Buck at his shoulder and the others rising in the room beyond. Quiet as those few words were, they had all heard them, all been listening for them so hard for so long. Nettie came out from Casey's room and directly through them, moving the towering men out of her way like she was walking through a herd of steers.
She bent over him, a prayer leaving her lips to see those blue eyes again and he smiled to see her, tried to lift his left hand to touch her but couldn't reach up for some reason.
"Vin Tanner, you're getting t'be all skin n' bones ..." Softly scolding but her smile like a sunrise as she leaned in close to him so her soft cheek pressed against his whiskered face. "Welcome home, son." She whispered and his eyes fell closed a moment in bliss.
Nathan gave him a drink of water, and his relief faltered at the feel of Vin's pulse fast and faint under his fingers.
When Vin looked up from taking that drink, still enraptured by the cool slide of it through his body, there were all six faces there stacked up around him and a hurtful grunt of a laugh surprised it's way out of his mouth.
"I owe you fellas money or somethin'?" The sound of chuckles laden with other emotions too large to let loose; Vin felt that himself, to see them all and know they were all alive made something in him loosen he hadn't realized was so tight. Chris' eyes blazed down at him, all the world in blacks and whites - if Vin was awake, Vin would live and Vin didn't know how to say he wasn't sure of that. There seemed an awful lot of light in the room, like it was shining out of them onto him.
Charlie wiggled through their legs and grinned such a grin at him he thought the boy's face might just split in two, he felt the small hand slip into the hollow of his and squeezed Charlie's fingers to reassure him. Kid's face was black and blue, though, he thought that's what it was, and his eyebrows twisted a little, but the effort was too much.
Weak as a starved newborn, Nathan knew that, but he also knew he wasn't feeling any pain and he should be, at least in some discomfort. Yet the tracker lay there smiling up at them as best he could, looking at each of them, one by one, a strange quiet darkness deep in his eyes. Nettie saw it, too, her look met Nathan's across the bed and the worry was shared wordlessly.
"Tell me ... about the ... camp. Judge ... come?" Pulling breath from some distant unwilling place, and though Nathan wanted them to let him rest, he insisted so doggedly that he let them sit on the bed, around it, and tell him the story. Interruptions become more frequent as it went and each had their own part to add, the volume increasing and the mood becoming almost raucous.
He was warm still, that same fever that had inhabited him for two days, not so high but constant and unyielding. Yet he smiled up at them like they were all he wanted to see, small animations in his face bespeaking great pleasure. Was he telling them good-bye, Nathan wondered? Taking a last look at his friends, settling all that had happened so he could go with no questions? When he found Vin's blue eyes fixed on his, he thought Vin was telling him so; that peace of a man satisfied, something crucial attained.
Nettie chased them out at last, and sat down beside him, knowing they were getting into her whiskey in the other room but not begrudging it to them.
"Vin Tanner ... " She said, shaking her head ruefully at him with her eyes shining as she took his hand the same way Charlie had.
"It's done, Nettie." His voice faint, his eyes losing focus, and as they did his hand tightened with sudden gripping painfulness on her fingers as if he'd suddenly started to fall without knowing how, and he looked almost alarmed for a moment. That was pain, and she knew then how truly he'd forgotten about it that it would surprise him so. The blue of his eyes dimmed, the focus slipped ...
"Don't." She said insistently, holding that hand that had begun to loosen tightly, clutching the other on his shoulder, her eyes almost angry as she forced him to look at her, refused to let him go with an iron will, "Don't you quit, Vin Tanner, it ain't fair t'them that suffered for you! How'll they hold value to the justice they fought so hard t'give you if you give up n' die now?"
God, he didn't want to disappoint her, not any of them, but he didn't know if he could stay, wasn't sure he wanted to ... even now the echoes of purple mountains and flower-strewn meadows threaded into his mind in distracting profusion, drawing him back and maybe that was how it was supposed to be ... though it could be a lie he told himself because he was so bone-deep tired of struggling for everything, always. It was so quiet there, so beautiful, and he longed for that peace with an ache that drowned his body's pain away.
