Disclaimer: The characters used herein, with the exception of original characters (please don't borrow) are the property of MGM and Trilogy. No profit sought or accepted.
Rating: PG13
Warnings: Language, violence
Notes: Yakoke, Adrian, for a heart deep and true; words cannot say how much you mean to me, and to my writing. And to my new friend, Lynne Smith for beta-reading and valuable suggestions.
Bibliography:
Rain started a quiet patter in the hour before dawn. Ezra, warm in his bedroll and dry under the groundcloth tent, smiled drowsily, smug in their cozy shelter never realizing the trough formed by the canvas roof between the two ropes was slowly filling with water.
The boys put on their slickers, got themselves coffee, and ambled on over to pack the mules, keeping a close eye to what promised to be the morning's entertainment, Jules willing and helpful among them in a slicker of her own. The boots kept her feet dry even in puddles and mud, she felt rough and ready as any of the men and turned her face up into the rain to catch it on her tongue relishing the taste of the west. Chris acted as though he just didn't see her, Vin avoided her, and Ezra treated her as condescendingly as her uncles, but the rest were friendly and accepting, and that was good enough for her for now.
"She's a spirited little gal, ain't she?" Buck grinned as she manfully carried her Aunt and Mary's valises and bedrolls from the tent to the pack-horses without complaint - indeed, she seemed to be having a great deal of fun doing it and went willingly after anything they asked for except a sky-hook, which she frostily told J.D. only a rube would fall for. This set Buck to snickering and J.D. to swearing at him, since he'd fallen for it himself once.
Mary and Elizabeth rolled up one side of their tent to prepare breakfast in relative dryness, and when Elizabeth noticed the roof over her brothers beginning to sag as the rain began to fall harder, she almost went to wake them before noticing that all the men were watching that bellying canvas eagerly. With a wicked smile at Mary, she went about her labors with an eye to it herself.
They didn't have to wait long.
"Thar she blows ..." Buck sang out as the weight of the gathered water started to pull the side-walls of the canvas up, the round stones simply rolling away, walls rising as the weighted sway of the roof deepened so the rain skirled into the shelter and unpleasantly roused the men within. Only the Judge was quick enough to notice why that wall was lifting away and he rolled out of his blankets and out of the rapidly collapsing shelter a moment before the overlapping canvases at the top parted and dumped gallons of rain-water onto the three men still inside.
Their dismayed cries resounded in the camp, but were drowned out by the unfettered laughter of the rest as the three sputtering men tried to untangle themselves from their suddenly sodden bedclothes and the wet dropping weight of the canvas, which now hung one to each rope like pieces of laundry.
Jules thought she'd wet herself as Buck and J.D. howled and pointed, her shrieks of laughter threading among the deeper sounds of masculine delight and stumbling back against Buck, who caught her against the impossible length of his lanky leg and looked down at her with such glee in his midnight blue eyes that she could've kissed him. Oh, she'd never seen anything so funny in all her life, nor felt so free to enjoy it!
Elizabeth might have gone to their aid once she caught her breath, and almost did until she saw Vin laughing, too. Truly laughing, and all thought of helping her brothers fled; he was beautiful with all the shadows chased from his angular face and his blue eyes sparkling with merriment, tawny and tan and wild as the wind. Beautiful, and the realization shocked the laughter right out of her.
Her brothers and Mister Standish flailed about comically cursing and slipping, James fell back into the ruins with a resounding splash, and all Elizabeth saw, with an expression of fearful wonder, was Vin Tanner.
Vin had waked feeling better, the smell of rain fresh from under the cowled edge of his buffalo robe, curled on his side and comfortable enough in the presence of six good guns to have gone into so deep a sleep that he hadn't even changed position until he woke. He knew he'd dreamed, though he didn't remember it, he had that calm in the middle of him of something soothed in the night.
He'd nearly finished loading his stores by the time the Monroe's tent gave way, and he couldn't remember having had so good a laugh for a long time. It was a toss-up what struck him funnier, the brothers or Ezra or the depth of enjoyment the rest were taking in it, Josiah rocking back and forth like a tickled bear and Nathan just pounding on his thick shoulder. Even Chris was shaking his head and wiping his eyes so for a while Vin almost blessed those bastards Monroe for starting their day out so well.
Morning was a pink thread widening in the east and he took a cup of coffee out into the lightening dark to watch it. The direction of beginnings, which today he felt ready for. They'd meet the train by late afternoon, and by the time he had to take to Peso's back again, that horse would remember who was in charge. Damned beast was a treasure on the trail, could go for days and muster speed or endurance when a lesser horse would've long since faltered, but he exacted a cost for it in temper and contrariness. It was a balancing act day to day.
Behind him he heard Ezra berating his fellows in floridly aggrieved terms, and the stretch of that smile was what Elizabeth saw as she approached him from behind, his eyes easy even when he turned to see who was coming. She hadn't been sure how to approach him after their inexplicably truncated discussion in the Sheriff's Office, but for once he didn't spook. For the first time his smile remained and she wondered, with a sudden deep twinge of unaccustomed guilt, whether he'd been thinking of Duley.
Her smile felt tremulous and false, his was making her heart run too quickly. "I know you'll probably be ahead of us all day, and I thought you could use these ..." Offering a packet of sandwiches in oil-cloth which he took with a short nod, still shy, but not as like to bolt as he'd seemed.
"Thank you, Ma'am."
At the formality she cocked her head at him, eyebrows down-turned in scolding mockery; "Ma'am? Haven't we gone beyond that, Mister Tanner?"
For a moment he just looked at her consideringly so she wondered if she'd gone too far somehow, given something away that would offend him. But then he touched two fingers to his hat-brim and smiled again, a hint of humor and respect, maybe even liking, that was only for her this time. She took that smile to heart with shameful eagerness, embarrassing herself even if he didn't know it was the first such smile he'd given her, nor that she cherished it.
"I reckon so, Elizabeth." He said, and then the silence grew close as she stood transfixed as a child by a bauble, until she remembered he did not chit-chat so he probably wouldn't say anything else, though his head began to tilt curiously.
"Well!" She said briskly, "Then ... I imagine you have things to do ... breakfast will be ready in a few minutes, you have some before you go, all right?"
A nod, a vague narrowing of his eyes on her so she turned around at once, astonished and dismayed, even horrified as she strode purposefully back to the tent and the breakfast in the making. What could she be thinking? And why in God's name would she think it of him? She had more suitors than she could count in Virginia, some good men, kind men, men she could proudly have to husband her! Men who were interested for heaven's sake!
It was the time and place, that was all, the dangerous country undermining her confidence in herself. It was her own romantic nature running away with her, it had to be, though she was not and had never been the romantic sort. She sighed, deeply troubled, looking around her as if she might find a cause for this uncharacteristic behavior in the sere brown wilderness she had been so enjoying.
When Thomas died, she had refused to even consider marrying thereafter, meaning never again to allow her inheritance to fall into a husband's callous hands. She loved the farm and the forests and the rivers her father had built, she would not again see everything she loved and cherished looked on as a possession by a stranger who could dispose of it as he would. Her brothers had nearly had it all through Thomas, but it had come back to her on his passing by her father's Will. She would be unmarried all her life and glad of it! Yes, glad!
Mary wondered at the vehemence with which Elizabeth stirred the corn-meal mush, but was busy enough enough not to dwell on it.
As soon as the day was fully broken, the rain stopped and the sun came in streaks through the glittering trees dripping quiet rhythms in the stillness. The men shed their slickers, shook them out and rolled them to tuck behind their saddles on Vin's advice in case the wet he could feel in the northeast rolled down their way during the day.
She tried not to pay any attention to Tanner as he walked the line of pack mules with J.D., loose-kneed and easy as a cat, a readiness of eyes and hands that she found, for some reason, interesting. She tried not to pay any attention as he, too, shed his coat in the work of getting ready to head out and the chaps just seemed to focus attention ... pale leather buckling across the front of his buckskin pants just below the bottom margin of his gunbelt, laying tight across the top of his tailbone ... good Lord, her sister's husband and she was admiring his rear, it made her flush hotly and lower her head, deeply ashamed. She started violently when Mary touched her arm with a soft warm laugh and said,
"Oh come on, Elizabeth - they are handsome men, and a pleasure to watch ..." Her own eyes meaningfully following Chris' long back - and dropping lower with a meaningful arch of her delicate eyebrows - as he walked away from them across the camp. Elizabeth's mouth opened around a gasp, but Mary's eyes were so conspiratorial, so willing to share feminine confidences, that she found herself laughing instead.
"I admit," She confessed helplessly, "I have never seen such men as you have out here in the west, Mary." Purposefully looking at the rest of them as well and noticing how the color of their clothing and the easy slouching postures blended in to the background, while her brothers and Judge Travis were obvious wherever they walked. It made her think of a day in the general store when she had nearly purchased a blue riding outfit until Tanner had touched the fawn-colored one she wore now in obvious favor. Had she bought it for that reason, and had he shown that favor to protect her out here where blue would be seen a long way away? The thought that he might have confused her with its warmth.
Mary's look at the seven men packing the mules was equal parts pride and frustration, she tossed biscuit balls into the bottom of the second dutch oven with little doughy plops. Elizabeth covered them and walked over to set them into the coals, flexing her fingers as she came back from the unaccustomed weight of them.
