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:
Their fire looked lonely out in the wide dark above Ft. Laramie, burning pine wood brought out from the Fort because there was no fuel ofany sort left after only a few years of white man's occupation, and pitiful little grazing. All of them were drawn in their time, thinking their separate thoughts, to contemplate that outpost below. Josiah and Chris had come back with three of the hens plucked and rubbed with salt ready for roasting and a dutch oven with a soft-raised mound of bread dough, and they'd laid their small camp in a quiet sensitive to the rawness of unspoken things just under the surface.
Vin didn't feel at all well, knew he wasn't in fact. He was light-headed more often than not, and there was a hot turmoil in his soul over having kissed Elizabeth Monroe that would not rest, he could barely push it back far enough to feel sane. His flank hadn't quit throbbing since he'd aggravated it earlier and his ribs and hip ached, just ached, his whole body oversensitive to pain and discomfort.
He went about his business slowly and carefully to accommodate what he understood to be fever, trying not to overheat himself with the chill of night falling and wishing he had enough whiskey and the privacy to indulge it until he was unconscious. Natural sleep hardly seemed possible, a man couldn't sleep with such guilt as he felt so rampant - Lord, what wouldDuley say about him kissing Elizabeth like that? About him wanting to so much, wanting so much more ... she was silent just now, but she would not be silent in his dreams, he knew it.
He'd kept his distance of women since Duley'd gone, not because he didn't have the same appetites and urgings as any other living man, and not because he wasn't human enough to indulge them when he had to. He was a peculiar man and had long since accepted that, many of his ideas and attitudes formed in distanced solitude without the influence or understanding of adults, or even other people. But that didn't make them any less true, and a man had to live by his own beliefs no matter how strange they might seem to others. Nettie said God put morality in all people to either take up and live by or let wither in wickedness, and he was holding on to his with both hands right now.
Truth was he'd never wanted to risk forming another bond as intimate as the one he and Duley had shared, because beyond believing no other soul in the living world could touch the places in him that were hers, he was incapable of more than one such love at a time. Allowing another woman into his heart - if it was even possible - would mean he'd have to let go of Duley, who was infinitely more precious.
So while he could fulfill his body's needs with others, he was as sure as he breathed that no woman but Duley Monroe could ever fulfill the wordless needs of his heart. The thought of losing all he had left of her, his dreams and Duley's visitations there ... that he might find himself abandoned in the living world completely, forever, doomed to go on without even the slight comfort of those dreams ... he didn't want to even contemplate that.
He felt the weight of their eyes on him, Josiah a quietly reassuring presence - and so much more. He hadn't been paying attention there, but it was a guilty comfort now to know that if he got taken down himself, Josiah would at least carry the warning on. Vin didn't mistake that willingness in the Preacher's eyes and his gratitude was so profound he'd never be able to express it. Josiah had likely understood from the first what he intended, because it was a course the Preacher, with his own history among the people, would consider for himself. The Cheyenne stood with the Lakota, and Josiah would stand for them. Josiah had been backing his play a long time now in small, but not insignificant, ways.
Chris, though ... there was no avoiding the fact that Chris was coming at him sometime soon, his looks were so sharp and deliberately provocative that Vin volunteered to wipe down the horses just to get out from under the feeling of impending doom for awhile.
Time and again Vin found himself coming up out of a worried reverie he hadn't noticed falling into, this time with tack dangling from one hand and the other on his hip, his whole body cocked hard in thought and his head low between his shoulders, shaking slowly back and forth as yet another avenue away from killing turned to a dead end.
No one knew how far he'd go and he didn't intend to tell anyone, those chips would have to fall where they would if he couldn't avoid it. But premeditated murder was the worst sort of sin, and he could lose her forever as punishment. Everything kept leading back to that one price he didn't see how he could pay, and hell didn't scare him half so much as that. Deep inside there was a blackness of inevitability he would not, would not acknowledge. He sighed and shook his head again, dizzy with it, blind from the tangles he couldn't think his way to unraveling and that deeper terror that threatened in silent still patience.
He went back to work, ignoring the objecting pull of too many injuries over the tremors of not enough food and sleep. He'd killed before under man's law and been righteous; Gerald Monroe was as vile a criminal as any of them, worse. Whether he'd ever dirtied his hands himself - and Vin sensed that he had, with patrician enjoyment - he'd been the motivating force behind the death of innocents, and he was the architect of this genocide against the people. Surely it was enough to warrant death in God's eyes, wasn't it? Whatever he did, it had to be worth losing Duley and Chris and Jules and everything he cared about but his honor.
From under Peso's neck, the black hide rippling and twitching with pleasure, he watch Chris and Josiah check their dinner, Josiah dropping the lid back onto the dutch oven with a clang and a snap of burned fingertips.
What would these men he admired so much think of him if they knew what he was prepared to do? What would Chris do when - because it was no longer a matter of if - he found out Vin had used the Judge's cause to advance his own? Smuggling weapons to a hostile enemy with his own government engaged in a campaign against them would as easily ruin a Judge, a journalist, any of the six men who trusted him. Treason was a brush that could stroke wide when there were those it would serve - and there were too many who would bury Judge Orrin Travis and Mary and all the boys to covering their own sins.
And what if Chris tried to stop him? That thought stilled his hands with a thick grasping coldness he'd never wanted to feel. Larabee was going to be mad no matter how he played this, and he hardly had a hope in hell of keeping him from discovering those guns.
Vin forced himself to eat and tried not to show how impossibly mixed up he was, no solid ground under him anymore, he couldn't find his balance outside or in. The poor state of his own health was worrisome, too, with what he had in front of him to do, he might have to move fast if Chris became an obstacle.
As he laid back on his saddle, a cup of coffee resting on the flat of his stomach between his hands, Vin found Chris' eyes on him across the coals. Josiah was a thoughtful shadow of big deep bones and watchful eyes nearby, but he would not interfere. Vin realized with a flutter of high nerves that Chris was done waiting. He swallowed a frustrated groan.
Chris set his own cup down with a little clink on one of the stones around the coals, lacing his fingers together between his spread knees, and said blandly,
"Vin, I ain't the kind of man to walk stupid right into trouble, and I gotta figure you know that by now."
Vin's face tightened and his head turtled down a little into the collar of his coat, but he said nothing: It wasn't a question.
Josiah leaned one elbow back onto his own saddle and waited while this battle of wills was joined, both of them so unpredictably volatile lately that he could only pray it would resolve itself well. Chris had chosen his time well, though; Josiah had known when they'd come on Vin pacing that invisible line, even before Nathan started a soft swearing mutter, that Vin was running a low-grade fever. But he was also off-balanced inside himself like Josiah had never known him to be, even when injured. He wasn't ashamed to hope the tracker had weakened enough by now, was hurt and tired enough and his heart sick enough of keeping the secret Josiah admired him for keeping to lead him to honesty with Chris. Because if they kept butting heads like this ...
Chris smiled again, but it wasn't a patient expression. "You been holdin' some cards close t'your vest for weeks now, Tanner, and nobody's pushed you t'lay 'em down yet. I guess I'm about out of patience." Pale eyes diabolically colorless in the dim glow of firelight and the intent to push clear in them, in the snap of his voice and the bold forward lean.
But Vin Tanner had never backed off from hard looks, and he was prepared to be as stubborn as he had to be to safeguard this friend he mourned losing even now. He tipped his head back and said quietly,
"Don't reckon I need t' ante up 'til all hands've been dealt, Chris, and it ain't over by a long draw."
Chris saw stubbornness liven the deep-set eyes in Vin's tired face, his mouth twitched with a humor approaching real at the wry acknowledgement in Vin's obscure answer. He knew the stakes were going up, here, and he hoped to put it off. Chris didn't intend for him to be able to.
"We hired on t'do a job, Tanner." Again calling him Tanner, throwing that down hard as a fence between them. "I told you in Four Corners there'd come a time I'd be asking outright what you've been hedging off to yourself in all of this."
"I guess I might be askin' my own damned questions." Vin shot back with a quiet sizzle, referring to what Elizabeth had told him that his friends had not, and Chris leaned forward across the coals.
"There's some talk about what's goin' on 'tween you and that fetching young widow ..." With a sardonic twist of his mouth that could have been either distaste or disbelief. Josiah flinched at the sparks that struck between them, but Chris just kept on going.
"Some figure you just don't want to share personal business, that it's why you're actin' so peculiar, and you've let 'em think so - maybe longer than you should've."
The gunslinger chased the furtive shadow of guilt on Vin's face hard as a calf going down for branding, and Vin knew now that Chris was going for his throat and didn't intend to let go until his questions were answered. He despaired of holding up steady under that much stubborn will right now, but he just didn't know where Chris would land when it was Mary and Judge Travis who could suffer. He clenched his teeth, tasting bile in the back of his throat, and glared at Chris because it was all he could do. Chris focused in sharply, a predator with prey backed into a corner.
"Now me, I got reasons to think that's so much wool you're draggin' around over your tracks, cowboy." Smiling, but it was thin and mean and Vin got very still. Would he say why he didn't believe it? Say Duley's name in front of Josiah? He could see that threatening in Chris' meaningful eyebrows, glanced over at Josiah and found him somberly attentive to them both.
Silence stretched tight across the fire between them, both coiled intently, vibrating with the impossible clash of equal forces. Chris' eyes were calculating and he didn't try to hide it, hunting for a way through that prickly patch the tracker had drug in around himself and determined to poke and prod his way in.
Vin had never felt more trapped than he did right now in the eyes of this man he counted as the best friend he'd ever had, or likely ever would. Chris was right, or had been until today ... How could he answer after having kissed her like that? After having the taste of a woman's hunger in his mouth and pressed so needfully against him and glimpsed a heart that yearned for his happiness like no woman but Duley ever had. But how could he explain it, either? Vin didn't want to admit to himself much less to Chris that things might've changed between he and Elizabeth, Chris knew she was Duley's sister and Vin didn't want to see the condemnation in his eyes to think ... God, to think what? Was he even thinking? His thoughts chased a dizzy circle he needed time to slow and sort, but he didn't have that luxury with Chris on him all teeth like this.
Chris saw the desperate edge on Vin no matter how composed he seemed, tension in the fine lines around his eyes and the thin pallor of his mouth. For the first time he almost felt bad about it, not wanting to run Vin to ground this way but having no choice he could see. Vin was going to do something that could get him killed otherwise, that much Chris was certain of.