"You come up outta that dream, Vin Tanner!" Nettie demanded sharply, catching him in the instant before he fell into it forever and giving him a shake that rattled his head on his neck. His eyes, which had been drifting, came back to her, intent, bewildered. She caught his soft-whiskered chin in her hand and bent her face down close to his so he could see her fury and her determination, enough for them both if need be, enough for them all.
"You give up now and what'll become of them? Chris Larabee'll never have faith in another thing all his life, he'll go hard and dead as a cinder inside - the good deeds you seven could do won't never get done, the seven souls God drew you all t'gether t'save won't get saved. You die now, boy, and you leave ruin behind, and sorrow, and trouble for too many! Too many! You don't go so easy as this, Vin Tanner, easy ain't never been your road. Don't you quit on them now, nor on me."
The first question sank like a leaf swinging down into the muzzy run of his thoughts, the answer seemed to rise as easily as the way out of the pain, blithe and almost flippant - they would be fine and dying would make the hurting stop because it felt like he'd borne it forever. He would be free and Chris would not be ruined ... and both, he realized wearily, were lies uglier than the pain he would have to endure to live out this day. He was so tired, he wasn't sure he could and would they blame him, somehow, if he couldn't? His eyes brimmed with that as he looked up at her, not sure he had it left in him to do ... but Nettie smiled to see the truth realized and her calloused hand cradled his cheek.
"Sleep, boy." He thought Nettie said that, he wasn't sure, it could've been his mother. It didn't matter, he couldn't do anything else anyway.
Nettie didn't know what woke her; the house was silent but for the somnolent sounds of sleeping men. She lifted her head and peered across the room ... Nathan's chin rested on his chest in the chair between the window and the bed, and by the wan silver glow of this breathless time between morning and night, she saw that the bed was empty. For a moment in which her hands pressed to her breast she had the irrational thought that God had come and taken him, flesh man and spirit together, in the night. But the sheets and blanket trailed off the rope-frame bed toward the door, which was ajar.
Her woolen shawl settled warm around her, fringe brushing her ankles, and she crept quietly into the main room in her bare feet silent as a wraith. They lay on her hearth, in her sitting room, the long outlines of their bodies and the soft sound of their breathing bringing a pang to her heart that is a mother's over sleeping children. It was warm within, the windows fogged and running with condensation, but the rain had slowed to a quiet patter.
She looked around, knowing the shapes of furniture and cupboard. He was not there.
But the cup left on the warm stove in case Nathan wanted it was gone, and someone had been at tomorrow's bread, as well, one brown loaf missing a messily torn-off heel. Her face turned in fearful confusion toward the door and found a darkening spray of drying rain from it having been opened, and she went to it, feeling like she was dreaming. Lord, it was a good dream, if dream it must be.
Cold air brushed over her face, the yard sparkling and still but for the quiet music of dripping into puddles from the eves. She took a breath of it deep into her as she pressed the door closed behind her, toes curling on the wet wood. Never was a more beautiful thing than the dawn after a storm to someone who loved the wildness, there was a peace beyond understanding to see it washed clean and breathing in the vivid stillness. Best place to do that was the east-facing side of the porch where she had a rocker for that very reason.
Walking in the silence only a woman long of the frontier knew, she went to the corner of the house and there stilled for a long time, breathing small tight breaths. Tears gathered in her eyes, her hands tangled in the edges of her shawl pressed fiercely to her heart. He was there, a vague shape graven in the dim glimmer.
He would have come out here to die, if he could. She knew he would. Would have wanted the new day to break on his face, his body to take in the purest and cleanest breaths of morning. But he would not have brought the cup of coffee that sit on the planks at his side, and he would not be taking a bite of the bread in his hand, chewing with thoughtful relish as he faced the east with an unbroken gaze. Not dead. Great Lord, oh my merciful Father, so far from dead! A man stubbornly deciding to live would do those things, and set about it just this way: Coffee and bread, a new day. The pressure in her chest eased, the tears were allowed to brim and fell down the fine weathered lines and seams of her strong face.