"You know, Elizabeth," Mary said, "I don't believe there are men such as these in the west anywhere else in the world. They are the most exasperating creatures I've ever encountered, I have to fight them tooth and nail for my liberties, but they'll fight the devil himself if he tried to deny me the same thing. They are the most contrary and bullying and foolishly courageous species, and they're impossibly sentimental and sweet and thoughtful - you just never know which you're going to get! Changeable as the weather, I declare ..."
Elizabeth sighed, watching them finishing the work of the morning scattered around the camp, bold and free in sound and motion as a pack of predators on their own hunting grounds. Not men a woman such as she would impress beyond being troublesome to take care of, social graces and fine clothes faint attributes in a country where self-sufficiency was valued above all else. No, Mary was the sort of woman who could make such men dream, beautiful and fierce and independently idealistic as they were, without pretense or fear or any inclination to yield to anyone or anything.
She scrutinized Mary's thoughtful smile as she watched the men gathering at the cookfire, jostling and teasing each other like a pack of unruly boys and yet considerate in the small gestures of serving each other, passing cups, standing stumps to sit on and such. Mary's face was eloquent with true affection; rascals and outlaws and deadly dangerous men, yet they had all earned the love and respect of this independent and surprisingly sophisticated professional woman.
Only when Mary's eyes lingered on the tall gunslinger in black did a recognizable melancholy come to her expression, a faint reluctant yearning that settled the suspicions in Elizabeth's mind. She'd already sensed that there were powerful emotions working invisibly and unspoken between those two, but obviously it was nothing simple or clear, nor anything either of them welcomed. Wanting something both knew was not good for them, but the knowledge in no way diluting the wanting. Larabee was a stony man, deeply interior and recklessly deadly, hardly the sort Mary Travis should find appealing, but now and then, for fleeting moments, his fierce eyes would find her as if he were taking hold of her with his hands.
Vin Tanner was hardly the sort of man anyone would believe Elizabeth Monroe would find appealing either, whiskers and callouses and hair unbound to his shoulders, grudging and uncouth and ... Her sigh was eloquently confused.
She wondered if Mary, for all her forthright determination to carve her own way out here, found it as difficult as she did to have the strictures of civil order that had guided her in the east, for there she had been raised, Elizabeth had learned, removed. There were rules and ways of being that, even if circumscribing and dictating a woman's life to the point of suffocation, at least provided a kind of security in knowing what consequences would come of what actions. Do this, and that results, whereas out here ... none of that applied, there were no rules, every man and woman was free to do just as he or she liked. How much was just never done in that wide-open lack of any signposts whatever? How many things were left undone because a body couldn't understand what it was or why it should be or how it could be?
Mary watched Elizabeth out of the corner of her eye. There was something bothering the lady, that was obvious, and she suspected she knew what it was - Mary was getting the impression that Elizabeth had grown to like their taciturn tracker, and she found that idea very intriguing. Of them all, Vin was the one least likely to attract notice, quiet as a ghost and so standoffish around women, as if mystified by their moods and intuitions. But she could see where that shyness in so capable and rough a man might be appealing, she knew herself he had a potent and fiery nature no matter how quiet he was nor how antiquated and formal his manners were.
Truth be told, she liked him herself and was appreciative of the selectivity of his conversation, there was something gracious in his untamed freedom. Of them all, he seemed the most whole to her even solitary as he was. It might be a fine thing to see him find some good woman and have a family, she'd seen him with Billy and knew he'd be a good father. But he was also as fiddle-footed as any man who'd grown himself up wandering, a drifter in the truest sense. Not driven by demons or trouble or boredom or addicted to the adrenaline of tempting death, but because it was his nature to roam.
Maybe it was a little sad, aimless-seeming and lonely, and the thought of a wife and children and him settling down could let her put her worries about him, at least, aside, but Vin's thoughts and instincts on solitude were contrary to most. Comfort to him was not a satin coverlet under a sturdy roof, but the weight and substance of a buffalo hide under the stars, not a fine aged brandy, but the newborn head-waters of rivers high in the clouded heights. He had no urge to acquire, the wagon he had because he'd never bothered to get rid of it. She knew the other six wondered, as did her father-in-law, why the tracker stayed when it was sometimes all he could do to bear the confines of town and the proximity of too many folks, but Mary thought she knew. Where most men's brains led their travels, Vin went with his heart, and he was among them now for that very reason. But he would not stay forever. Could not. Not even for a woman as good as Mary had come to believe Elizabeth was.
Her eyes were a bit regretful as she glanced at the back of that lady's auburn head. Then she shrugged; it wasn't as if it mattered much, even if Vin accepted her interest or even allowed a flirtation, they were both too intelligent to think it anything but an infatuation, a passing fancy.
All though breakfast, quick as it was and eaten standing up for the most part, Mary and Elizabeth studied the men they found themselves among for their own reasons, and found themselves also sharing feeling looks between them as they did.
Vin and Chris sat shoulder to shoulder, the map over Vin's knee as he told Chris where he would leave sign to guide them. The rain might slow them down a little on sodden ground, but it was fairly sandy in most parts and should be all right given an hour or so to dry out, the rain hadn't lasted long enough to saturate.
That done, Vin tipped his hat to the boys and mounted up, moving more easily than he had the last few days. Chris felt better to see it.
As soon as he slipped down out of the treeline after the Glorieta Pass onto the high desert plain, Vin's spine started to crawl like eager eyes landing on his back. The pass went over the southern tail of the Sante de Cristo mountains, and he rode about twenty miles down the winter-dry slope pricked by stands of cedar and sage, salt-brush and scrub pine to where the Rio Grande cut deep into the earth. That whole time he was so uneasy he had to let Peso run a bit to burn off what nervousness he passed to the already edgy horse. Peso didn't like wide-opens any more than his rider did when it came with that sense of something toothed and hungry on your heels.
Finally he reached the mesa overlook and stopped, sat easy, stretched his legs in the stirrups and admired the spectacularly panoramic view. High desert plain surrounded the Rio Grande gorge with high mountains and a chain of extinct volcanos bordering the river corridor. Here, the broad amble of the Rio descending through the wide valley between the San Juan and Sante de Cristo ranges was constricted by sheer-walled cliffs into a narrow sliver. Here, also, the Rio was already being met by the first trickle of melt at higher elevations falling off both sides in threads and thin curtains of streams.
He took his time like he didn't have a care in the world beyond having a drink from his canteen and taking in the landscape, but in reality he was methodically quartering a search for the flash of a distance glass or a rifle barrel, the edge of an unnatural outline among the brush and tumbles of rocks, anything that would answer the warnings still clamoring in him.
To his left, nearly hidden by a stream-side row of gnarled scrub pine, an arroyo descending into the gorge 700 feet below sliced down through the butte, one of a dozen other jagged downreaches of darkness against the bright mesa that would flood in summer and make the canyon sing, sounding a muted roar in the bones. Early mornings, mist would swirl up over the rims like clouds from the violent rush below, but just now it ran tame.
To his right ran the path that would take them parallel to the canyon and the train whistle-stop at White Rock, open enough for the mules to go easily, the obvious route. He could even see the dim dot of the water-tower on the steepening incline with the glass, though no one else likely would have, Wicasa Hinhan said he'd been blessed with bird eyes.
Anyone would've guessed he was spying out a trail in that direction as he sat looking across that expanse, but he wasn't. He was seeing it all in the open, all exposed, with the dangerous rim at their left where they could be driven off like buffalo into the gorge. Down there, two-legged scavengers could strip the goods at their leisure and leave the rest for vultures and coyotes and the rise of the river to scatter. There were too many places in the hidden folds of the land, water-cuts and subtle ridges and rock stands where ambushes could be laid that would give them no escape either forward or back. No. Didn't like neither route nor drop. One mule went by accident or design and the rest would follow, J.D.'s instinct would be to hang on, a kid's good-heartedness without ever imagining he'd just go on over himself.
He couldn't know if it was Wittinger for sure, nor whether whoever it was wanted murder or just robbery, but a thinking man planned for the worst. Too damn many ways to die out there running along that rim and he believed in the deadly sense of eyes on him, and waiting. If he were this hunter, it was where he would lay up.
He shifted in the saddle, cocked his left knee over the horn so casually that even when Peso shook his big head so hard the tack rang he barely swayed. Plucked the brass distance glass out of his vest pocket and took a look down the rim like he was plotting how they'd go on, looking for what eyes wouldn't see.
Didn't see didn't mean wasn't there, Wicasa Hinhan had often said, waiting for him to sense the world in other ways. Someone was there.
The few thin cascades of water off the edge on this side were enough, moving quickly enough, to justify what he planned to do other than walk right into getting himself and everyone with him killed and robbed.
Played right, they would be safely on that train and out of reach before any bushwackers figured out where they'd gone much less caught up with them. Trouble was, he didn't figure Wittinger for brains enough to have kept out of his sight and senses so far on their backtrail, so it nagged at him, if it was Wittinger, how he'd known where they'd head.
He looked across the gorge into the canyon-riddled mesa, the mountains rising in stately purple waves in the north, having made up his mind, and a thought passed through that'd passed there many a time before. A puzzlement at how a man could not know what a humble creature he was with such grandeur stretched out before him. How a man could look at something so vast and wild and beautiful, live in so gorgeous a plenty, and dream of nothing but conquering it he'd never been able to work his mind around.