"What is it you're wantin' to get off alone to do, Vin?"
"Never said I was, just scoutin' is all ..."
"Just scoutin' my ass, Tanner."
Chris could see the mad zing of thoughts in Vin's wide eyes, knew he was trying to find something to pacify him and thus did not believe the very believable thing Vin came up with.
"I'm gonna warn Crazy Horse, if you gotta know. Alright? I'm gonna warn him about the Monroes n' about Custer n' about the troops Crook is musterin' in the territories. I'm takin' word t'the Lakota."
Chris' eyes narrowed speculatively, but Vin knew with a sinking heart that he didn't quite buy it.
Chris nodded thoughtfully and said, "Yeah, maybe that's some of it, but it ain't all. Me n' the boys, we aren't exactly big fans of the cavalry, I can't imagine you'd think we were. Nor that we'd mind you findin' a way to help unravel this rope they're knottin' around the necks of the Indians up here. Just because we don't known 'em don't mean we don't give a shit. Wrong's wrong. No, that ain't it, and I ain't lettin' you up from the ground you're sittin' on before I know all of it.
"You sayin' I'm a liar, Larabee?" Vin tried for anger and found it only at himself, struggling to turn it outward, to drive Chris off those guns, away from having to make a choice he couldn't ask him to make knowing how he felt about Mary, how deeply he admired the Judge.
Josiah was watching Vin very carefully and Vin looked back at him with the uneasy suspicion that the Preacher was reading every thought he had. If Chris knew about the guns, he'd have to take a stand either for or against. If he chose for, he'd be running the same risk of treason that Vin was, that he was willing to bet now Josiah himself had decided to take way back in Four Corners. He'd be risking the enmity of Judge Travis, betraying a man who would not be able to forgive being used to shield covert crimes even if he agreed philosophically - his duty was intractable, his justice as utterly blind as any Vin had ever seen.
"Guess I am, Tanner." Chris' head cocked to one side, fair hair ghostly in the dim light, the handsome cuts and slopes of his face drawn in silver against the night. "Not sayin' things can be an outright lie sometimes, I reckon."
Cold as a stranger and Vin actually shivered to see that in his eyes and know what he was talking about that no one but he and Chris would understand. He hadn't told Chris about Duley until he'd been forced to, he hadn't offered his understanding and support when Chris needed it more than breathing. That was what had bothered Chris then, and it still bothered him now. It seemed so unimportant to Vin with so much else going on. And then Vin really did get mad, and in that anger he thought he'd found the way out of it - make Chris mad enough, and words would stop. He didn't think Chris would kill him him, and he was willing to take whatever punches it took for Larabee to feel like he'd won without actually giving over the knowledge of those guns.
Josiah's big shoulders rose in alarm as the sparks that had been striking between them burst into flame. He knew what Vin was doing, and it was a very dangerous gambit. He wasn't sure, strong as he was, that he could control Chris Larabee if the man's temper got the better of him.
"Dammit Larabee!" Vin snapped irritably, "I ain't no little child you can push around, I don't owe it t'nobody t'tell 'em every last damned thing I been through in my time, what I've done or had done t'me or any damned thing I don't want to talk about!"
Chris rocked back at this blunt rejection of his own feelings of betrayal, which he, of course, felt were more than fully justified. The fact that Vin would attack him even so obliquely as this, because Josiah wouldn't know what Vin was alluding to, rather than admit the truth made him so mad he hardly kept from getting up right then and hauling Vin up with him just so he could knock him down.
Vin saw it and pushed harder; "I said what I said, you asked me n' I told you! That ain't good enough for you, well, it ain't my nevermind. Lots of things ain't my nevermind, cowboy, I don't owe you a damn thing! You can glare at me 'til the sun burns down!"
Josiah realized there was a subtext under the angry words that was beyond information or guns, surprised to understand for the first time that the trouble between Chris and Vin had begun long before this journey.
"You gettin' mad, Vin?" Chris asked in a soft voice, eyes and smile suddenly cold and sly. Vin glared, angled jaw jumping and mouth thin. He'd made a mistake and Chris was on it like a wolf with blood in his mouth.
"Well, saddle up and ride catch-up hard, boy, because I've been madder than that for days now." Like it was something that pleased Chris, glad enough to make Vin's head cock aggressively. Because Chris Larabee understood the clarity of anger, was comfortable in rage and the forced focus of tempting it. Times when grief and sorrow and emptiness got too great to stay in alone, driving a man out of himself into bloody chaos before it he died in there, alone. And Chris knew Vin Tanner understood that every bit as well as he did.
Without another word, Chris got up and stalked toward the mules, Vin's startled eyes rising and following long before his body could do the same. The bony heads of the mules lifted at the gunslinger's approach, long ears shuttling forward toward him, and the instant their eyes shifted to look over his shoulder, Chris' elbow shot back and took Vin upside the head with a short and vicious strike. Josiah winced at the audible crack and Vin dropped like a rock, but Chris just went right on uncovering the packs. Josiah was glad Tanner didn't try to get up again, though he was momentarily worried when Vin, sprawled out on his back, didn't move at all.
He breathed a little easier when Vin's legs and fingers jerked in his waking, he groaned and rolled to one side dizzily, but he still met Chris' eyes with a bloody defiance as the gunslinger looked back over his shoulder. One of Chris' eyebrows rose coolly and he went back to the task, taking down one of the packs and squatting down with it, ripping the ties open and spilling half a dozen pistols onto the ground.
His eyes rose to Vin, flooded with a comprehension that was only half furious. What Vin had been protecting him from was immediately clear, as were the choices he'd tried to keep Chris from having to make - that he now had to make in earnest.
But Vin was looking at the guns himself because they weren't the ones he'd bought and packed, he'd never seen them before and his genuine surprise confused Chris ... the tracker turned to Josiah, who simply took a sip off his cup and shrugged with a deep amusement in his gleaming blue eyes.
For a long minute Vin and Chris both stared at him, open-mouthed, Vin twisted half-over propped up on a forearm and Chris squatting over that pack. Then Chris dropped backward onto his rump and started to laugh, shaking his head, and every hard thing that had come between them broke apart and scattered away on those airs.
Come dawn the following morning, the three were on their way without breaking the silence with a single word. They didn't need to, working like a well-oiled machine and enjoying a deep and quiet gladness in it.
Vin and Chris exchanged many a glance, but neither apologized nor felt the need for it. Rock stubborn and pridefully foolish was part and parcel of what a man was, couldn't ask forgiveness for being what you were, and your friends would never ask it.
Still, Vin felt the lifting of a lonesomeness so oppressive he hadn't even known what it was until it gone. For the first time he actually thought he might live through this with his body and soul intact.
None of them noticed the shadows of two men slipping into their tracks.
They went at a canter through a loose scatter of trees, rain-black evergreens soaring straight as plumb-lines to the cloud-dappled sky amid leafless aspens bare and white as bones. Ageless layers of damp forest litter muffled the hoof-falls into hollow thuds, and though they could see a goodly distance through the wide-spaced growth, the staccato flickers of pale slanting sunlight and shadow striping them as they went was a confusion to the eye that Vin didn't like. They were blind to their left, downslope, where he would lay an ambush himself, and that worried him significantly. Felt like he'd had eyes on him all day and he'd never spotted them once. Three men and three mules were too easily mistaken as prospectors, and he couldn't know what warriors he might encounter, what shape they might be in, what mood. They could as easily kill the three of them to take the mules or satisfy a vengeance as allow him time to give them to them. After being harassed throughout the winter, normally a time of peaceful preparation for the hunting season to come, he was sure the Lakota were in no mood to look sympathetically at any white men found on their territories.
He sighed and canted his slouch hat deeper over his face against the constant misting rain, not enough to wet them thoroughly, but cold and annoying and putting damp into everything. Last night he'd let Josiah clean and dress the claw-wounds down his flank; well, maybe 'let' wasn't the word, what with Chris and the Preacher threatening to strip him down by force rather than have Nathan find out they'd let it go. Both knew how right the healer had been to wring the promise from them at the sight of those oozing furrows, stitches given up in tears here and there, angry and red and very obviously painful despite Vin's stoic acceptance of their unwelcome attentions. Josiah had regaled them with Nathan's salty thoughts on the matter, swearing Nathan had nearly put his eye out throwing supplies at him as they'd been packing the mules in Ft. Laramie. Vin didn't say so, but he'd slept better than he had for awhile and felt more keen today.
Accepting things as they were was a matter of habit with Vin. It didn't usually pay to question or fight or even celebrate things over which he had no real control, but a huge weight had been lifted away to have Chris know about the guns. And Josiah ... Lord, it was a fine buoyant thing to discover how much more of a friend both he and the Lakota had in that big preacher.
A waspish hum brushed by his cheek that Vin recognized immediately, his hand shot up in an automatic warding immediately followed by the wet thump of impact and a breathless grunt behind him. He swung Peso in a pivot so sudden and tight that the big black's back hooves tore distinct circles through the leaves into the black soil beneath, laying his body purposefully across the trajectory of any more arrows from that direction. Chris had pulled up hard, staring down at the quivering shaft that had suddenly sprouted through his left arm as if he didn't know what in hell it was or what it was doing there; blood bloomed in a black glisten on rain-beaded black cloth. Josiah had legged his mount into a run to catch up with them, the mules strung out behind him jaws up after the taut line of his sudden hurry.
Chris' pale eyes snapped up to meet Vin's as if looking for answers, and then another shaft thrummed to a stop in his left thigh. This time he went over, whether to protect himself or because he was too hurt to stay mounted. Vin pushed Peso across this new direction and had a glimpse of the tail of Chris' black duster and the bottom of his boot as his leg slithered across the saddle seat. He hauled Peso around throwing leaves and dirt up from under his hooves, and launched himself up high in the stirrups shouting a furious challenge.