Strong enough to have come in perfect silence through the sprawl of his sleeping friends, stubborn enough to have taken the cup and torn himself her bread and gone out without a soul hearing. Strong enough to have wanted those things that a living man would, and stubborn enough to seek the peace of dawn to himself.
Wrapped up with her best quilt cocooning his feet, cowling up over his shoulders, his head laid on the high-rise of the chair, watching the dawn come with the wide-open love of a man who had never expected to see it again. Nettie did not intrude. She could not have spoken just then anyway, or moved, it was enough just to look at him, his achingly blue eyes clear and roving somewhere distant and private.
Dawn came in slow majesty, magenta defining the bellies of the receding clouds and lightening in gradual increments, changing shades and shapes with every moment. It was as if the world held still, breathless, to stand and watch a mighty hand paint the birth of this singular day, pinks and golds that softened the angled hollows of his face.
Finally he sighed, filling his chest, if not easily, with the cold morning air, his exhalation steaming slightly as his head turned against the back of the chair and his eyes found her standing there without surprise. With her he did not have to smile to tell her he welcomed her company, nor offer any reasons or excuses for being where he was. She came across the wet planks to stand behind the rocker, still so gaunt it made her throat ache but the expression shining in his eyes as lovely as any smile she'd ever in her life seen.
Quietly she laid her hands over the back of it to rest on his chest, and his head leaned into her arm, his right hand came up to cover hers on him and hold them there, warm and strong, against the living beat of his heart. His long fingers threaded into hers with such open affection that glad tears sprang again to her eyes. How could she ever describe the tranquility of his face? Lord, she would never be able to think of it without smiling, and she would never forget it as long as she lived. Look, Miz Tanner, she said in her heart, your boy will be fine, and she swore she felt a smile from across the gulf. He had done what needed doing, his faith had held him and kept him, and whatever trouble might come in the future would be faced with the certainty of that survival.
Neither spoke. They only watched together as the first golden rim of the sun rose above the treeline on the ridge. Into that morning, Nettie voiced the prayer she saw in Vin Tanner's eyes with a heart so full she could hardly speak:
"'I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.'"
(Timothy 4:7)
Peso swung his big anviled head over the chewed top rail of his stall, eye rolling toward the door and twin streams of steam shooting out of his flared nostrils. He'd been cooped up too long and was looking for trouble, and the trouble he liked best was just slipping in between the big barn doors like a ghost out of the pre-dawn dark. He blew again noisily, tossed his head in eager challenge, but Vin wasn't crazy. Well, not totally. Slipping away was one thing, but he was no where up to Peso yet, damn horse would likely kill him just tryin' to get the saddle on. The big horse lipped his hatbrim as he came near, and Vin leaned away sharply as a rim of teeth sneaked in.
"Just wait, we're gonna get reacquainted real well, we are, I'm tellin' you." The man's eye lowered to the horse's with that willingness to scrap Peso wanted, but Vin turned away then and went to the stall housing Buck's gray. He had him tethered by the time Charlie slithered through the slats at the back, moving real quiet, as he'd taught him, and Vin smiled as he pretended to adjust the tether.
"Figger you can handle that saddle?" He said as Charlie crept up to within five feet of him and he heard the boy stop and blow out his breath sharply.
"Jeez ... yeah, of course." Sullenly, which made Vin's smile widen a fraction. But Charlie needed a stool, and they needed each other to get the wide heavy saddle up and over the gray's back. Vin couldn't use his left arm under the saddle-tree channel to lift it, and Charlie's collarbone wasn't entirely healed either, so it was awkward and took some careful planning and too many gasping twinges to get it up and over and set right. The tall gray just stood there calmly, head high and ears flicking back and forth, not even protesting when the saddle dropped too heavily on his broad back. Peso would've flung saddle, blanket and potential rider across the stall by then. The boy ran his thin arm under the saddle to check that the blanket beneath was flat, then slid under even that to stroke the hairs of his hide smooth, which the gray seemed to appreciate nearly as much as the small apple Vin was giving him. A promise was a promise whether to a man or a horse.