Humanity was as tick on a bear in the face of it, he'd never been able to conceive of mastering what logic said would forever defy being mastered, or why anyone would want to. The Lakota had liked that he'd not known that the answer to that question when they asked him, likely the only white man they'd ever met who could not. The earth was so generous; it fed and clothed and sheltered and asked only to be respected in return, left unruined for the next creature to use. He sighed then, as he always did when this train of thought butted up against impossible to understand, and shook his head.
To a man like him, ruined for living among folks by experiences too brutal for forgetting, the wilderness was a beautiful heaven, a nurturing sanctuary where he knew the whys and hows of everything like it talked to him. His natural fear of death had been as simple as being unable to imagine anywhere more perfect, but Duley's going from that wilderness he loved had taken that fear away forever. His jaw worked a moment, then he put the thought away. He couldn't be thinking about past or future right now.
The Rio shouldn't be high yet, which meant they'd have riverbottom banks to trail along, maybe deadfalls from last spring's floods, but nothing they couldn't get around. Of course he also knew, with a niggle of dread, that he was going to get arguments about going down into the canyon and back up again rather than straight across the mesa to White Rock, and he knew he'd have to embellish the risks of that route as cause.
Some of the boys would probably know he wasn't being entirely honest with them, Chris would know for sure, could spot a lie with a gunslinger's dead-keen instincts and he had nothing to distract him from it this time. Hopefully he'd just trust him to be doing what was best for everyone even if he couldn't say how he knew or what he knew. Damnit all, he was sick of feeling like a villain, and he still couldn't do a damned thing about it.
When at last he turned to go back, he did so with a sudden set of spurs and a quick haul on Peso's head to see what he might catch unaware, then he had to ignore the instinct that had his hand snatching toward the butt of his Winchester to take the man who'd ducked back among a cluster of rocks a thousand yards upslope. Lord, he wanted to surprise that bastard with a sharpshooter's impossible eye, and if he'd been on his own he would've been snapping off shots that would've pinned the man where he was while he himself rode right up on him. But he wasn't on his own, and he had to ignore him and be satisfied to know his short hairs were right and where one enemy, at least, might be.
He waited at the pass for the rest, watching the faint rise of dust through the pinions, junipers and ponderosa pine that choked the slope on that side as he sat concealed in the brush with Peso ground-tied a short distance away to lead any enemy away from him should it be enemy and not the mules coming. The black ripped through a small patch of verdure with an eagerness that made it plain it was that, and not his dangling reins, that kept him in place. Vin didn't care, it felt good to sit down on something that wasn't fighting him all the damned time.
When he identified the riders in the distance he stood up and stretched, gingerly, but with a little relief that he could. That it was Chris and Buck coming ahead made him grit his teeth, a pair of eyes too sharp for the deceit he had to do. He put on a tired face, grim at the edges, which was just what he felt and so would ring true. Best way to sell a lie was sandwiched between two truths, something Ezra surely knew, and it didn't exactly please him to have that in common.
"You don't look too happy, cowboy." Chris drawled as they pulled up beside the trail, and Vin shook his head and looked away, glad they were horsed and he was on foot so his hatbrim obscured his face without seeming intentional.
"Got too many spring melt streams to cross on top of the mesa, I figger we'll head into the canyon n' up at White Rock."
Buck laughed, lounging deep in his saddle and his head cocked trying to see Vin's expression.
"Well, don't that sound like fun! N' we're doin' that because of streams, Vin? Like we can't get ourself across some streams n' goin' down into the canyon'd be easier n' less dangerous, right?"
Too much skepticism for Vin to ignore, and the tracker's face was hard-edged and nearly angry.
"That's what I said, Buck, you wanna get on down here n' argue it with me?"
Buck's smile never faltered, but his eyes flashed at the challenge. Chris forestalled the urge to tussle that seemed to be on both Buck and Vin by dismounting and walking to the top of the pass, looking back at them, neither having moved, after he'd examined the far side a moment.
Then he walked back, his horse following, and stopped in front of Vin with enough fire in his cool eyes to make Vin's heart sink. He wasn't buying it and didn't intend to go along.
"Ain't good enough, Vin."
Buck leaned back on one hand, the fingers of the other toying with the reins across the horn as he watched the pair on the ground to see how it would play out. Vin didn't explain himself most times, just said what was what, what he intended, and headed on into it, got right touchy at being questioned about anything, but Chris wasn't about to be put off by that. Strange to see them facing each other off like they were, both stubborn men, both full of secrets, but usually in tune with each other in a way Buck almost envied. Not now, they weren't. Not at all. Vin cocked his head to look back at Chris and didn't give a thing up for a long and increasingly tense minute.
"Vin," Chris said softly, eyes intent as he took a short step closer so Vin had to look up at him. Too close for Vin's comfort and Buck knew that, too. "It's our asses, and if you know somethin's not right on the mesa, well ... me n' Buck won't pass it on, but you're gonna share it with us so we don't go easy where we ought to be going tip-toe."
He never even looked at Buck to get his agreement, knowing it would be there. That Chris was reading more in Vin's uneasiness than he should've been able to made Buck wonder real hard what the two of them weren't saying - and hadn't been saying for a while now.
Vin knew he couldn't use Duley to divert Chris from this, and he couldn't tell them about the guns or the Judge would find out what he was up to. No way Travis wouldn't stop him, he'd be honor-bound to it, and to holding him as a traitor to the U.S. government and maybe the boys as well if he suspected they knew. No. Those guns came out and he'd either be arrested or renegade, taking what mules he needed and abandoning them all. The boys he didn't worry about in that regard, but Duley's kin was another thing. Shit. He stood with his fingers laid wide on his hips, cocked to one side and shoulders a deep slant, head down as he thought it through and feeling Chris standing there looking right at him the whole time.
Chris waited, patient with him as he'd always been patient with him, understanding his need to think things through before speaking them.
He would have to lie, and use bits of truth to make it palatable. He said, "Shit, Chris, it ain't nothin' but a feelin' is all. My short hairs went high out on the mesa there, it's a place bushwhackers'd have an easy time takin' us, n' a party this size, this many good animals, women ..." Letting it trail off knowing where the last barb went.
Chris glanced over at Buck, who shrugged. It sounded true, but his instincts and Vin's uneasiness said it was more than a 'feelin'. Cool green eyes measured the tracker very carefully, took his time at it now and didn't hide what he was doing. Vin took his examination without a word, though Chris knew it had to bother him something fierce to be doubted. Yet he took it. Which meant there was cause to doubt. Chris thought he and Vin had settled it between them, that the tracker'd been straight out honest with him in Nettie's orchard, and now he realized with a pang of real hurt that it might not be so.
Secrets on secrets, and had one been used to cover another? Had Vin turned him off one thing by giving him something else to chew on, like he was a dog or something? God, he hoped not, the rage that threatened deep inside him to even think it was monumental ... no, it wasn't that, surely.
Coldly he guessed he shouldn't be surprised Vin had more secrets than a dead wife, nor that he hadn't heard them all in that one night, but if he'd left out something that endangered them, if he was keeping something back that they needed ... a bitterness rose sharp in the back of his throat, eyes fixed on the knotted cord laying on the front of Vin's lowered hatbrim. He'd thought once before that he and Vin were open with each other and had learned different, and it was mighty unpleasant to have that lesson driven home again so soon.
Buck watched them both carefully, feeling a bristling between them he'd never expected, and a mistrust in Chris that surprised him mightily. It had seemed, since Nettie's being hurt, that the two of them had settled things between them and were at peace. Maybe even that Chris was keeping a secret for Vin, something shared that had restored his faith in their sometimes puzzlingly mysterious tracker. Well, maybe not, looking at them now, Vin's head down and his eyes everywhere but on Chris, and Chris' eyes nowhere but on Vin, steady as a sighted gun.
Finally Chris said, "Well alright, then. You say so, alright then." He didn't miss the subtle drop of Vin's shoulders, like he'd been holding his breath and only then let it go.
"I guess we can trust your 'feelin', eh Vin?" Suggestive of other things he might not be able to trust and his tone faintly sour with it so Vin closed his eyes a moment. This hurt, but he couldn't show any weakness now, couldn't give any openings for mistrust to grow, for them to question his reasons or judgments and maybe figure out what he was up to and ending up having to either turn him in or lie for him.
"I reckon you can, Chris." He finally said, and when he lifted his head, his eyes were clear and direct because the danger of that mesa was true, he just wasn't saying he might know who it was. Lord, though, the warning in Chris' eyes was hard to take, the threat of having against him a man who'd been a friend from the moment they'd met without Vin even knowing what a friend felt like. And Buck would turn, too, in reclaiming the old friend he'd given up so gracefully to Vin, and his enmity would be even deeper than Chris' in his defense. Not men he wanted against him, not men he wanted anywhere but at his back, as his friends, a thing he hadn't ever really grasped before Four Corners.
He almost wished he was still ignorant of it because it only increased the magnitude of what he was risking. In them he'd learned the folly of being always alone, of keeping so far a distance between himself and folks that he almost forgot how to speak, how to walk among them. He'd always thought alone was as he'd been meant to be, as it was wise to be. If they came to peril because of him, if they never understood his wish to keep them clear of treason, he would be alone again, and more than ever now that he understood what they were to him. He'd felt that way when Duley had gone, been crazy and lived wild as an animals. Instinctively he knew a man didn't get two such chances, he would never come back from it a second time.