"Heya! He He caught a glimpse of a spotted pony moving swiftly downslope of them and confused Peso by holding him back despite his own reflexive tightening and forward lean after them as Vin refused the urge to give chase. Those arrows had come from two different directions and he wasn't about to be drawn off into an ambush, or leave Chris and Josiah to face one. Peso was tossing his head and snorting against the quick turns Vin put him through to check the forest around them as soon as Josiah was near enough to protect Chris, driving upslope and then down, bracketing his friends and the mules from all directions. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Josiah and Chris back to back on the far side of Chris' black, pistols drawn and ranging, and his chest eased up the littlest bit. Chris was wobbly on his feet and bent awkwardly, but the barrel of his gun and his searching eyes were both steady and ready, pain ignored or put to use while the danger existed. Chris Larabee was never meaner than when someone drew first blood on him, and he was searching for a target with fire in his eye. No further attack came, and Vin stopped just within range of them higher on the gentle slope, held Peso hard to stillness with legs and hands and will so he could listen. Peso was not a tractable or pleasant horse, but he had a hunter's prideful heart and had never failed Vin when it counted. He held, ears a high swivel, nostrils flared, still as a graven image but for the flutter of mane and tail. A sigh of wind, the almost inaudible creak of saddle-leather when Vin leaned a hand on the pommel to raise up higher in the saddle, turning with every sense reaching out. Birdsong, like innocence. Slowly he settled back into the saddle. Vin could hope the Indians had heard and believed him, but chances were there were only two of them if they didn't press the advantage of having taken one of them down. "They're gone." He confirmed quietly as he approached them and dismounted. Josiah holstered his pistol at once and turned around for Chris, who was jamming his own .45 forcefully into his silver-conched holster swearing a blue streak as he went awkwardly down out of the crouch he'd been in onto his butt. His bloody fingers were white-knuckled around the shaft embedded in his thigh. "Wait, wait Josiah ..." Vin pushed by and squatted in front of Chris,grabbing onto his shoulder to pull him around toward so he could see the head of the arrow that had passed through his arm. Smooth; "Huntin' arrow ..." He said with a quick encouraged nod, and Chris flicked him anirritated and pained glance and said with a sarcastic grunt, "Oh, good, that's real good, damned glad that makes you so happy." His teeth were clenched hard around the words and he'd begun to shiver a little, but by the fire in his eyes he wasn't going down any time soon. Josiah stood up and let Vin take over, sliding his rifle out of the sheath on his horse and returning to stand guard over them, his eyes doing a careful route around them and his legs convenient against Chris' back as support. "Ready?" Without preamble, Vin took hold of the length of arrow behind Chris' arm and broke the head off between those grips. "Well, no, I wasn't quite ..." Chris complained acidly, his face pale and tight as Vin pushed him steady against Josiah's legs and grasped the feathered end of the shaft, bracing it between his fingers where it went into Chris' arm. He glanced up at Chris in momentary warning, then yanked it out in one fast move that made a harsh breath blow by his ear, laying it by his heels to look at later and whipping his bandana off and around the gunslinger's arm in a tight knot. Chris clutched automatically at it and bent over, a long sibilant sound issuing out between his clenched teeth, but Vin was already examining the shaft in his thigh. Again he glanced up at Chris, who wasn't surprised to see a wry half-smile on the tracker's face as he said, "Wanna take a chance, cowboy?" Tapping the arrow still in him so it vibrated and knowing by how white Chris got that the head was against the bone. Take a chance that it was also a smooth head and wouldn't rip through muscle if he tried to jerk it out - it would hurt like holy Hell if it was barbed and wouldn't come, and they'd have to dig for it anyway. Chris chuffed a soft laugh, green eyes clouded a bit but in no way defeated. "Hell ... I'm feelin' so damned lucky today. Do it." It hurt so deep Chris came within a grey breath of passing out, deep into the muscle and indeed nicked in against the thigh-bone, but it came out whole. Josiah moved to ease Chris flat and he lay there gratefully while the world spun nauseously fast inside his head, long narrow fingers clenching and releasing, breathing ragged and his eyes closed hard. The preacher handed down his bandana without taking his eyes off the forest around them and Vin, after letting the wound bleed a moment and delicately unraveling a piece of cloth up out of it, tied the bandana around the gunslinger's narrow thigh. He sat back on his heel, bloody fingers dangling over his knee as he looked around with the prickly sense of eyes on his neck. "You think you can go, Chris? We need t'get t'more cover if they come back with friends." He gave Chris a minute to get his senses back, then waited a moment more until he was able to get breath enough to talk. "Yeah ..." Tight as a bowstring as he flexed his arm with a testing twist, "Just through the meat ..." Both Vin and Josiah noticed he didn't mention his leg, they only helped him sit up when he made a move to do that and let him breathe a minute more, knowing how urgently he wanted to puke by the convulsive swallows. "Well," He finally managed in a breathless rasp, "Least I don't look quite so much like a porcupine." Josiah handed him his hat with a curved smile, and they got him onto his feet and then horsed with little trouble. Vin knew he'd be feeling those injuries before too long, adrenalin and stubbornness only went so far. But Chris had the advantage of a temper that had carried him more than once when he should have fallen, he gathered up the reins with a wince and said with some fire, "Dammit! Got a target big as Texas right behind me ..." A jerk of his head at Josiah as the preacher mounted beside him, "and they hit me twice, ain't no right logic in it." Vin just wanted off this slope and into deeper cover, his head on a swivel as Chris and Josiah followed on behind him. The chance that a pair of warriors were alone this far off their home range was slim, so he had to assume there was a larger party in these mountains somewhere. Once word got to them, they wouldn't be shooting hunting arrows, he thought grimly, afraid to know why the people were ranging so far into the mountains from their winter camps. They should be moving down onto the plains by now to hunt the buffalo as they migrated from their own winter camps to the slowly greening pastures. To find a hunting party scattered into these mountains filled him with a terrible vision he knew was true. The great plains that had reverberated with the thunder of thousands of hooves, that had shimmered like a dream under layers of dun mists from the dust of their movement, were silent now, and empty. Game was scarce even here, too much sign of white men trapping out the streams and hollows either on their own or at the behest of the army to starve the Lakota into submission. The people didn't understand winter war, as they wouldn't be able to believe the depths their enemy would sink to in order to steal what could not be owned. They managed to work their way lower into the protection of thicker trees and a problematic tangle of undergrowth, trading that cover for rougher travel in the hidden gulleys and brush-choked stream-beds. Chris was holding on well, though he was slightly ashen and had a gleam of sweat on his face. Vin knew they'd have to stop soon and tend those wounds better than they had, but his spine was positively crawling. Peso mounted a slight ridge with a jolting dig and surge of haunches and shoulders, and Vin had a glimpse of a broad down-dropping meadow that met the forest again at the bottom. He stopped so short that Peso had to lurch to keep his balance, Chris' horse too close behind struck his haunch with his shoulder and for a second they jostled, but the three came to a line on that ridge, looking across that bare meadow at the timberline a few hundred yards below. Nobody could see a thing out of the ordinary, but Josiah went for his rifle just the same, alerted by Vin's stand in the stirrups. If that boy'd been a hound-dog, he'd be pointin'. "Don't..." Vin stopped Josiah's reach without turning, and they held utterly still as a group of mounted warriors stepped out of the flickering shadows of the forest's thin edge where only their stillness had concealed them. They stopped expectantly, magnificently adorned and painted, astonishly colorful. "Well, I'll be ..." Josiah sighed, and it was a breathtaking sight. Golden eagle down-feathers fluttered and turned on horse-hair hackamores, broad tail feathers and pinions displayed on the tips of lances butted into their braided insteps and the points of bows held in hands bristling with ready arrows. Red hands and white hail on a startling blue background, hoofprints in black and brown and yellow climbed haunches and yellow lightening strokes were painted boldly on the ponies' hides in a colorful profusion. Circles around their eyes to give them keen vision, stripes around their legs for fleetness and sure-footedness, jagged strokes from haunch to knee, from chest to elbow, the warrior's thunder power expressed. Chris blinked, mouth parted at this apparition of fierce and mesmerizing beauty. Vin's couldn't breathe, everything in him straining toward them with the same fearful longing he'd felt so long ago when first he saw them. Strange and wild and fitting this world like no white man could, fringes and feathers and long black hair moving in the breeze, a people who loved the wind and the music it made on the world, symbols of the spirits that gave each their power, personal battle histories laid out in paint and beadwork and quillwork and headdress for the eye that could read them, and he knew these were warriors of renown even from this distance. Not just hunting, but ready for war. No one was surprised this time when Vin called down to them in the language, and what little out of the vaguely challenging echoes of his statement Josiah understood made his eyebrows raise. "Brother Tanner?" He said very quietly and calmly, "Are you sure it is wise to be so ... aggressive?" The warrior in the center shook his lance over his head with a barking cry and heeled his brown and white pony forward in a short charge to the middle of the field, his comrades urging him on with gestures and calls. Vin twisted sharply in his saddle to look back at Chris and Josiah, his face deadly serious. "Follow on close 'til about ten yards or so away from 'im, let me go from there." He said, "Don't do nothin' - we may be seein' these seven, but there's more out there, n' they've had time t'get behind us." The sudden brightness of a wicked grin startled both Chris and Josiah, his expression lit and hot with something neither Chris nor Josiah understood. "Seven is a holy number, y'know." He said with a little laugh, so quietly they'd have thought he was talking to himself except that his eyes were so significant. Then he turned and kneed Peso hard enough to make him jump into a tight-reined canter down the slope. "I don't like this." Chris growled, eyes narrowed on Vin's back as he leaned up and set his mount in motion, Josiah right alongside him dallying the ties of the mule-line around the broad pommel of his Mexican saddle. His glance cut back and forth rapidly between that task and the Lakota waiting for them below, seeing no smiles on the variously painted faces but not necessarily as offput by that as Chris was judging by the rise of his shoulders. A glance between them parted them to either side of Vin, which exposed them to attack but opened their own field of fire. Blue eyes and jade marked the warriors nearest to the tracker as he pulled Peso up a couple of yards away from the warrior on the pinto; they would be the first targets if shooting started to keep Vin from being caught in the crossfire. Chris cleared his duster from his gun in a sweep of black that drew dark observant eyes. Josiah didn't need to see his face to know why the warriors straightened in answer, shifted a little further apart from one another. Josiah had seen Chris Larabee take down four men in a roaring moment so quick no single shot could be distinguished, and that confidence had always dressed him like sharp-bristling armor - not afraid to die and deadly because of it, telling them so and ready