"You reckon you're up t'this?" Charlie squinted up at Vin as he went to reach under the rounded swell of belly for the cinch.
A sharp blue eye slanted down his way, lamplight hard on the high bones and shadows laying deep in their hollows, a chuff of a laugh. But Charlie still eyed him without seeming so, he was still thinner than he ought to be and he moved like he was being careful of hurts that were still meaningful, but he had a serene sort of joy in his hands as he hooked the near stirrup over the pommel to expose the buckles for the cinches under the stirrup leathers. Charlie liked to watch the plainsman's hands; even lying in his room for weeks he'd always been doing something with them. He'd made the beautiful plaited lariats stacked on top of the parfleches and canteens by the side of the stall, thin strands of leather he'd stretched out from the foot of the bed, using his toes when it was short to tighten the tuck so he wouldn't have to bend for it, and then his fingers in a complicated rhythm and slide and snap of weaving. He'd taught Charlie a few things while he was doing it, wishing he had enough horse-hair to make a truly fine lariat, like his hands could work without him paying any attention to them; all Charlie'd managed yet was a tangled lot of knots.
Charlie handed him the end of the leather cinch and he fed it through the buckle, taking a simple but true pleasure in working the leather back and forth between the lower cinch ring and the buckle, from the cooperative horse, and his own intentions. He flicked a finger at the side of the stall and Charlie fetched the parfleches, helped secure them with the latigos behind the cantle of the saddle, then the rifle and its sheath in front, canteens, and the lariats. The parfleches were filled with coffee and sugar, salt pork and cornmeal and flour, and the smallest held the gifts he'd told Charlie to buy ... Cotton cloth for White Wolf's wife, awls and needles and thread, leather punches and tins of hard candy; a man intending to bide awhile should come to a camp with generous offerings so his presence was not a burden, and Charlie had most of Vin's money to be generous with. Money came and went, it didn't matter to Vin. Strange, the things that didn't matter to him anymore, as well as the things that once hadn't and now did.
Vin mounted first, unabashedly using the stool and feeling every motion acutely in every stiff joint and muscle, but enjoying the strain and being very careful.
Then he made a gimme motion and pulled his left foot out of the stirrup so Charlie could get his into it, reaching hard and low across his body with his right hand for Charlie's and together they hauled/boosted the boy into the saddle in front of Vin. Vin was slight enough that Charlie fit comfortably in front of him without being crammed into the horn, and the boy was small enough to let his arms get around him easily for the reins. A twinge in his left shoulder stopped the forward reach of that hand and Charlie passed the rein back to him with a crooked grin like he was an old man needing help. Nathan'd said it'd be giving him a trouble a long while, and while he believed him by now, he didn't have the patience for it. If it was gonna hurt, well, it was gonna hurt, no good laying abed for it.
"How come I gotta ride with you?" Charlie complained, "How come I can't take my own darned horse."
"White Wolf'll have one for you, Charlie; you don't want to come in ridin' a horse you might like n' him think you're givin' it up just t'be polite."
"Oh ..." Wondering that anyone would care if he was giving up something he liked for politeness' sake or anything else.
They walked out of the stall, Peso tossing his head indignantly up and down in a fast jig as they went. Charlie leaned down with Vin's hand secured in the back of his pants for the paddock gate, closing it quietly behind him. Nothing moved, dawn still awhile away but the slowly defining outlines of things growing silvery. It felt breathless to Charlie, just as he was himself, scared and excited and both feelings so big it was a guess from one minute to the next which was in charge. Vin could feel it thrumming through the boy's body and he smiled, turning watchfully from side to side. Wouldn't do to let anyone see them now ...
White Wolf was upon the ridge where it was dangerous to be, his signal fire smoldering beside him. Fortunately, he'd lit it pretty late last night, and Vin didn't think anyone had seen it, small as it was and distant, only someone looking for it would have noticed. And Charlie had been looking for it, looking hard, trying to have faith in the promises of a Comanche. In himself.