His throat had closed up so he didn't try to say anything more, feeling Chris' sharp eyes on his back and Buck's pleasant yet piercing look like they made him bleed. He just went to fetch Peso and mounted up, grateful for the noisy approach of the pack train.
That Julianna girl headed right for him the second she saw him and all he could do was wheel Peso around and head up and over the ridge where she wouldn't be allowed to follow. Why wouldn't she just let him be? He'd made himself pretty plain, he thought, and didn't want to be unkind to a child, but her face bothered him mightily, made him ache in a place he hadn't even known existed and didn't want to know about now.
They took a rest there before heading down, and Josiah lifted Julianna down. "This is Glorieta Pass, Miss Monroe." He said, because she was so curious and he appreciated a child wanting to know things, hungry to learn: "There was a famous battle fought here during the Civil War, right where we're standing, that's come to be known as the Gettysburg of the West."
"Right here is Sharpshooter's Ridge," He said, crouching to flex and stretch his legs and back, gesturing down the piney slope. There was a look in his eye like he could see the ghosts before him, and Jules looked for them, too, in the shadows of boulders and trees.
Josiah continued, "And it was here the 4th Texas Mounted Volunteers - a bunch of farm boys and ranch hands, to be honest - held off 400 Confederate soldiers and turned the tide of war in the southwest, kept 'em from invadin' Colorado Territory and sent 'em scurryin' back to San Antonio ..."
Stephen huffed with insult at this characterization of Confederate troops and reached for Julianna to pull her away, but she side-stepped him almost gracefully, ending up against Josiah's side. His big hand dropped on her shoulder momentarily, a protective gesture Stephen neither missed nor dared to contradict. He wanted to argue, wanted to defend the honor and glory of the south because he'd always had to do so ferociously to compensate for his father's northern leanings, but he hadn't known about this battle and couldn't permit ignorance to be revealed. He settled for a scornful snort and turned away to his canteen.
"I never knew the war came this far west." Jules said, meaning the Confederate Army, and Josiah nodded, "Oh, yes. They wanted Colorado, and if they'd taken it, the war would have gone on for many years more than it did."
"I hate war." The girl said vehemently, defiantly shooting her disapproving Uncle a look that disapproved in return, feeling quite safe in the reach of the preacher's broad arms.
"All men of conscience do, Miss, but some held slavery to be a sin and a wickedness far beyond war. God sometimes calls us to unpleasant duty." Josiah said gravely, and she turned a bright and wide-eyed face up to him.
"Grampa didn't hold any slaves, did you know that?" Bragging about something she knew mortified her Uncles at home and taking a savage delight in poking at them.
Stephen glowered; among their peers at home, all wealthy slaveowners, their own father had spoken in favor of the Union cause and nearly made pariahs of the entire family. There was even the suspicion that he'd aided escaping slaves, provided fraudulent manumission papers. Betrayed them and their community at every turn, but it could never be proven and his goods and mills were too important to the war effort. Only when he had finally abandoned them had the brothers and their mother been able to rebuild their reputation, appearing at the slave auctions as if carrying out a sacred duty and making purchases despite not having the need for any more hands. It was the point that had to be made and many of those slaves had simply disappeared at war's end. His niece defied him as she hadn't dared for years and his hands itched with the will to discipline her.
"Then your Grampa was a man ahead of his time," Josiah said, and held Stephen's eyes when the sound of his voice drew them to him; "And a gentlemen I would have been proud to know."
This made Jules beam inside and out. Her Grampa was just such a man as this preacher, he had to be, proud and stubborn and not afraid of anything! Glad to have earned that admiring smile from him, she said,
"Old Mose told me Grampa gave them papers of manumission the moment they came onto his land, made them all free men." Old Mose being a boss in the tobacco barns on her Aunt's farm and not someone she was supposed to talk to, as she was not supposed to have anything to do with any of the negros. More than once, before she'd figured how to have her way in secret, her Uncle Stephen had taken a switch to her for playing with the field hands' children and visiting in the shacks, where she'd always felt more welcome than in her own dining room.
"Mose said my Grampa told him men were all men under the skin." A glance was all it took to see the redness creeping up her Uncle Stephen's neck, but her face remained the picture of innocence.
Nathan had been keeping a distance of the Monroes, the syrupy accents and genteel manners scraping raw a place inside him that had scarred smooth years ago. Now he took in the cock of that girl's chin at Stephen's threatening glare, the pride in it to agree with a grandfather who would have been called a traitor for speaking against slavery while the Confederacy defended its right to enslave. It was a thing to wonder at that a child of the south should have come so far past that way of thinking in so short a time, and for a moment he was ashamed of himself for having let that helpless and fearful feeling come back on him, even unconsciously. He'd been remaining in the background unseen and unheard, and even if it was to spare his own sensibilities, he was beyond that, now. This was not the south and he was not a slave, but a man of the frontier upright and esteemed by men he admired in return, a citizen of a town he was proud to serve. His generous mouth compressed a moment and a spark came to his ebony eyes.
"Let me help you there, Mary." Deliberately using her first name in easy familiarity, the healer turned to lift Mary Travis down from her saddle, his big hands nearly spanning her waist and with a warmly friendly smile so James had to take his outraged brother's sleeve in a hard pinch.
That a black man would address a white woman so, touch her without a hint of subservience, as if he were her equal! Stephen seethed with frustrated insult.
Indeed, Elizabeth had a moment of instinctive alarm herself over it; at home, such friendships had to be discreet, it was best to maintain a public distance from the Negroes for their own safety. The war might have ended slavery, but it had not changed what had always been a staunchly rigid division, deeply ingrained and viciously, if secretly, maintained. She held her breath as the tall healer challenged Stephen with a directly defiant look, but it took only a glance around at the rest to ease her. As distracted as they all seemed by their own business, every one of Mr. Jackson's friends had a defensive eye on their healer and a clear way to their guns, and the healer himself suddenly looked, for the first time, like an equally dangerous man. It was a warning even Stephen heeded.
Jules skipped off after Josiah to walk the line of mules and beamed at her Uncles as she passed, reaching out to take Nathan's hand and bring him along like he was an old and comfortable companion. He let himself be turned away, knowing her mischief when he looked down into her sweet smile and satisfied eyes.
"Girl, you seem t'like whackin' at bee's nests, don't you." Josiah's laughter startled the mules.
Fortunately, neither the Monroes nor Judge Travis knew the area and thus did not question Vin when he led the train down the gradually steepening incline into the gorge.
But Josiah wondered about it, and his inquiring look at Buck was met with a meaningful shrug that would bear some discussing later. The preacher's return look promised that, and Buck seemed willing, which meant something was going on. Josiah was almost afraid to know what.
They would be in the canyon no more than ten miles or so, only enough to bypass the mesa, but it cut very close their time to meet up with the train. Vin took the brother's vocal criticism about poor planning without comment, he'd as soon have to run to make the train than sit there in the open waiting for Wittinger to figure out what they'd done and have time to catch them up at White Rock. Them Monroe brothers made sounds he found very easy to tune out.
They strung out along the meandering east bank of the Rio and Jules ignored the crick in her neck from looking up at the tall rocky cliffs that had gradually engulfed them. On their left the river slid quietly by, muddy and calm but for the roil of a current in the middle, and there were trees and bushes growing on the rough rocky sides in places that hardly looked like they held a teaspoon of soil. Hoof-fall muffled in the sandy soil and the faint ring of bits and tack echoed up around them under the constant sigh of small waterfalls and the purling chuckle of the river. She was entranced by the sinuous corridor of colored layers and jagged angles and water-worn carvings, scattering mists from the streams falling down into the gorge on both sides shimmering with ephemeral rainbows. She wished the tracker would slow the pace a little so she could really look around.
Being held to a single-file effectively stifled conversation, and Stephen quickly found himself bored by the walls to either side of them and the lulling sound of the water. There was no reason he could see to have broken camp so late only to be rushed now to meet the train in time, it smacked of disorganization.
Chris and Buck rode in front a few yards behind Vin, with Judge Travis and the ladies following close on, the Monroe brothers and then Ezra, who was drowsing in his saddle, behind them. Jules rode in front of J.D. and the train, Josiah and Nathan chivying them along from behind.
It was quiet in there, and warm, safe-feeling within the walls and the horses and mules walking easily, ears slowly flicking forward and back. A shadow flickered over the broken ground and Jules squinted up at the broad band of blue overhead where an eagle wheeled on the updraft, passing back and forth in calm quiet sweeps. A smile spread across her face of which she was unaware, it was so beautiful with the wind fluttering against its wide-spread wings, answering the lift and drop of unseen air currents with graceful ease. She was so focused there that she didn't notice her horse had slowed until J.D.'s bumped into it from behind, and just as she threw him a laughing apology and that light girlish sound slipped into the hush, the explosion of a rifle-shot shattered the peace.
"Missed him, Stephen!" James cried, the pair of them oblivious to cocked guns in seven hands, half aimed their way, and Stephen sighted again on the eagle, which mocked his poor marksmanship by flapping once and resuming its wide wheel. Stephen's finger tightened slowly, the rifle holding its center on the outstretched raptor above ... he would show these peasants a gentleman's marksmanship, he ... lost his grip on the rifle with a cry of surprise as it was ripped backwards out of his hand, and when he twisted around to see who had dared, he found himself the blazing focus of the tracker's furious blue eyes.