to prove it. They stopped as Vin had requested a few yards upslope of Vin, Vin said something sharp, Peso dancing in place and tossing his head as much as he could from the hard bow Vin's reins put on his neck. The Indian gestured dismissively and his companions laughed, voices rising as Vin said something else in a tone of contemptuous challenge. Some sort of agreement was reached, the warrior Vin had been talking to pulled off his bow-case and handing it and his lance to another warrior as Vin looked back at them drolly. "They're insultin' my horse. Stay put, we're alright here." Yet he and that warrior seemed to be tossing insults back and forth at each other as they came together again, their faces serious and the postures of both men and horses aggressive as bears edging around each other. Peso held a hard arc to his neck without Vin's encouragement now in challenge of the mare the Indian was on. The moment they turned and faced across the meadow together, pointing at a cedar at the far end glowing red in the breaking sun, Josiah sucked in a hard breath of realization and stood up in his stirrups. Rough ground, gulleys choked with brush and running streamlets made the course complicated; Chris glanced at him, alarmed, but Josiah didn't move to interfere. In fact, a grin split the peppery scruff of his face and he sat back down like a spectator at a sporting event. Vin bent down and pulled Peso's head around toward his knee, letting him circle tightly, feeling the explosive temper and stoking it by his control over it; "Horse, git there first any way you can." Then he let his head go and let him see that tree and let him know by loose reins under his grip on the pommel that it was his to run. Which meant, to Peso, the most direct route no matter how that impacted his rider, and at the drop of a lance both animals detonated into a churning run. Peso ran like a wild thing over fallen trees and through a steep declivity, bulling his way through the brush with a blunt brute power that had the warriors shouting with disbelief and glee. Leaves and twigs burst into the air after him like a whirlwhind had gone through and the Indian pony, though swifter and more durable, was seriously handicapped by having to go around obstacles both horses had been expected to avoid. But Peso was going straight as a crow flew, and the big black's disregard for those barriers significantly shortened his way, heading for that cedar like it was the only thing he saw and nothing between would stop him. The pony, zigging and zagging valiantly around the obstacles, fell far behind. Peso went to his hind feet when Vin pulled up at that cedar tree, fighting the bit like a cutthroat trout on a line until Vin got him spun and let him go back the way he'd come. Josiah laughed out loud when he saw Vin lean precariously out of his saddle to the farthest reach of his grip on the pommel and touch the warrior on the arm as he raced past in the opposite direction. The warriors whooped and barked to see that, and even Chris had a grin on his face as Peso went flat-out as a badger back toward them, Vin nimbly avoiding brush and tree-limbs to keep from being scraped off the saddle. They all heard the black's deep-chested squeal of protest when Vin finally pulled him up in the spot where they'd started, rearing again with exuberant will and flinging his head side to side and sawing the reins out of Vin's hands, long yellow ivories bared, striking at the air. Vin just gripped his knees and moved with him until he came down, knowing he was showing off and giving him that due; his ribs were a bellows between Vin's knees, and proud or not, being winded would settle him momentarily. He'd just managed to lean out and gather the reins again when his opponent approached in a swift tumble of hoofbeats that did not slow. Vin looked up at that just as the pony ran past and the warrior flung himself out of the saddle right at him. They met with a resounding thump of chests and Vin was taken backwards out of stirrups and saddle and hat and nearly his boots, the hard ground a bone-jarring shock against his back, caught between it and the weight impacting on top of him. Two pistols cleared leather, a mule line got dropped and two horses startled forward before they heard the laughter, Vin's a pained wheeze, but true as they'd ever heard. Josiah shook his head and drew up and Chris could only follow suit, not knowing what was going on and not liking not knowing. The warrior and Vin rose from the ground in a tottering good-natured tangle, raising dust off each other in a rough greeting display and grinning, eye to eye with brotherly affection. Vin had obviously known this Indian a long time, and Josiah's smile was eloquent with relief. "To Chris had an expression that could flay rock and he said in as close to a snarl as anything Josiah had ever heard from a man; "You don't start tellin' me what the hell is goin' on here, and I'm gonna start shootin' just so's they'll notice me." "They're friends ..." "Tanyan yahi yelo. Tokiya yaunhan?" "The warrior is asking him what's wrong n' where he's been." Josiah's voice and easy manner eased Chris in turn. Vin heard significance in the question beyond what Josiah could only translate - not a polite inquiry as to where he'd been, but wanting to know what Vin had seen that could help, knowing without being told that the emergency was what had drawn him back and wanting whatever word he'd brought of what the white man was doing in the P'a Sapa. "Wocicyaka wacin." Vin nodded, telling him he wanted to talk, his expression more than enough to say it was a matter of gravest importance. "Tashunke Witco, is he here with you? Near?" "Ai." The warrior never hesitated to affirm that Crazy Horse was, indeed, in these mountains, and Josiah realized then exactly how deep Vin's roots among the Lakota were that not one of them thought to protect their chief against him. "Is it worth the nips and kicks of this ill-mannered horse to win?" Two Badgers asked, eyeing Peso like he was a strange form of animal he'd never seen. "Every bit of it." Vin answered with a sharp nod and a wolfish grin. Chris looked on unhappily, uneasy with the feeling that Vin was becoming a stranger to him. From the first meeting of eyes in that dusty street in Four Corners he'd felt like he'd met a kindred spirit, been certain he and Vin had recognized each other and he'd never questioned that before. But now Tanner was speaking a tongue he didn't recognize, fitting in among these wild warriors like one of them, and there was too much about him lately that was unexpected and beyond Chris' ability to grasp. He didn't like how that felt - would he, truly, lose this friend he hadn't realized he valued so much? Was he watching the wilderness draw Vin back to it forever? Vin looked back at him over his shoulder as if he'd felt his disgruntled attention, troubled by the high violent shine in the gunslinger's expression. "My good friend has been injured by arrows." Vin said to Two Badgers without accusation, quick to give reason for Chris' open hostility before any of the Lakota took offense. Two Badgers shrugged indifferently. "We saw only strange white men." Admitting culpability without guilt, a sparkle of humor in his dark eyes. He spread his hands as if the reasonableness of the act could not be questioned; "They did not kill him." And they certainly could have, any and all of them, had they chosen to. He set his hand on Vin's shoulder, the horse-hair tassles on his war-shirt whispering off his sleeve into the breeze, and smiled with all the warmth he felt in his heart to have this old friend before him again. If Vin Tanner called the pale snake-thin man in black his friend, then he would be Two Badger's friend as well, because all the Lakota now knew they would need every friend they could muster. It was this, in fact, that tempered his joy to see Tanner - the knowledge that he would not have come back unless he knew the Lakota needed him more than he himself needed to deny his wife's death. Two Badgers had expected never to see Tanner again, he was that kind of stubborn man, so he could not deny the ominous portent of his old friend's presence even if he was glad of it. "Tell your friend to come down off his horse and we will help him." He said. Vin considered Chris dubiously; Larabee had a deadly glower going on his face and his jaw was so tight he could almost hear his teeth creaking. "uthe' shna." Two Badgers insisted with a little push. "Alright, I'll tell 'im - but I don't know as he's gonna let any of you near 'im - n' he's got teeth t'be wary of." Two Badgers' smile broadened appreciatively to hear this and to see the true respect in Vin's wary eyes for that man's temper and skills. Four further warriors came in from the forest, and dismounted; four others disappeared in their stead and those that remained kept every approach in plain watch. Josiah felt the polite curiosity of the Lakota in their examination of the Cheyenne quillwork on his coat and belt, and their wariness of Chris because he looked like he not only could bite nails in half just then, but wanted to. Two of the warriors were very curious about his wounds, as well, talking back and forth between themselves as Josiah had eased the shirt off Chris' pale sinewy body and lengthened the tear in his pant-leg, since there was no way in hell Larabee would take his pants off surrounded by Lakota warriors. It was hard for Josiah to restrain his mirth when he finally made out what the warriors were talking about, and he accepted the proffered poultices from their dark hands despite Chris' blackest scowl and disdainfully wrinkled nose. Finally, chaffing under their interest, Chris had demanded to know what they were saying and Josiah called Vin to explain. The tracker came reluctantly and stayed out of arm's reach. He told Chris that the two warriors were the ones who had put those arrows into him, and that they'd chosen him specifically because he was so narrow - thus a far more challenging target. Chris' eyebrows twisted down as he stared at Vin like there was a steam valve threatening to give way in him, the warriors watching them both with great interest and good will. Josiah had snorted softly, then, he just couldn't help it, and a shy smile had chased across Vin's stressed face, too, even with Chris glaring bloody murder at him. "They didn't know who we were, Chris." Vin said, with a nervous glance at the warriors nearby, a distracted smile declining their offer of pemmican and jerked meat. His stomach was in a knot so tight he was sure even a bit of food would go no further than his neck. Those two warriors were bland as meadows even when Chris' cold pale face turned to them, the fine high bones struck hard under the skin with fury and threat in equal measure. Vin didn't breathe, Josiah's big blunt hand tightened on Chris' knee warningly, but in response one of the warriors took a beautifully beaded narrow bag off an equally beautiful wide belt under his shirt and withdrew from it a stained paint-stick, holding it up for Chris to see. His expression was not unfriendly and he seemed quite somber and serious, but Chris looked to Vin for an explanation. He was nearly startled to find Vin so openly anxious, eyes dark with helpless worry and a plea he would never voice. Vin wouldn't ask Chris for what he wanted, but he wanted it so much Chris couldn't deny him - that his friends wouldn't kill each other right in front of him. The gunslinger held Vin's eyes long enough to convey the depth of the favor he believed he was doing, then he nodded warily at the warrior. High Calf spat into the cup of his hand and mixed a little color from a small pouch from the same beaded bag, then squatted in front of Chris, the long fringe of his leggings spooling down onto his moccasins and the damp earth. There he drew a red circle around the bandaged wound on the gunslinger's bare arm. With ceremonial solemnity, he then mixed another color for radiant yellow rays out from the red circle. Chris' eyes followed every move suspiciously, not yielding his hostility even when Vin tentatively explained that the warrior was invoking his personal medicine. But it wasn't a sign he recognized, perhaps the warrior's father was from another tribe, or his mother had spent time as a captive, and it gave him a chill to realize the gathering of warriors from even far-flung nations had begun. Chris let the second warrior do the same on his thigh, a pattern of three parallel stripes like a grizzly had taken a swipe at his leg, knowing by that who had given him which. While he made no objection to having his pants painted along with his leg, nor did he assume any sort of forgiving face. When they were all mounted again, those two warriors flanked Chris as though assuming his defense while he was