Some folks in town had heard the kid talk of the invitation and were dead set against a white child being turned over to savages; Vin shook his head, remembering their indignant protests, himself almost envying Charlie the years that were to come. Those fools had no idea. Surprisingly, Mary had not been among those shocked and horrified at the thought, he'd told her what it had meant to him as a boy, some of what the life had taught him, and though he'd been brief about it, as was his nature, she'd seen wonder and pleasure and serenity in his eyes, and heard rough poetry in his words.
"Mary, iffn' I thought even for a second he'd come to more harm than good ..." Admitting Charlie would know hardship in the wilds, but so had he in civilization, and managing to impart the formative force for good hardship could be to some men, "I'd never be teachin' 'im a thing myself. It's because of me he wants it, n' it'd be a thing I'd be proud to have my own child come t'know. Ain't gonna be possible for much longer ..." And Mary had known that, too, was true, and shared his melancholy over the plight that would inevitably befall the Nations in the new world being forged in America.
They rode in silence, each deep in their own thoughts, Vin in memory, Charlie in anticipation. Vin felt the boy curving back into him as they approached, though he knew his face was proud and calm. He gave the wordless comfort of his warmth and his solidity behind him, of his arms that tightened just a little and maybe gave away a bit of how he would miss the boy.
Two wiry muscular horses with gleaming coats long free-flowing manes and tales stood ankle-high in the morning mist behind White Wolf, his face also proud and calm, though his eyes shone like stars. Vin knew White Wolf's wife would have packed a set of clothes fit for a Comanche boy into his packs, moccasins and leggings and a fine deerskin shirt, she loved children and could mother the earth alone did she have to; Charlie was a lucky boy.
The man who had stood for Vin so long ago had stood in just the way White Wolf was standing now, his hands easy at his sides, gazing calmly into eyes Vin knew were too blue for a Comanche to be at ease with, at a head too fair and a spirit too old already. Vin's chest got tight to remember that seamed copper face, the grace and authority of the man he'd come to know was the only father he'd ever have.
When they were come to White Wolf and stopped, Vin handed Charlie down, and the boy stood close beside the gray, his hand unconsciously looping into the stirrup on top of Vin's foot. Vin looked down at the dark top of Charlie's head for moment, then, his heart hard in his throat and his eyes burning. White Wolf met his look when he was able to do it clear, and promises were given that Vin believed.
White Wolf walked the beautiful dun horse toward Charlie, and extended the reins to him, which made Charlie's mouth round in wonder. The horse's large brown eyes watched him trustingly as he took the reins, broad velvety nostrils brushed the backs of his small fingers and blew warm breath across them so he shivered with pleasure. No saddle, but a blanket and a sketchy frame holding packs of necessaries for the trail.
Vin said, "I figgered I'd come with for a bit, ifn' the people don't mind. Been holed up in a room in a town too damned long."
White Wolf grinned; Big Tree had asked that he try to convince the tracker to come, if he felt he was strong enough, and he said with a sly sort of concern, "The wilderness may not be easy for you right now, Tanner, you are not all well." Fishing for the fire and the humor that emerged at his invitation.
"Hell, White Wolf, I figger a grizzly'd be easier t'handle than Nathan once he finds out I'm gone."
Buck would tell the rest come breakfast, he was the only one who wouldn't have tried to stop him, and by then they'd be long gone out into the unmarked territories where he could hear his Ma's voice in the wild winds.
The End
Truly heartfelt appreciation to all who wrote throughout the posting of For Faith, so many of you writers I admire - you move me, you make me laugh, you excite me about writing and are a pleasure to write for. I hope you'll welcome more from me in the future; be patient and I'll try to make it worth your wait.
Endless thanks to Jo for her initial encouragement and fine beta-reading, and for posting For Faith on her site, and on TannerTales.
Last, but certainly not least, to Adrian, to whom this story is dedicated with enormous respect and affection. Yakoke, my friend.
Please email Painted Eyes with any comments.