"You damned idjit, what d'you think you're doin'?" Vin was so mad he didn't even know how he'd got past Chris and Buck to reach this stupid dandy first, all he knew was he had to stop him from firing again. Damnation! He'd taken them this way so their passing wouldn't be known, and now this thoughtless fool had all but sent the bushwackers a damned telegram! The echoes of that shot still reverberated, and the line of horses and mules had stopped in a jostling cramp, every eye on the two of them faced off, J.D.'s mount dancing as the mules stacked up behind him and all of them surprised and confused.
Stephen made an angry grab after the rifle but Vin's grip was white-knuckled and implacable.
"Give that back to me! I don't recall having to have permission to hunt, Mister Tanner!"
Chris was surprised to see Vin hesitate, swallow whatever had leapt hot and wanting out into his eyes.
"That - " a stab of the rifle into the air, "isn't hunting!"
"You can't just shoot an eagle, Uncle Stephen, it wasn't hurting you!" Jules cried from farther down the line, standing in her stirrups and leaning forward with temper over her horse's withers, "You can't go around killing things just because you're bored!"
"Julianna!" Elizabeth chided, but her expression agreed with her niece, and the moment of that distraction gave Vin time to get himself under control. With a few rapid ratchets of his arm he ejected the remaining shells out of the rifle and then handed it back to Stephen with a hard eye.
"A man don't kill things he don't intend to eat, Mister Monroe, and I ain't never heard of eagles even on eastern menus. You keep that damned thing in your leathers 'less it's called for or I swear t'God I'll disarm you for the rest of this trip."
Stephen's mouth opened and he looked to his brother, who was so spineless as to appear sheepish over the incident, and to the Indian Agent, whose mouth was set in a thin angry line - not angry with the tracker, however. The gambler raised his shoulders when he looked there, neither agreeing nor disagreeing but obviously not about to be caught up in any trouble the Monroes might start with the sharpshooter - the gambler's cunning eye to advantage and unapologetic self-interest was something Stephen admired, thus, when he looked back at the man, he had to respect the subtle indicators that said this was a dangerous hand he would be wise to fold. He slammed the rifle back into its sheath and gathered up his reins with a stare that didn't back down, his face rough and sharp with restraining what he had never had to restrain before.
"Gentlemen do not hunt only for the table, Mister Tanner." He said, as if he'd been engaging in some civilized sport these uncouth barbarians of the west could not grasp.
Vin moved back up the line, his face angry but oddly inscrutable to Chris' eye. Vin loved the wilderness and had an Indian's affinity for its creatures, laid hands on every carcass he brought down for food in thanks for the sacrifice. Maybe that'd be enough to make him mad somebody like Monroe would try to kill a grand creature just for fun - that little girl seemed to have a shrewd knowing of her Uncle's instincts and wasn't shy about singing out with it, either.
Jules saw the grudging approval that gunslinger let fly her way, and brief though it was, it put a tingle down her back that made her feel like she'd taken on an army and won.
"Chris." Buck ambled up alongside where the trail was wide enough for it, the train moving again, stringing back around the narrow bend; "I'm thinkin' maybe there's somethin' more t'worry about than stream-beds n' such up there. Don't seem a stream-bed would care whether it heard a rifle-shot down here or not."
A quick glance betrayed Chris' instinct to defend Vin, but Buck knew him. Chris Larabee had never trusted a soul on this earth through and through but his wife and child, and where there were lives he cared about at stake, he'd look at a thing straight-on. That he didn't immediately answer, though, didn't do much to set Buck at ease - Chris had suspicions of his own.
Chris did, at that, and he knew Buck was too sharp to pass off the observation Chris had made as well himself. He sighed and lowered his head, examining his hands on the saddle-horn and the dark feeling inside him of doubting Vin more and more. That bitterness colored his answer.
"Buck, he ain't gonna say anything if it's so n' I'm tired of bein' danced. Let's just us plan on you bein' right."
Their eyes met, men who had come through years and troubles and mortal times together and had no need to discuss how it would be or what to do, they'd ridden knee to knee too long a trail not to know how it had to play. Buck nodded grimly, then drifted back to make sure the line stayed tight and that the women were protected without seeming to have anything more on his mind than a flirtatious smile and a wish to poke some fun at J.D.
Vin wanted to be up out of the canyon first, presenting himself as a target it someone had to be. So when they started the upward climb, Peso jolting upwards in a motion that made his back ache, he moved a few hundred yards ahead on the incline intending to do it on his own. Within a minute he found Chris nearby off Peso's left heel, turned to the left in the saddle as the rim came near level with their heads and his rifle across his thighs. Vin knew it was cocked and ready to fire.
"Thought we'd keep you company." Buck had taken a similar position a bit closer behind on the right and his toothy smile was meaningful as he cleared his sidearm with a sweep of his own rifle's walnut stock. That lively edge on him, a man who always went headlong into trouble, and the same edge was in the razored stillness of the gunslinger on his right. Both back far enough to give Vin room to fire if he had to - Vin had a very wide kill zone - but both on the same high edge, expecting trouble. Both knowing there was something he wasn't sharing and saying so in actions that spoke their distrust louder than words.
Vin said nothing, neither agreed nor disagreed. But he slipped the loop on his mare's leg and shifted his pistol to the front of his high-waisted pants where the butt rubbed across his bruises like a conscience. As they rose out of the canyon on the narrow rocky path, his head did a slow swivel, everything but the moment put into the back of his mind. Frontier-honed senses spread wide on an automatic search that saw and heard and smelled and felt without his conscious will.
Ahead of them, the water tank rose in the distance alongside the occasional line of gleaming tracks in the dry grasses and scrub. Far to the south he spied the thin plume of smoke from the train's stack as it climbed the long grade to the top of the mesa. Mountains ahead, long and high and darkly forested.
For a few minutes he thought they'd done it despite Stephen's gunshot, though his hackles never laid down once. The mule-train came up out of the gorge unmolested, the women talking together and the girl between them, the Monroe brothers paying nothing any mind, but the Judge and Ezra high in their saddles, the rest of the boys craning to scan the land as they came up onto it. He noted that the mules had been broken into three smaller lines, Nathan and Josiah each taking a string along with J.D. Smart boys. He almost breathed easy.
As it turned out, the only trouble he'd avoided by taking the gorge was getting a little ahead of Wittinger and his bunch, he wasn't the first to see the dust of their pursuit approaching from the mesa behind them.
"Vin?" Buck's query was light and almost cheerful.
"I see 'em. Get this line runnin', Buck, soon's we hit them shallows ahead." A tip of his head toward the broad meander of several convergent streams heading over the rim, some of the banks cut deep enough for cover. "Keep the women in front."
Chris had already started moving back, his left elbow jerked once as he put a cartridge in the chamber and shot a hot glance back at Vin that Vin didn't much like to see come his way.
Like leaves blown off a tree, Vin and Buck and Chris peeled away off the column and turned back down its following length. Ezra noted it, and immediately why. He set his fingers to his fine curled brim as if taking his leave of the Monroes for another, equally pleasant engagement, and hauled around without explanation. The brothers looked after him, and Orrin squinted to see what was suddenly coming up their backs that had the seven drawing weapons like they had prey in sight. Riders, and a goodly number of them; Buck's hail caught at him and he looked over to find Wilmington twisted in his saddle and pointing with his rifle to the ravines ahead. Travis lifted his hand in acknowledgement, sliding his own rifle out from under his leg.
"Gentlemen, I suggest you clear your rifles." He said to the brothers with an understated urgency.
"Mister Travis, what is happening?" James asked, beginning to be alarmed, and the dark glittering eyes of the Indian Official took on a sudden set of experience and authority that James had not expected and did not find at all reassuring.
"It appears we've picked up some desperados, probably after the animals and goods. Flank the women and get them into that ravine ahead as quickly as you can move."
Stephen opened his mouth to object being sent to the rearguard with the women and children, but Travis fixed him with voice and eye so hard he shut it again. "Do as I tell you," The man snapped, "If you want to live through this, let these men do the work you've hired them for and do as I tell you!" One blunt finger rose in a dire warning that neither brother doubted; "My daughter's life is in your care. Now move!"
Vin stood in his stirrups, reins gripped up near his chest in his left hand as he held Peso back and took a moment to mark where everyone was: Chris on the far side of the line of mules as it lurched into a run, J.D.'s voice sharp in the sudden din of hooves as he moved the long-eared line as fast as the burdened animals could go. Buck was behind him, swinging wide upslope, and he spotted Ezra's red jacket as he split away from the brothers and heeled his horse into a run that would put him between Buck and the mule-train. He had a momentary glimpse of the women's confused and fearful faces as he passed them in the opposite direction, then he let Peso go.
Wittinger had the high ground - he knew him in the moment he grew near enough on the horizon to make out that tall-crowned hat through the glass - and now he saw men streaming down out of the trees in the distance to his left, spaced wide and opening fire as they came. Trying to pinch them off from two directions. It wouldn't take much for the bunch he was heading toward to catch up with the slow-moving mules, and those on the left could stop them before they reached the ravine or push them right off the rim if they got through. Obviously Chris knew that, too, his direction changing at an angle to meet those men coming down out of the trees, but it would take more than that.
With a tightening grip of his knees that Peso recognized, Vin dallied the reins loosely around his saddle horn and rose, balanced in the stirrups and taking the action of Peso's bursting run in his knees, the rifle rising a straight sure line at the chest of the man still a thousand yards out. Eager for the easy wealth on those mules, believing them undefended but for a few men, and destined to learn how devastating those few could be.