compromised by injury, and no amount of scowling drove them from that place. He rode high on temper and pride both and was eagle-eyed and alert because of it. Josiah smiled; only an Indian would admire such aggressive hostility in the face of overwhelming odds. Being among these Lakota brought back many fine memories to Josiah of his time among the Cheyenne, but he sensed it was something far different for Vin. He was worried about the tracker, certain he'd been hurt more than he was showing in his friend's rough greeting, and certain also that he was concerned about Chris, riding on his far side straight as a ramrod despite injury and long hours in the saddle, eyes glinting like a rattlesnake disturbed once too often. The warriors glanced often at him, intrigued by so much spirit from a twice-wounded man, but they didn't know how truly volatile he could be. Chris had no experience among the people to understand their ways, and the people, right now, were not as willing as they'd once been to extend their patience to ignorant white men. Being Vin's friend would only count so far, and Vin looked like he was holding the peace between them on will alone. Josiah had expected Vin to settle once they were among the people he'd been trying with such dedication to find, but that hadn't happened - indeed, he was winding tighter by the hour, and it was not the Lakota or the guns or even Chris striking sparks like flint off the Lakota here that was working him so deeply. Again Josiah had the sense of something far beyond the here and now, because even knowing about the guns hadn't entirely healed the peculiar rift between Chris and Vin - this was something else between them, something Chris knew and was holding in confidence. Whatever it was had complicated a relationship that had been as easy and open and natural as breathing from the first, and Josiah couldn't imagine a force that could disrupt that natural affinity. Sundown strapped the woodland in long still shadows that scattered into wavering ribbons as they passed. Night fell and they still did not stop, taking advantage of a full moon to travel the legendary distances that had so often confounded the cavalry. Even the horses and mules were quiet, the Indian ponies by training and instinct, the white men's horses and mules following that lead, ears attentive, hoof-falls muffled on the thick carpet of decaying leaves and pine needles. The warriors paused often to break the rhythm of their movement, making their sound like a small herd of feeding deer, like the normal stir of nocturnal animals. Evening came frosty cold in a keen-edged settling of crystalline blackness, wide-flung stars bright and crisp centered by a full white moon that picked out the trunks of the trees like the bones of the night. Black shadows and white light, black hollows and white highlights, surreal in its starkness. Vin ached all over, a quick sharp pain in his chest when he breathed too deep and was a little disoriented, but glad to be among these warriors - proof of the people's survival, of their courage unbroken, and it was enough right now. He didn't know where they were going, but the warriors moved with purpose, and he could only hope he would fulfill at least this part of his duty soon. Two Badgers kept smiling at him, but Vin read the worry that tainted it. His friend knew his coming was a harbinger of disaster, and he knew nothing and no one could stop it. It was a hard thing for Vin to represent doom to these people he cared for. He tipped his head back to see the sky through the trees, velvety and distantly peaceful, whirling on age after age indifferent to the turmoil of the world. Surely that sky had witnessed the best and worst that man could do, and the world yet went on. Must always go on. He felt the small tug of the latigo string across his throat as his hat fell back and the nip of the cold night drying the sweat in his hair. He closed his eyes and for a moment just rocked along, face upturned and pale in the hard white light so Two Badgers knew some spirit was on him. It was a hard thing, the warrior knew, for a man to have his own people behaving so badly that he had to act against them. Vin Tanner had never understood his own, or really liked them much, but nor had he entirely understood the Lakota way either, not being born to it. He was a soul between worlds and lonely in that not-here, not-there place. Two Badgers was not surprised to see how deeply Vin Tanner still mourned his tawicu wastelakapi, the beloved wife who had filled him with happiness for so few years. Two Badgers knew, the people all knew, he had never known such joy before, that his life had been cruel and the loss of her made him crazy. That craziness had not gone yet, because Two Badgers also knew Vin Tanner had not come back now to carry out that last duty a man owed his loved one. He remembered the first words Tanner's wife had ever said to him after three days of staring at each other over the fires and across the camp. They had made the people who heard laugh at his stunned look and feel a great deep joy that she had chosen him - 'nimitawa ktelo', she had said, despite the fierce look in his eyes as if he threatened her - or felt threatened himself - you will be mine. And so he was, then and in the years after. And even so he was now, still hers today. A man should not belong to ghosts. Two Badger's mount moved closer to Vin's black under the slight pressure of his knees, and the warrior's mouth twitched in approval when that willful beast proved his loyalty in a hard warning toss of his head that jerked Vin from his reverie. Vin raked cold trembling fingers through his hair and set his slouch hat back on his head, wiping his hand down his face and taking a few breaths as deep as he could manage, ice-edged and painfully cold. Trying to draw back from the edges he kept finding himself balanced on. Duley'd loved nights like this, and he'd loved the magic they called up in her. She'd find some private spot for their sleeping robes under the stars even when it was as cold as the frost he could distantly feel pinching his exposed face right now, wanting to witness the mysteries the night so seldom revealed to living eyes. Wondering at the separate life in the darkness, wary, but ever wondering. God, he was hot, and he was tired, and he wanted to get home to her. She was with him tonight in full bloom and he held on to her with all his miserable heart. Wanted her, thought he saw her now and again grinning at him from behind a tree in invitation to the chase, heard the silvery echoes of her laugh and the swift pat of her feet as she led him to whatever bower she'd made for them that night. He would've made his bed in a snake-pit if that's what she chose, content wherever she was, wherever she'd ever led him. He'd never fit anywhere before she'd come into his life, his world had settled around her and made sense, and he did, too. As if all of him was fated to love her from the instant of his birth, soul and spirit and body, every inch of skin, every drop of blood, every breath he took, He adored her lavishly with them all. She'd loved him from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet, not a piece of him hadn't come under her touch, her kiss, and only with her had he ever been able to be that free. That real, when he'd always been half-invisible. She could make him hard with a look, make him shiver with a smile, cause his blood to run hot and trembling in his veins with the stroke of her fingertips across his hand. She was love and sex and soul all in one, all his missing pieces, anything he had of understanding the fine feelings between people. He got lost awhile, then, time slipping backwardsinto unfocused memories. When Josiah twisted in the saddle some time later to check the mules to his left, Vin's drifting eyes went to the motion and Josiah's familiar face for a moment was startlingly strange. A deep tremble rattled through him, fear of whatever weakness was seducing him so well away from the present, and he pressed his hand to his left side against the ache there and kept Josiah's powerful back in his sightline as tether to the here and now. Don't Duley, he breathed, unaware he'd voiced the thought, don't take me there now, not yet ... his breath sounded harsh in his own ears, felt raw in his lungs and bitter. Now wasn't then, he reminded himself forcefully, and he needed to be here now, here, not in that velvet past, not thinking of Duley's skin and her scent and the sounds she made - God, but it was a powerful yearning to let go and slide on back into those yesterdays when there had been nothing between him and his freedom and his wild true love, nothing threatening any of it, nothing yet lost that could never be retrieved. But now was not then, and he had only to look at the dark-carved faces around him to know it. Even on a dangerous raid Lakota warriors set forth with unburdened hearts, glad of the chance for honor whether it meant celebrated victory or noble death. That fundamental joy, that vibrantly brutal acknowledgement of life itself, was overshadowed now with a new wisdom he despaired to understand. Life could be difficult, its challenges many and often mortal, but the grim darkness that had fallen on these faces now was not the philosophical acceptance of a hard season or too many winter deaths, not a necessary burden being taken up stoically in times of need. No. This was different. Though their courage still burned like an unquenchable fire, it was the defiance of a warrior surrounded by enemies knowing his time on the world was at an end. It was a determination to die well and meaningfully and with memorable honor. Under that bravery, their hearts were on the ground with the knowledge of the great wrongness in the world, a sickness they could not stop and that would not spare them this time. Once the certainty of spring had sustained the people through the most devastating winters. Once they had known like a heartbeat, like the blood in their bodies and the life in their breath, that the people would always be free and in haromony. Now they were facing the last long winter of all the people, and this time spring would not come. Vin was tired to the bone but could not sleep, he sat by the low glow of the fire surrounded by the soft breath of sleeping warriors, by Josiah's quietly sonorous snores and blinded himself in the glow of the flame, so deep inside his own thoughts that Two Badgers had to reach across the fire and touch his folded knee to gain his attention. "Tashunke Witco is coming - no," A flash of white teeth at Vin's sudden startled attention to the darkness around them, "Not this moment, but soon." Vin subsided, his narrow body sloped and curved with fatigue as he ran both hands over his face, the scruff of whiskers hissing quietly against his calloused palms. Two Badgers regarded him somberly, seeing his haunted need for rest and fearing the knowledge he carried like a sickness in him that prevented it. Speaking it would render it real in the world, no longer a nightmare that could be denied, unspoken. Tanner sighed as if the breath ran down to his toes and shook himself so like a drowsy dog rousing that Two Badgers smiled, but the eyes were not drowsy that Vin turned up to him then, those eyes like the summer sky on breathless hot days. "Tell me what's been happenin' up here, my friend, so I know what to tell that man, I do not want to waste his time with tales he has already heard." Two Badgers drew himself up thoughtfully, considering what he would say. "Na< 'ce 'ce ... (I suppose); The people are going to the Rosebud, we are told there are buffalo coming down there. We had messengers in the Moon of Hard Winter saying we must come down to the agency or be named hostiles, but the runners reached us far too late to travel, it was impossible even had we wanted to go, which no one did. When the weather finally allowed it, He-Dog said he would go, his children were too young to run and his women were too afraid. Tashunke Witco said no, he would not, which was hard for him because He-Dog was his good friend, and he did not look at him so he would not cause him shame. For himself, he could not. He watched them go, our Strange Man, from up on the ridge by himself, and we watched them go, too. We did not think ever we would see them again." This sorrow plain in his eyes, the firelight gilding them like agates, slippery on the broad deep bones of his face. "But they came back after awhile because the soldier-Chief Crook attacked them on the Powder where a storm had stopped them on their way to the agency. Grabber led the soldiers there." Vin's face was horrified - how could even a troublesome half-breed like Grabber lead the soldiers down upon the camp of the people who had opened their hearths and hearts to him?
"An-gan dha 'i." Two Badger's confirmed grimly - not only had they heard this thing but, by Two Badger's face, they had also believed it. Vin was having a very hard time with what he was hearing - this far had the divisions between the people gone, even between Tashunke Witco and his good friend He-Dog, both trying to save the people from extinction. Vin knew, and Two Badger's did, what more Tashunke Witco was trying to save beyond lives and land and the doom that could not be turned away. The hole inside him widened, deepened until he could no longer see the edges of it anywhere. "The peace-men say the land will be taken from us, we should get money for it now and make them honor the selling papers." Obviously not believing that, no Lakota could believe any white man's paper true whether he touched the pen to it or not. "Tasunke Witco ... " He shook his head, spreading his hands in helpless faith to that man's true visions and knowing he did not have to explain to Vin Tanner how ridiculous it was to sell the land, the soul and heart from which all harmony in the world flowed. But the people were divided to the point now that a Lakota, even a half-breed like Grabber, had brought soldiers down upon the heads of his own women and children. "That is very bad." Vin said, shaking his head, and Two Badgers agreed; "Ai." "But Grabber saw horses there that had been with us and he thought we were there, he told the soldiers it was the camp of Tashunke Witco, and the story has gone out that we are all dead and scattered in the snow." Which still made him laugh to remember, as it had made the whole camp laugh until they realized that if they lived, unmolested, it had to be He-Dog's people that had been struck. "There were many more soldiers than Indians there, but only one warrior died, only one woman hurt, the boys saved the horses and the people escaped, but the soldiers burned everything of the camp. He-Dog talks no more of the agency road, Two-Moons and the Cheyennes share our lodges and cooking pots. Minneconjou have come among us on the trail to Rosebud, Black Foot Lakota and even some Santees." His black eyes became very significant as he looked at Vin, saying more with his expression than his calm words. More would come, the warriors were gathering like the clouds before a storm, and they gathered around the Strange Man of the Oglala whose visions were coming true. "They come even from the Red Cloud camp." A half-sneer of disdain curling his lip at the name of Red Cloud, once a mighty warrior and revered, now the servant of the soldiers and his own contentment. "The soldiers wait in Fetterman for more soldiers. They will come in summer, and we must hold the Rosebud to make meat for the war we will give them." Vin sat in silent stillness, his forearms laid across his thighs and his head bowed with thoughts that were nearly tangible. Two Badgers said nothing more, but allowed his old friend to understand all that he had said to him. When Vin looked up, Tashunke Witco was standing behind Two Badgers, his red chief's blanket folded high around his waist and his eyes unreadable. Startled, Vin got up at once, not knowing the man well but deeply respectful of his leadership, and of the bitter truth of his visions. He was a slight slim man much as Vin was himself, no taller, and plainly dressed, his braids, of a color lighter than usual and with a definite wave on his brow, hanging long down his back, a single feather in his scalp-lock. As humbly presented as a boy warrior, yet the power of him reached out and raised the hair on Vin's arms, stirred the grief in his soul so he couldn't speak. "Hau, cola." Tashunke Witco said in that soft voice that yet was heard in any council like a bell. Vin reached his hand across the fire as if unaware it moved, captive in the terrible knowledge that seemed to come to its source in this man. A man in his prime, 34 years old and his reputation shining like a star among the Lakota since he'd been a boy, his hand warm and calloused. Crazy Horse looked toward the pack mules expectantly, as if he knew why Vin was there and needed what he had brought more than the lengthy courtesies Vin was afraid he wouldn't remember. Twenty seven guns. Only 27 guns against the greed and might of an entire nation, and when they were laid at the feet of the man he'd brought them for, the offering looked so small Vin was almost ashamed of it. Those Josiah had brought he left in the packs, the gift not his to display, but making it clear they were also for the people. Tashunke Witco smiled atthose guns, touching each admiringly, and at the many boxes of cartridges, as if Vin had brought him a truly worthy thing. "Hecheto welo." He said, it is good, and a flush climbed into Vin's face and did not leave it. Vin was normally a graceful man, but his hands were awkward in showing Crazy Horse how the pieces of the disassembled rifles fit together. Two Badgers sat beside his chief, knowing it was not the size of the gift, but of the heart that gave it, and knowing both of these men in ways they did not know each other. This gift was Vin Tanner's whole heart in a collection of blued steel and brass and powder, it was his blood, did the people need it. Tashunke Witco was polite, sparing and deeply thoughtful as always with his looks and words, but Two Badgers knew he was pleased. They smoked together, bearberry and tobacco in Two Badger's red stone pipe, and finally Vin said so quietly he was almost unheard, "I am sorry." But he was brave enough to look up into the face of the man who would carry the people's dreams forward forever, who would be the war-cry and the victory he would never himself know. Crazy Horse looked back at him, his face still and yet open. "I have remembered a little story lately. Let me tell you." He said, and both men settled back to hear. "There was once a village where a child was born whose father was surely Coyote the Trickster, for the child was born walking and talking and very sure of himself. He delighted in taking all things into his hand and pulling them apart to see how they had been made, and he would show them to the others in the vgillage as if he was a wise man. One day his mother was scraping a buffalo skin and did not notice Coyote Boy wander away. He was very young still, of an age when other children would barely be walking. He was found in the lodge of the Wicasa Wakan, who was away." Two Badger's eyebrows rose, "Han .." He said, signifying in the traditional reply that he was listening to the story-teller, his face rapt as a boy. Tashunke Witco smiled a little and nodded. "Coyote Boy had opened all the sacred bundles and scattered the sacred things around him to examine them, things were broken that should not even be touched. He had made terrible ruin in that holy place. When the people came in and took the things from his hands and tried to instruct him, knowing that he was yet a child, Coyote Boy laughed and showed them the parts of all the sacred things and said they were but skins and feathers. He waved them about and said, 'You see there is no power in these things. I will show you what things have power, and what things are sacred, for it is clear you do not know.' "Then Coyote Boy grew older and the time came for his vision quest, and the Spirits told his father Coyote that the trick had gone too far, it was time Coyote Boy learned to be a good person or it would be too late, forever. The Spirits came and dealt with him then, and what a fight there was for four days and nights! That Coyote Boy learned the truth, and he became a quiet man and upright, respectful of the people and the Spirits and knowing what is sacred. But he could not forget what he had done, and he wailed and gashed his arms in his grief, and cut his hair. So Wakantanka, the Great Spirit, sent a yellow-shafted flicker to him, up and down through the trees, with the message that no matter how big he had been, no matter that Coyote had given him a mind too sharp and a tongue too hasty for a child, he had been a child. And wakanheja, children, are never punished. We love them with patience, as is right, knowing that they do not know." Tashunke Witco looked at Vin, then, and Vin couldn't look away, though his heart ached deep for the terrible truth he could see in the dark eyes. "They are like this child, your people." Crazy Horse said, "Ruining what they do not know has value and talking big all the time about how much they know when it is only an empty wind blowing. But they are children, and they will learn what we have known since time began. The spirits will be patient until it is time for them to learn, but I think they will have a big fight on their hands. I think it will last more than four days and nights this time." Vin stared at him in bewildered wonderment, understanding his point easily but astonished that a man who had lost beloved family, a child, dear friends and the life he loved, could offer so gentle a hope to the very people who had done these things to him. He could not have spoken if his life depended on it, humbled and stricken with anticipation of the terrible loss that would come when Crazy Horse was no longer among the people. "It is a bad future that comes." Crazy Horse said, not softening the pain of it as such truths could not be made better. "A bad sickness. We will fight because we are warriors and it is our duty to the people, to the earth. We will not be victorious." Two Badgers flinched beside him, but made no argument, honored that Tashunke Witco shared this vision with him, even as terrible as it was. "The true fight will be far harder, and go on far longer than any of us will be alive to fight. It will be a war of drudgery, a thing of stubborn women, I think." His mouth curled in a wry smile, "Tell them they cannot do a thing and they will only be more determined. I tell you, I say this - I have seen the ocheti shakowin, the seven sacred fires of the Lakota Oyate burning in their wombs, though we shall not see it brightagain until long after my bones and yours have been dust. Put off that sick look, Vin Tanner. We are men, we will die, but the people will lay quiet as the bears in winter, slumbering, waiting - I have seen this, I know it is true." His face was stern and strong with this confidence. "Can a white man kill the whole world? Can he reach into the hot red heart of the earth and cease it's beating? He will dig, he will ruin, and when he has taken all hevalues, he will abandon what he killed us to have and we will creep back. Yes. We will creep back with the trees and the meadows and the bears, we will stand up out of the dust when wisdom has come to him at last and he will know what richness Spirit holds in the world that he has not seen in his gold-blindness." Now it was Two Badgers who stared at him in amazement, grasping himself that hope Tashunke Witco had found in his wisdom. There was his peace, even in the midst of ruin, and it became Two Badgers' peace as well. In their dying, the Lakota would make a noise so huge the echoes would never die, they would fight until they were a terrible legend told around pioneer hearths and white men's fires, they would exact a cost so enormous that would the whites would not be able to sweep their memory into guiltless oblivion. And more - they would perservere, wherever the scattered remnants of the people were, those stubborn women who would teach the forbidden tongue and the forbidden ways until the white men learned to be better people. He was profoundly shaken in both gladness and helpless rage to realize that Tashunke Witco believed that time would come, that he had this faith in the very people who would try to destroy them. Vin found it hard to be so hopeful, but Crazy Horse passed him the pipe with a warm smile. This wicase ska, this white man, was not a Lakota and could not name the things he knew, but Crazy Horse understood that Vin knew them anyway. This wicase ska recognized the voice of the land and felt it move in his soul, knowing what was true and right and how a man needed to behave. He was a human being, and his children would be. White, yes, but oyate, allies. Perhaps helpless now, but they would not be forever, and they would help breathe the embers of the Lakota back to life when that faraway time he had seen in his visions came. One day more they rode with the Lakota while Vin told Crazy Horse all that the Monroes had done, all that was planned except the when, which he did not yet know himself. He hoped Elizabeth would have that answer when he saw her again, andpromised to bring word somehow. To this Tashunke Witco smiled a little with a glancing eye and an eloquent shrug. "The time does not matter," he said almost placidly, "It has already begun. But we will have this season, and the buffalo on the Rosebud to make the people's hearts strong. The horses will be fat again by the time the long-knives are ready to fight in earnest. Then we will have our season of vengeance when there will be so many brave good deeds that no one will be able to count them, nor even care to." His smile was broad and full