Vin didn't stop to see the surprised look on his swarthy face as his bullet took him dead center and off his horse like he'd run into a stretched rope, and with that shot the battle was joined. He didn't need to hear Chris' rifle to know it was barking, there were too many to take at close quarters so this would have to be a running fight of well-horsed marksmen.
James frantically raced for the ravine ahead, keeping an eye to the women between him and his brother and thanking God they could all ride as well as they could, hauling up on the reins as they reached the sandy embankment and plunged over it in an explosion of sand and water. Mules rushed past in a jostling crowd of hard bony shoulders and ear-splitting brays to mill wildly in the immediately muddy run, Josiah and Nathan turning them with harsh cries and slaps of coiled ropes into a packed order. Rifle-fire boomed on the mesa behind them as James flung himself off his horse and ducked so hard he nearly broke his own nose on his knees, even though it was not coming his way.
War - for a moment he was frozen by the immensity of the experience, terrorized in its urgent immediacy. He had a frantic glimpse of his brother's face, white and drawn, on foot among the horses fumbling at his rifle-sheath as his mount nearly spun in panic, head tossing and jerking him this way and that. But it was the sight of Mary Travis that got him moving; the woman snatched a rifle out of a scabbard he didn't recall seeing under her leg and leapt down in a flurry of split skirts as soon as they'd reached the bottom of the arroyo, a blur of purposeful motion. He lost sight of her for a moment as the rest of the mules streamed past on both sides and milled frantically, raucous cries adding to his confusion and the dust growing to choking levels, obliterating the landscape beyond them as Mary scrambled up to the top edge of the ravine, a rifle in her hands, and threw herself down.
A horse dug hard into the bank beside her as J.D., freed from the train, took his mount up the soft face, hocks sinking and snapping upward like pistons as the horse answered his voice and hands and heels. The moment the animal cleared the rise they were running flat out, J.D. laying low and hard across his neck as they raced back toward the nearing thunder of gunfire and the storm of dust and smoke thrown high in slow whirling clouds. A wave from Travis sent Josiah and Nathan after him, and Orrin had a fleeting instant of deep satisfaction that they trusted him to do what would be necessary here.
James thudded into the earth beside Mary, white-faced and all but rattling he was shaking so hard, but a rifle clutched in his hand and determined to acquit himself well for his sister's sake, his niece. He'd never been in the middle of a pitched gun-battle in his life and wished with childlike fervor that it would just stop, the noise was deafening and he was afraid the animals bunched and skittering behind them would spook right up their backs. But Mary Travis simply set her elbow into the dirt and sighted the rifle, waiting with all apparent fortitude for whatever might get through the seven men who were evidently going right into the teeth of the offered battle.
Jules scrambled up to the edge as well under cover of a dry grey-green bush at the edge of the ravine, mouth agape and her heart beating a rapid tattoo on the ground beneath her. For a moment she was frustrated by the dust obscuring the view, but then a gust of wind swept down the broad dropping slope like an invisible broom and the conflict unfolded before her astonished eyes. Images that would leap bright to her memory all her life as if she were here, again, in this moment.
A mocking whoop drifted back to them, the drum of hooves a tone too low to hear passing from the earth into her body. It was a strangely joyful sound, hunters loosed into a fray, and it seemed to encompass them all in the pure aggression of their advance. Those seven men didn't care how many there were against them, they moved in a pattern like a dance they'd long ago memorized together. Riders swept fast along the rim, merged for a moment, and then opened out from each other toward the riders from the trees to the left and back at those coming fast along the rim behind them.
Never a hesitation, never a backward look, rising in their saddles and rifles lifting, firing almost in a single coordinated volley into the scattering of outlaws on both fronts to devastating effect. She could pick them out, each of them, as the outlaws veered and bunched into several groups before a force they had obviously expected to simply ride down and over. She didn't know how many of those desperados had fallen, only that none of the seven had.
Buck and J.D. were running a wide curve so near the rim it made her breath stop and then they curved up again to come at the flank of the attack rushing up along the route the pack-train had taken, guns blazing. Chris and Josiah and Nathan, spaced wide, rode at a staggered diagonal angle upward across the slope, driving the men who had emerged from the trees into a long arc that slowed their momentum down the incline toward the ravine where the party had gone to ground.
And Vin Tanner - Lord, he ran straight through the first of the outlaws firing with steadfast accuracy despite his horse leaping and churning under him, fire, shift to the next target and fire again like one motion, one sound. Two fell at his approach, another's horse went into a hard tumble from running into them and he swung the rifle-butt in a short nasty arc at the head of the last rider as he passed him, then sat his black onto his haunches with his legs alone, looking for the next target.
"Yes!" Jules screamed into the nearing din, her hands pounding the earth in front of her as she saw what they were doing. The outlaws who had come up behind them were still coming, but now they were disorganized and shooting over their shoulders at Buck and J.D., now Vin as well, who had sliced through their line and turned to come up their backs. The three men on the upper slope cut and drove the rest into in little bunches with rifles and pistols and exquisite daring, and Ezra's red jacket wove wildly as he picked off any who managed to make it through.
"Yes!!" Screamed again with no idea why it was that word, it could've been anything and was almost inarticulate in the jagged exertion of her young voice, but she had to scream or burst. She would never be able to describe that ferocious and primal joy, the admiration that sizzled like lightening through her bones at their cunning and courage.
Buck and J.D. and Vin would be counting on them, now, to drive the outlaws back from their hiding place, wouldn't they? To force them between the slowly closing arms of the two lines the seven made? Would her Uncles know that? Feverishly she snapped her head around to look behind her, to warn them, but the Indian Agent was already at the rim, levering careful shots across the edge and her Uncles, for once helping rather than getting in the way, seemed to take his orders with grim obedience.
To her astonishment, Mrs. Travis had a rifle in her hands, too! Mrs. Travis, a fine, cultured woman, gripping a rifle and sighting down its long barrel calm and determined as any man Jules had ever seen. It was almost more than she could believe to see her very own Aunt loading Stephen's rifle and laying boxes of shells out just behind them from a saddlebag Jules had no idea where she'd gotten. Oh, this was a wonder!
It was all happening so fast and furious she didn't know where to look and tried to look everywhere at once. Outlaws driven into them veered off toward the mountain, splashing in a huge glittering spray through the stream a few hundred yards away from them, and the Indian Agent turned to follow their progress with his rifle, firing to discourage them from coming in their direction. Her Uncle James, looking like she'd never seen him look before, rose up to one knee to keep firing over the rim while Uncle Stephen turned with Mister Travis, the four of them covering several directions at once with her aunt feverishly reloading and passing up fresh rifles and now pistols, as well. It was a rout! Ha! Those outlaws had run into big dogs this time, with sharp and deadly teeth!
But then she saw a tight bunch of outlaws out on the flat fleeing back along the dark churned earth of the trail near the rim. Finding themselves in the cross-fire from the ravine and Buck and J.D. behind them, they had evidently joined forces to try to take Buck and J.D. and escape past them. She screamed out a warning they certainly would never hear.
Buck saw them coming out of the cloud of dust and raised a dust-dervish of his own sliding to a stop. Nowhere to go but off that damned edge, they were caught on open ground and he heeled his grey around so fast it ran into J.D.'s bay behind him.
"Git, J.D., we're between them and stayin' alive now!"
J.D. wrestled a moment with his plunging mount, hazel eyes going round to see the desperados heading straight for them. Close enough to see belches of fire from blazing guns, men desperate to survive and obviously unprepared for this dizzying-fast turn of events. "J.D.!" Buck sounding like he wanted to grab him and haul him away from the danger, and a bullet popped into the ground on the near right. He'd swear later that it felt like he'd lifted his horse's front hooves off the ground on the strength of his arms alone as he turned and lowered into the bunching hammer of his horse getting off into a run, spine crawling with expectations of a bullet in the back.
They headed for the nearest cover they could see and went crashing pell mell right through a stand of sagebrush. Buck's gray had not expected the ground to drop away into a streambed under his hooves, and only the gentle angle of the slope kept his hard forward stumble from going tail over nose. Buck got pitched in a short vicious arc over his head, fingers spreading wide to release the reins before they got caught and likely broken when the leads came to the end of their reach.
J.D. barely managed to stop his bay before it went over as well, and he saw Buck go tumbling down the embankment with so much alarm that he didn't even notice the bullet whiffing through the brush and across his cheek. The instant his mount's withers dropped below the rimline, J.D. threw himself out of the saddle and let the horse carry him down the incline by his grip on the horn.
Buck skidded on his hands and ass over a rise of overgrown roots and down to the sluggish trickle in the bottom of the shallow gulch before he caught himself, breathless and seeing spots but still in the fight.
J.D. let go of the horn and plunged down, moving on the force of that momentum but keeping his feet under him. He turned to look up and back, standing nearly straight up to see where their pursuers were.
"God Almighty, J.D., git down!" Buck snatched at the pantleg at the kid's calf and yanked his leg up into the air, dragging J.D. off his feet with a yelp and down, hard. By now J.D. knew when to fight such manhandling and when not to, and he stayed flat, snatching the right colt out of his holster and accommodating Buck's forceful wriggle to get a sight himself.