of teeth, but the man of visions and quiet voice also a man of uncompromising war. "We have learned to fight the long-knives as they fight us. We are good at it." This war would not be a thing of many counted coup and separate glories for each warrior, but of the whole people together. That man looked out across the forest and smiled as at the face of his beloved. It would be a war of big songs for generations to come, and his warrior's heart anticipated the coming fight and the glory of it no matter how it might end. There would be such victories, such magic and power loosed from the heart of the world that it would fix the Lakota forever in the histories of the Nations and the whites alike. Enough to carry the people into the darkness coming, enough to sustain them through the loss of everything but that which could not be taken until the day came to Stand again. Having seen that day set him on his own path with a pride that simmered in his bones and made his blood sing. The world was wide, and the people at home in its secret places, they would be like fire in battle, and like smoke when the soldiers hunted them, and they would fight until the white men would tire of war and give them the Powder River country for their home and never want to stir them up to war again. Vin felt that satisfaction in him, in all of the Lakota, the buzzing thunder that rose in a warrior's blood when there was an epic battle at hand, when the great Spirit loud and bright in their hearts. It would spread from Tashunke Witco to all the people, it would build while the women butchered the buffalo their men had hunted on the Rosebud, while they prepared themselves to fight as woman often did, all of it like a dance their mothers and grandmothers back to the womb of the world had set the steps for. They would sing, and the song of their readying would be sweetness over a sharpening knifeblade. He could see the camps when he closed his eyes, dream them in the golden glow of firelight where magic would be moving among them, stitching them together, weaving them tight around each other. Under the threat of doom they would be laughing and singing, maidens would be courted and love would burn like fire between husbands and wives, many children would be made on the eve of this greatness. Not for the first time, Vin thought about joining them, riding this inevitable path with them to its end and to his own. He still hadn't entirely decided one way or the other. He had to stop the Monroes, that he had to do for Duley's sake, but after ... The temptation of living his last days among the people in righteous battle, cleansing himself, if the hope of it meant anything at all, of old sins and sins he would yet commit ... It would be a good death in the company of splendid warriors, in defense of a brave and enduring people ... Two Badgers looked at him with a grin a wolf might wear with the blood of prey on its teeth, and though his own was a crooked thing and thin, it was a smile as fierce, and it made his old friend laugh softly. Chris and Josiah remained at an awkward distance, treated well and with respect, but outsiders as Vin was not. Both of them realized that more and more, seeing similarities between Vin and the Lakota that had before simply seemed peculiar to Vin himself. More an Indian than they'd realized. There was a deep wordless understanding between them that did not yet exist even among the seven for Vin, more natural among them, and in the wilds, than he would ever be in a town. Maybe more than he would ever be even with men he knew for friends as much as Vin could know such a thing. Josiah understood more certainly now than ever how much Vin sacrificed to dwell among his own people. Perhaps how unsuited for it he would always be. He saw Chris recognizing the same thing with a deep forboding sorrow. Josiah's heart caught again and again at what God showed him that day they rode with the Lakota. A beauty that would never exist in the same way again. The lift of long glossy black hair into a spritely wind, the turn of feathers and fur against it, the colors and patterns of them, even the small sounds they made fitting the rest of the world as much as tree or stone or earth underfoot. It was a way of being he knew most whites didn't grasp, and he knew it might be lost forever before they had time to learn. It would be a terrible loss. Vin had often said towns blinded and deafened him after awhile until he had to get out under the sky. Now Josiah knew why. In the silence and stillness of a moment's pause on a ridge that many-throated voice could be heard, that collective pulse felt, and the entirety of life known. He had felt this among the Seminoles outside Four Corners, far from their home and all they knew, and he had felt it among the Cheyenne that season he spent with them. Here, and now, it was breathtaking - God dwelt among these people who obeyed His will, ironically, better than many who had his Book to tell them how. Such faith could not be taught. It was a clean and direct obedience to the soul God gave all men - what felt noble and worthy was, what did not, was not. Vin was exactly that way, justice and honor a straight line out of his soul that he served devotedly, no matter what. Josiah hoped he'd have the chance to know Vin as these Lakota did. And he also hoped he could be of help with whatever haunted Vin's eyes beyond what was coming upon them. The Lakota saw that in their friend just as clearly as Josiah did, but they seemed to know the cause as Josiah did not - and Chris seemed to know that much, too. Josiah's curiosity was a patient and watchful thing. The Preacher knew who the unprepossessing warrior was who'd appeared in the night and who left again, alone, late the next afternoon. Chris didn't ask and he didn't volunteer the information, the gunslinger was in as strange a mood as Josiah had ever seen of him and he kept a prudent eye there. Jealousy, he saw flashes of that when the Lakota touched Vin without making him jump or shift away, seeming to understand his glances and silences like a language they could hear. Josiah also saw Chris' unease in the only world Vin would ever be wholly comfortable in, and hurt sometimes, maybe not to have gotten that far with a friend he instinctively knew he needed as well as Josiah did. It all distilled into a sullen anger not helped by the pain of wounds these good friends of Vin's had given him, he was pale and sharp-boned and jumpy as a man unsure of reflexes his life depended on, and at the worst possible time. Not a man to suffer vulnerability calmly, Josiah thought. Chris hadn't said, either, what he'd do if Judge Travis found out about the guns. They shared a small but sustaining breakfast of fine-made pemmican with the warriors, and then left them without ceremony. Vin tied the mules by their ponies unasked, no one mentioned it. More than weapons and cartridges, but everything they had of food and goods and the animals themselves, which the Lakota greatly admired for their strength and character. Josiah turned once back toward the camp as they rode away, to the warriors preparing for their own leave-taking. Dreamlike, they moved in the mists and the curling tendrils of the last coals on the campfire like smoke themselves, brightness muted in the hazy dawn. Gilded in that pale light so every detail was drawn in it. An age of the world passing, a way he prayed with all his will would not perish forever, because it was a way men would need to find their way back to some day. Josiah had his own visions, and he remembered them as he looked back at those Lakota like a dream that brought tears to his eyes. Although the distance they and the Monroe party would travel would be roughly the same to reach Fort Laramie, the mule-train had the advantage of the plains east of the Platte rather than having to thread down the western flank of the Laramie mountains. Vin, Chris and Josiah would have to cross the high country to the northern-most point of the Platte to meet them, and they'd have to move fast. Not having the mules along made that a little easier, but it was still a long way over rough country. Vin was too quiet and seemed to know that himself, fading off into the forest ahead to scout like a ghost wanting away from the land of the living. Now and then the broad sloped valley below could be glimpsed from high points on the trail, more mountains a pale upthrust edge to the far distance beyond. The day was clear and pale and cold, and he clung to Duley's warmth like a lost child. They camped that night at the timberline, not speaking to one another, grating against one another in a way that distressed them but couldn't seem to be eased. Josiah woke in the deep still darkness of the hours before dawn and found Vin feeding small sticks into the campfire absently, as if hypnotized by the tiny bursts of flame. He rose out of his blankets like a bear out of a nest and joined him, not sure for awhile that the tracker even noticed. "What did Crazy Horse say, Vin?" He finally asked, and Vin didn't startle at his voice nor indeed do anything but sigh and shake his head. Josiah wasn't sure he'd answer at all, Vin had a hard time finding words to express his feelings, and they were engaged here more completely than Josiah had once thought possible. Vin had always been at a remove from things, from people and circumstance, his eye clear at that small distance. But this was hooked hard into his heart, this flew unceasing circles in his mind. Josiah waited, having learned the value of patience with Vin. Vin glanced at Chris, a long lean shade among shadows sitting watch, reluctant to share this confidence even with Josiah behind Chris' back after just having come to terms with each other again. But Chris had never dwelt among the people, had no experience of them, he'd only see the futility of their preparations for a war they could not, could never, win. Not the hope Tashunke Witco with his brave clear vision had so impossibly given. Tashunke Witco's life given whole for their future, and it will burn like the sun, no one would ever forget it. That man's blood would sing in the stones and murmur in the waters and sigh in the earth beyond destruction. "That man ..." Josiah did not need to ask who 'that man' was, "Josiah, he knows what's coming, he knows ..." Anguished and disbelieving, "But he Stands, because if he doesn't Stand now, even against odds as impossible as this, the people might never Stand again, ever. He believes he can win, he believes he can wrestle a fair deal out of the army if he just doesn't give in and surrender." By his eyes, that was not something Vin could believe himself, knowing better than Tashunke Witco, for all his wise visions, the treachery and wickedness and greed the nations faced. A people who did not lie could not always see lies being woven around them, a people of honor did not wholly understand the utter lack of honor even in an enemy, or how mortal that lack could be to them. A people so in harmony with the world, so attached at heart and soul and spirit to it, could not even for an instant grasp how blind white men were to it, what cruelties and wickedness were unrestrained in that numbness. They would not hear the earth cry out as they gouged into her holy body for gold, as they trapped her children in emptiness and stripped them of their sacred ways. They wouldn't see the evil they did, they wouldn't know. "Josiah, they'll murder the Lakota on those goddamned agencies, they'll murder all the people, they'll kill 'em fast, the ones that won't bend, and they'll kill the helpless slow, and nobody'll know it's happening. They'll never be able to erase the stink of it, but they'll try, and I don't know how t'let 'em do it, I can't stop it, I damned well can't, but I don't know how t'live with it." More than Josiah had heard him say at once in all the time he'd known him, and straight from his heart. Vin shook his head, washed over with grief, with admiration, with a love he could never escape, widening his knees and the knuckles of his hands clasped hard over the space between them, his head falling low between his shoulders and his heart falling heavy to the ground. "They don't even know what they're destroying." He said in a voice rough with helpless anger and sorrow, 'they' an all-encompassing condemnation of his own. His head came down to his hands, his elbows resting on his knees, silenced by the enormity of his own feelings, and Josiah sensed how hard he was trying not to weep as his fingertips and thumb pressed into his eyes. Josiah made no move that would break what frail control Vin had on himself. He knew what terrible fate Vin was seeing no matter how tightly he closed his eyes or how hard he pressed against them, his own heart held on in commiserating stillness. But finally he said, "Moses knew he'd never set foot in the Promised Land, Vin." Vin nearly recoiled from the sympathy in the Preacher's voice, so low a tone it wouldn't be heard a foot away and yet it rumbled in his bones, too openly loving for him to bear at that moment. He tried to make