"Take the first one, now!" And J.D. did, that rider tumbling so Buck's nearly simultaneous shot hit the man behind him. The outlaw grabbed at his shoulder and reeled forward, black pistol spinning away through the roiling air, but he got the horn and kept his seat. Frantically J.D. kept firing, because in a minute they'd be right on them, he'd seen what horse's hooves did to a body they ran over and the outlaws would use their horses to do what their guns had so far failed at.
One of the outlaws tumbled unexpectedly to left and Ezra's dusty red coat suddenly sliced a bold stroke of color across their field of vision from left to right. With a meaty thump, his mount's left chest and shoulder met the right side of the advancing horse, driving the animal with a jolting sideways stumble into the next and forcing the whole bunch just far enough past J.D. and Buck to keep them from being trampled. Buck's whoop would've deafened J.D. if the gunfire already hadn't.
For a breathless forever it was a screaming thunder of hooves and hide and leather, working stirrups whizzing by their heads as the outlaws passed and kept right on going up the other side and out onto the flat, haunches bobbing away into the dust-cloud they made.
All the noise seemed to follow after them and grow faint. Quiet fell. Buck and J.D. straightened with the bank at their backs, pistols straight-armed in case any of the escaping outlaws turned to fire a parting shot, but they did not.
"Damn ..." Whispered but thrumming with glee, and when J.D. turned his head, numb and blank, Buck was scraped and bruised and covered head to toe in dust, and grinning like a crazy man, "Now that was fun!"
J.D. couldn't find breath or voice to speak, didn't know how he was still standing up when he couldn't feel his legs, and Buck and Ezra were grinning at each other.
Buck smacked him on the shoulder as he went for his grey in the bottom of the wash, "I swear, J.D., you look just like a trout on dry land ..."
Laughing out loud and shaking his head, sounding so like Buck that the terror let J.D. go. He could holster his colt, hearing that laugh, and find his own laughter in being glad he was alive.
In the ravine, they watched through the swirling pall of dust and gunsmoke as the retreating outlaws scattered in every direction. There were maybe six or seven left that could ride hard, three or more wounded, and none looking like they wanted anything now but to get as far and fast away as they could get from these seven men. Julianna yelled raucous as a field hand and for once nobody said a word about it; she was the voice of triumph they were all too breathless to find.
Chris, Josiah and Nathan, spaced broadly, pursued the bunch they were chasing far enough to ensure they wouldn't be back and then turned back down the slope, reloading at an easy trot and scanning the battleground to make sure their own were still standing. One by one they saw heads rise over the rim of the ravine, the girl leaping and punching at the air with a clear excitement. Chris heard Josiah's distant laughter with a wry smile of his own.
Orrin and Mary stood looking out across the battlefield for them; Chris, Josiah and Nathan were easy to see on the bare incline, scattered but moving well, then Buck and J.D. rising up out of a little gulley down the rim the way they'd come, shoving each other back and forth and whooping it up like boys after a brawl they'd won. Ezra rode sedately nearby, calm and collected as if he were out for a pleasant pastoral ride, but he had a deeply satisfied smirk.
Now that it was over, Elizabeth found she couldn't stand on her shaking legs and she sank to the ground where she was, rifle cartridges clutched in her shuddering hands and for a moment almost bursting into tears.
"Elizabeth, are you alright?" James' hands were warm on her shoulders, his worried face as he crouched and looked at her fearfully for any sign of injury. He was pale as a ghost and deeply frightened, she could feel it under the brave face, and she reassured him with a palm on his cheek and a wan smile;
"I'm fine, dear, nothing wrong with me but faint heart. Father would say you've been blooded today."
James felt an unaccustomed leap of warmth and pride to hear that forbidden name and know she was proud of him. That sign of his love made her smile widen just a bit; he'd always been the tail, he would say, of his brother's dog, helpless to do more than react and obey, but perhaps this west would show him his own shadow out from under his brothers. He was more like their father in his nebulous presence and doubtful, but deep-running, heart, than any but she could see.
"Go see to Julianna," She said with a wry and weak shooing motion, "she's acting like a Roman at a gladiatorial game, I despair of her out here!"
The men who had fought that battle returned to them singly and in pairs, Larabee's eyes going for Mary the instant he was near enough to see. Though neither said a word, the look that passed between them was ripe with relief and made Elizabeth shiver with longing to see.
Mary felt that urge to shelter in his arms that she always had to fight at such times, to lean into his iron-hard body and feel the thrum and heat of him like an untiring constant engine where no harm could ever reach her.
But her husband's death had taught her that even the strongest man was no guarantee of safety, and times such as these brought those feelings back as well. He could be gone in heartbeat, and this man rode hellbent into it trouble like it was all that made life worthwhile, sought violence and death like a blanket he could pull over the pain of losing his family. Oh, she understood that, but he would not have her compassion and she respected the fragility that couldn't bear it.
Still, she was woman and human enough to take comfort in the powerful feelings in his pale eyes whether he meant to show them or not. She'd learned to skim below the ferocity of his surface, it was enough to know she wasn't alone out here and never would be while he lived.
Vin, however, wasn't among them, and as soon as the other six came together and realized that, they set their backs to each other to scan the dust-drifted battleground on all sides.
"There!" The Monroe girl yanked on Chris' hand without knowing or caring who it was she'd grabbed so rudely, eyes focused away and pointing far across the mesa to a flicker of horse and man chasing hard across the face of the last slope toward the treeline. Even that far away, Vin's determination was obvious, balanced in the stirrups and laid long and forward in the saddle like a panther within a claw's reach of prey. The outlaw disappeared into the treeline and Vin went right after him.
Jules bounced anxiously, trying to pierce the shadows searching for him, shooting a furious look back at his friends for someone to do something. But both gunslingers were already going for their horses; they had just swung up when a single distant rifle-shot scattered out from the woods.
Buck and Chris reined in and sat; they knew the sound of Tanner's rifle, and it had been his; there was no answering fire.
All six relaxed and Buck winked at Jules' confusion, walked his tall gray near her and leaned down with the loose and lanky grace of rawboned men. He had a smile she knew was wicked and yet still she believed it - everything was all right.
He murmured, "Don't worry, girl, he'll be along presently." Wondering why she was so openly worried about a man who'd kept clear of her like she was poisonous. This was one little filly destined to grow into a woman to be reckoned with, and Buck dearly loved strength of character in women. A spark, a defiance of things that didn't suit her and a willingness to take the trouble that came with being so contrary. Her smile was like a strike of lightening, and she turned back to watch the woods again. She had strong feelings for Vin, and Buck was confused by that. What was it with Monroe women and Vin Tanner, anyway?
Several minutes later, Vin emerged from between the trees, his rifle laying aslant on his thighs. The battle was done, and Wittinger would not bother them again. Vin figured he'd probably done him a favor - wasn't smart to undersell the dangers of a job to desperadoes such as those he'd recruited into this attack, particularly when they'd come away with nothing but wounds and the loss of eight or nine men littering the mesa in the space of fifteen minutes.
The tracker came down the slope at a pace that told Chris he wasn't worried about anybody shooting at him from behind, and so he figured the outlaw was dead. He'd never seen Vin take after a man like that when the fight was already won. He was seeing too much he'd never seen in Vin Tanner lately, a man he'd thought he'd known to the bone from the second they'd met.
"Buck, let's get them mules untangled or we're gonna miss that damned train."
Buck looked over at his friend curiously. He was watching the tracker out across the expanse like he wasn't sure what was going on and was mighty unhappy to feel that way.
"Chris ..."
"Just get the mules, Buck." Squinting into the distance a moment more before dropping his head, his tone ending the conversation as surely as if he'd turned and walked away.
James and Stephen stood dumbfounded, watching the men sort out the mules and horses with cool aplomb despite being covered in sweat and dust and even blood, which none of them appeared to notice. They gravitated to each other with dust-raising back-slaps and eyes bright as fire, adrenaline moving among them in flares of laughter and bursts of excited talk. Like it'd been a lark. Like such unimaginable things happened every day, could happen again at any moment. James shivered and turned to his brother beside him.
"Stephen," James said, "You're going to leave those men alone from now on." Firm as a commandment.
Stephen, the handsome angles of his face smeared with dirt, knuckles skinned and the front of his body covered in dust that went to mud heavy on his pant-legs, just stared at him as if he were speaking a foreign language. He looked like a stunned ox, James thought uncharitably, but he pressed that advantage with newfound resolve.
"Obviously they know what they're about here, brother, and we do not. They do not need us, but we most certainly need them. Hold your peace around them, no more trouble. It's the only sensible thing to do - dammit, Stephen, do you hear me? Do you know how close to being corpses we were? You'll hold your peace, agreed?"
Stephen nodded, unable to contradict the wisdom of his little brother's demand in light of what carnage - and what deadly skill - he had just witnessed. Stephen Monroe was not stupid and would not allow pride to blind him to the reality the of dangers he'd just had smack him in the face. He did want to live through this; gold was worthless to a dead man.
James was satisfied, and felt a deep spark ignite and begin to burn where there had been only cowering emptiness. He cleared the breech on his rifle and unconsciously hefted it in his hand as if settling something wild to familiarity.
Chris walked out to meet Vin as he approached, and he had a look on his face Vin had never seen before. Like he wasn't sure who Vin was - oh, Vin thought with quick dread, don't let him ask the question he's got in his eyes ...
"You kill him, Vin?"
Did you shoot him in the back running away, did you know him, know what was going to happen here? None of the latter voiced, but Vin took it like he'd been hit and Chris didn't apologize for it.
Peso shifted, frothed and filthy and yet still ready to go for more, and Vin suddenly looked like that, too.
"We tried t'kill each other n' my aim was better." He said, quiet and cool enough so Chris knew he was mad, but if that was how it had to be to keep these people alive, he'd take it and find a way to work it around later.
Over Chris' shoulder Vin spied that Julianna girl running toward them like he was her long-lost Daddy or something, and the image startled him so badly that and Peso's front hooves lifted off the ground.
"We gotta get movin'." He snapped, "The train'll be there before we are. I'm gonna ride ahead t'keep 'em for us."
"Mr. Monroe, I suggest we make haste for the train." Orrin said, smiling a little when Stephen started and his mouth closed with a snap.
"Train?" He said, and Orrin laughed at his stupefaction and clapped him on the shoulder firmly.
"Yes, the train, sir, remember? Bring your wallet, sir, you're buying passage for us all."
Vin walked around the bales of straw and winter grass feed, barrels of water. Right here by the water tower waiting for them. Waiting for them.
Now, a cowboy who'd lost his horse to accident or foul play could wait by a water tower with his saddle and expect to be picked up and taken on to the next town down the line, but these supplies said this train had expected them. Vin had gambled on the fact that the train should be towing empty box- and cattle-cars north from Santa Fe, he had in no wise thought to find just the supplies that would make the journey comfortable. Had no idea how they'd gotten here and wasn't the least bit happy that they had.
Stephen and the Judge were arranging passage near the steam engine, which breathed in metallic huffs and wheezes like a great metal snake paused on its long slither north. People in the passenger cars looked out curiously at the approaching line of mules and trainmen came walking back to let down the ramp doors. Vin walked around that pile, thinking out whose hand it read like and a cold rich anger rising like relief to have a focus.
"J.D. was doin' that target thing he does again." He could hear Buck laughing as he mimicked a straight-up erect posture like a politician at a podium, and J.D. turned on him with a scowl and a ready retort,
"Yeah, well at least I ain't the only one can fly, right Buck? You shoulda seen 'im, Chris, he went sailin' into the air like a big old bird - c'mon, Buck, wasn't that you? You got you some feathers under there all mixed up with that animal maggotism?"
They were laughing as the mules came in, the dust-cloud they made swirling over them and away as they came to a stop. Vin had started walking toward them, almost unnoticed going straight for J.D., reaching up and grabbing ahold of the kid's coat-front and hauling him off his mount so fast he nearly tore his boot off on the horn. J.D.'s hands clutched defensively over Vin's, the look on the tracker's face scaring him like he'd never been scared of Vin before.
"Vin?" Buck moved his gray quickly beside them, no one knew what was going on as Vin jerked the young Sheriff nearly nose to nose and hissed,
"How'd all this shit get here, J.D.?"
J.D. was dumbfounded, eyes darting to the supplies he'd been so proud of arranging for, and his answer was high-pitched and stammering,
"I wired ahead, Vin ... I ... figured we'd need it, I wired ahead to Santa Fe n' told 'em we'd pay for it when we got here, Vin, what's ..."
"Damn fool kid!" Vin shouted and all but flung J.D. from him, fury marking him body, face and voice.
"That's how they knew where we was headed, damnit, ain't you got a lick of sense in your head?"
"Vin, what's goin' on here?" Chris dismounted, as did Josiah, and Buck pushed his gray so the horse's shoulder nudged at Vin from behind. The gray flinched and skittered backwards when Vin flung a fist out toward its nose to get it away from him, intent on J.D., wide-eyed as a deer caught in lamplight.
"Why didn't y'just send 'em an invitation, J.D.? Here's a bunch of good mules n' supplies, n' hell, even a coupla pretty women!" Not saying guns, not thinking guns or whose fault this really was or how hypocritical he was being.
J.D.'s mouth opened and closed soundlessly, hands warding as he tried to think how to explain and speechless at the temper Vin was showing, appalled to have it directed toward him. He'd thought it was a good idea, he'd thought to impress them with his foresight, yet as the rest realized what Vin was so mad about, they seemed to share his opinion. God, he'd done something really stupid, incredibly stupid. Helplessly he looked around at them, feeling more than useless and mortified to have brought the most peaceable man among them to such anger with him. Vin, his friend, Vin who never yelled and answered whatever question was sincerely asked, was looking at him like he was the biggest fool God ever put on the earth.
In the middle of his fury, in the red-hot rush of mindless temper grasping at something it could vent itself on, Vin saw the kid's eyes fill. Felt everyone looking at them, listening. J.D. never could hide a feeling from writing itself all over his face, fine-boned and boldly expressive, and his heart was just about breaking.
Vin's lips compressed into a thin hard line and he turned away with a downward jerk of his head, sucking in a hard breath and finding it stuck in his throat. He realized what he was doing, then, and it shamed him as nothing had in a very long time. It was a fight to put away a force of rage he never let out anymore, much less at this foolishly big-hearted kid, and he was aiming it where it didn't belong. J.D. never meant a thing to go wrong, never did, he went earnestly and well-intentioned into every mistake he ever made without thinking a single what-if, he been tryin' to teach him that.
Lord, he was losing his grip on himself and he couldn't, he couldn't, it was all he had any grip on at all. His gloved hands crept to his hips and the slant of his shoulders steepened, his hatbrim his shield.
Behind him, Buck's spine loosened when Vin rooted himself and seemed to settle, to everyone's vast relief. This was not a temper they'd ever seen loosed among them, but the fact was, Vin was right.
Chris knew Tanner wasn't relaxed except in posture. All this time he'd been wondering at the anger he'd sensed banked in the tracker that he'd never seen Vin carry so plainly, and now he was wondering why it had broke loose beyond J.D. being J.D. The kid was inexperienced and they often forgot that, it was the price they paid for having him among them. Mostly it was worth it, he made them laugh and would face down a tornado thinking he had a good chance of taking it down.
"J.D.," Buck said, quiet, but with a smile that was like an older brother embarrassed in front of his friends by a younger, "Why do you think we all sat around the table that night n' talked this whole trip out like we did?" Offering to teach this lesson so Vin could cool off without backing down, because the kid had been wrong and had to be told why.
J.D. looked like he wanted to sink into the ground, all of them looking at him like he was a kid again and he couldn't find anything to defend himself with.
"J.D., we did that so's we'd all know what the plan was." Chris said, tall and severe, the flat brim of his hat perfectly level.
Vin bit down on the inside of his cheek, holding still and being quiet to try to bring the same state in his mind. Things were breaking free of his control, he wasn't handling this well, he was losing his grip among clever and intuitive men and it meant their freedom or their lives if he didn't keep them out of it. Not a one of them would survive in prison, like wolves battering themselves to death against the bars of a cage. He'd made a mistake here, and a big one, which Chris proceeded to make clear when he said,
"So there wouldn't be any surprises, things no one expected."
Vin grew breathless listening to Chris' quiet sharp voice, knowing the calm was for J.D., and the edge was for him.
"You brought people into this we didn't know about, probably sent word by telegram where we'd be n' when, and none of us knew it to tell you better. Telegraph operaters get bribed pretty easy, kid, turn of a head t'let some outlaw with a gold eagle look over the desk n' read what's gone out. We'd've told you that. Man has to know he can trust his information."
J.D. paled at the enormity of that accusation, Vin did, too, unobserved.
"You mean them outlaws back there ..." J.D. looked over his shoulder involuntarily toward the direction of that battle, his elfin face stricken when he looked back at them. His fault they'd all nearly been killed, he got so pale his freckles stood out like spots of blood.
"God ..." He breathed, "I'm sorry, Chris, I didn't think of that ..." Buck's bark of scorning laughter told him no, he hadn't thought at all, and he fell quiet at the somber consideration of the rest. Had he lost all the respect he'd so recently won from them? Thrown it all away at one time? Their faces hurt to see; Ezra disgusted, Nathan uncomfortable, Josiah disappointed. Chris looking at him like he had the first day he'd tried to join them, Buck shaking his head. And Vin upset like he'd never seen him no matter how still or quiet he was just now.
"A man works in a team like this, J.D., he can't be keeping things that'll affect 'em all to himself."
Vin didn't move, didn't breathe, couldn't even look at Chris to make him stop because he'd give everything away in his face and he did not want the others to be suspicious, too. Chris would hold the confidence they'd shared, he knew he would, but the gunslinger was thinking beyond that now, and would be looking from now on for tells Vin would have to restrain.
"I'm sorry, Vin, it was stupid." J.D.'s misery was no more than his own, but J.D. could apologize for an honest mistake and Vin couldn't. His guilt remained in him, could do nothing but fester and be hidden. It felt like everyone was waiting for him, so he obliged them, compelled to ease them in their ignorance and honesty and heal the breach he'd caused by putting blame off himself onto J.D.
"Every lesson has a time t'be learned." He said, wondering when he would learn his own. The kid's face when he looked up was full of regret, nakedly scared that he'd lost their trust and done something unforgivable. Vin, though carefully expressionless, wanted to cover his face and sink down on his heels and search Duley out inside to remind him why he was lying to these men who trusted him, why he was putting folks he cared about in harm's way. But all he could do was let J.D. see a little regret while all those that were so much deeper had to be hidden.
"Let's get on board." He said, and went for the first train of mules himself feeling thoughtful eyes on his back.
To be continued...
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