him stop, flung out a warding hand and a word that became only an agonized swallow of sound through the constriction of his throat, but Josiah had a thing to say and Vin knew he would have to listen. Josiah had his own visions, and his eyes were nearly colorless with those dreadful things Vin did not want to know. Things more closely reflecting his own awful pessimism than Tashunke Witco's stalwart hope. "But he was still filled with joy that his people would dwell there, their journey would be over. God saw t'his resting place, did you know that? No man knows where lies, he died in the presence of the Father." He didn't say what more he knew that put him in mind of Moses, the fate he'd glimpsed too close on the heels of that courageous chief. A man could only bear so much grief without the ghost of a hope, and Vin was too near breaking already. So he turned away, the timeless bones of his primitive face made beautiful by the compassion in his eyes. "No matter what happens, brother Tanner, their time will come again." He murmured, nodding to himself and squinting into the darkness as if that time was clear to him. "In the meantime, we won't let them forget." Vin's breath broke across the fire as he swore that vow himself, unexpectedly comforted. The pale buildings of Fort Fetterman stood like boxy warts on a plateau above the valleys of Le Prele creek and the North Platte River. On the north, over the rim of the shallow bowl the Fort lay within, stretched the vast grasslands broken by ravines and creeks, and in the distant north the ghostly sentinels of the Rockies and the Big Horn mountains. It was because of that vague bowl shape that the soldiers had believed it was not so low to chance spring floods nor so high it would catch the winter winds, but both these things happened anyway. The land wouldn't grow and the supplies were too far between, too often missing, and there was nothing to break the bleakness that was all they could see. They called it desolation in its abrupt canyons and the lonesome whispers of grasses bowing in undulations west to east, a broken crust of flats and ravines with thin dusty lines of trees and shrubs huddled against the creekbeds. Had they asked the mountainmen and frontiersmen who'd built the place originally, or the Plains Indians who came among them to trade beaver pelts and buffalo robes, they would have known the Powder was a better place to be in winter, and the mountains more hospitable in summer. Then again, those worthies likely wouldn't have told them even if they'd been asked, not having much use for soldiers. A hospital building, barracks and stables and Officer's quarters with glass glinting like malevolent blind eyes in the windows, guardhouses and stores and out-buildings around a parade square. A bakery the wind carried evidence of to them as they approached the purling run of the Platte, which spread wide below the escarpment that the fort stood above and was shallow enough to cross easily. They'd ridden hard, but the train had arrived a day before them. So had two riders with urgent tales to tell of a clandestine meeting with a Lakota chief they had thought - had wished - was dead. Crazy Horse lived, and now he had guns. Jules saw them coming and took off running before anyone could stop her, her arms high as she sped in skips and leaps down the incline toward them, her grin and the sound of her gleeful jolting laughter bringing a smile even to Chris' face. Vin legged ahead, gathered Peso into an easy canter and almost kept it going to sweep her up as he passed until he remembered his infirmities and instead swung down a yard from her and bent to accept her like an armful of joyful hurricane. Chris swallowed hard to see that, like Adam had always done when he came home from being away and how it could sweep away every bad thing that had happened since he'd seen him last. Her heart beat fast as a bird against Vin's chest and he didn't resist her ferocious hold or try to straighten up out of it, just crouched there awkwardly and let her welcome sink into him like warmth and light and comfort. Like he hadn't felt in anyone's arms since Duley, and he needed it now too much to pretend otherwise. "We beat you! We got here yesterday!" She crowed gleefully, "You're slow!" Vin laughed and stood up, his hand caught between hers, and said, "Don't insult my horse, girl!" "You should see this place, it's disgusting! They were so thrilled to get provisions from Fort Laramie they were nearly in tears, and they're mooning over Miz Travis and Auntie like calves, there aren't any women here! All the men here are so unhappy, they keep sneaking away from the garrison at night to some hog ranch over the far ridge." Vin heard Chris and Josiah stifling laughter at that, treasured the sound of her gossipy chatter, but his eyes were up the slope toward that fort, and he had a very bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. As they got closer, walking with Peso trailing off behind him and Jules' swinging his hand on the far side, he could see Gerald and Stephen Monroe come to the edge, troops ranging loosely behind them. Not until he saw Buck and J.D. shove their way past and come grinning toward them did his hackles ease, though the cold feeling did not. The Monroes made no greeting, just watched blandly, and Nathan moved down himself at a good clip when he saw Chris in bandages, but to Gerald's right were a pair of dusty men staring hard at them. Accusingly. Vin stopped on the path, jerking Jules up short and Peso into a disgruntled side-stepping, smelling hay and stables. "What?" Chris stopped his horse and looked down, sandy eyebrows curling into each other, but Vin had nothing to tell him but a feeling, and he wasn't entirely trusting those right now. "Nothin'." He said dismissively, but Jules gazed quizzically at him and as soon as they'd reached the summit within the hard-trampled perimeter of the fort, he knew he'd made the wrong decision. "Run on, Jules." He said, "Tell yer Aunt we're here, will you?" He said, looking down at her without a worry on him anywhere, smiling like he was simply anticipating greeting her Aunt, but he was holding her hand too hard. Jules' face screwed up suspiciously and he had to pull his fingers loose from hers and move her away from him with a little push. Her father came to greet them with a bland smile but his eyes were like needles and her worry lifted a little higher. Nobody was looking her way when she slipped around the side of the larger barracks and went no further. Captain Monroe walked alongside the three men when they dismounted as if escorting welcome visitors onto the grounds, directing them with polite gestures and a descriptive tour toward the parade ground. Any notion of welcome, however, was dispelled upon reaching that destination, where his troops waited in ranks, half at ease but all on edge. "Private, take the horses and give them a good rub-down." "This'un'll take his ears off." Vin said with a twitch at Peso's reins. Gerald's smile hitched a second at that nearly primal instinct to defiance, but Vin handed the lead off to the young Private. "Unsaddle 'im n' nothin' more, if you value yer parts." Peso rolled his eyes and jerked his head up high and fast enough to stretch the private out in a sudden jolt and Gerald saw the tracker smile. Prickly as a cactus they were, man and beast both, and proud of it. Like his father had been proud, the same rock hard disdain and he felt himself bristle, caught it and smoothed it down. "So - " Monroe clasped his hands behind his back, rocking back on his heels with a pleasant face, "What became of your mules?" He looked from Josiah to Vin to Chris with a light in his eye Chris didn't like one little bit. "Lost 'em." Chris said, stopping where he was before they'd reached the center of the parade ground. He watched Vin as he spotted Elizabeth coming out onto the porch of one of the Officer's houses, stepping off it with a glad smile ... being stopped by James. Physically stopped, her voice rising faintly as he pulled her back to the house, disappearing as he got her inside and the door closed. The gunslinger's shoulderblades twitched, hard, recognizing at once the tightness of the spot they'd just walked into. Vin looked around for Jules', worried about where she'd gotten to and more worried to guess she'd disobeyed and was hiding nearby, too close to the trouble coming fast up their backsides. He was afraid to guess what the Monroes had that put those nasty smiles in play. "Lost them, you say? That's unfortunate ... " Even J.D. felt the sudden tug of strong undercurrents, his eyes flickered around the sudden casual encirclement of soldiers in rising alarm. Ezra straightened his arm, Buck moved in a half-turn, smiling at the grim soldiers. Nathan came to Josiah's back. "I have men here - " A tip of his head indicated the dusty pair Vin had noticed, "Who say - lost - isn't precisely what happened." Vin went white - followed, and he'd never noted them, followed right to Tashunke Witco ... Both Gerald and Stephen Monroe smiled right into his eyes to see him realize it, their gladness a burning gall in his throat. The worst possible thing that could have happened as a result of his bringing those guns was happening right now. And he'd plunked Chris and Josiah right into the middle of it, even the Judge and Mary, all the boys, if Monroe wanted to make it look that way. This was bad, very bad, and Chris was giving him flaying glances. "I think it would be wise for you to relinquish your guns, gentlemen." Gerald said in a smooth tone of false disappointment, Stephen's avid face at his shoulder. The seven looked at him, and each other, as if mildly annoyed by this ridiculous request, but Vin's distress was obvious to those who knew him; alarming from a man usually hard to read as a wall. "This ain't lookin' real good ..." Buck murmured softly. J.D. glancing quickly at his face then back to the soldiers. Chris had the tip of his tongue pressed against the back of his eye-teeth and his chin set forward speculatively. Most men narrowed their eyes in contemplation of imminent violence, but Chris's always got wide and round, like he was opening up to see more, to get everything clear and set as a picture he stored in his memory before the storm unleashed. Choosing targets. Gerald saw that expression, the subtle movements of the seven men even surrounded, a settling and tightening and a pattern of glances among them ... and suddenly felt anxious that even in so hopeless a position they might ... they could. Buck slipped his gloves out of his belt and tugged them on casually, slipped the hammer-loop on his holster as he let his hand down, cocked on one hip and smiling. Chris was flexing his fingers in a small sinuous rhythm but he made no move to free his own gun. "Ezra, what'd he say we should do with our guns?" The gunslinger said in a mocking drawl, Ezra opened his mouth to explain 'relinquish' in the most florid terms he could dredge up, but Gerald interjected with smooth authority, "An investigation is my duty ..." Projecting an aura of calm command but resorting to a pacifying lie to forestall the unanticipated prospect of a gun battle inside his own command fort - one he was in no way positive he would win. "However, perhaps my men were mistaken as to exactly what goods were given to the hostiles," an eloquently equitable spread of his big pale hands as if it were only a bothersome formality, only the rules he had to follow. "If it was only food, of course that would be understandable, you feared for your lives, perhaps. Indians are all horse-thieves - well, mule-thieves, eh? It can be straightened out." Nathan, Buck, J.D. and Ezra looked to the other three to see how likely that was. Not very. Something had happened, and though none of the four who'd remained with the mule-train knew what it was, they knew what side of it they were on. "And I say your men spent two days sleepin' in the sun n' made up this shit t'get you off their backs." Chris laughed, prepared to be contentious, and Gerald knew he had to act quickly or lose all control of the situation. "Regulations require disarming you and taking you into custody, so I'm afraid I must insist that you all relinquish your guns. Now." The last word a command his troops obeyed with a grim-faced tightening of ranks around them. Ezra snorted disgustedly, his face offended and his eyes accusingly on Stephen, who could only shrug. Gerald had insisted all must be taken, even Standish, Gerald was tired of worrying about them. Chris felt the aggressive bump of Buck's hard flat chest against the back of his shoulder, caught the deep slant of his broad hatbrim and didn't have to look to know there was an eager gleam in his indigo eyes. A noisy racket and sudden bristle of rifle-barrels made Chris' face go stone hard. The soldiers became aware of the cross-fires the position of the seven put them in, and all drew hard beads on one of the seven. "Don't, Buck." He said quietly as he felt the lanky body behind him tense in moving for his pistol, laying his weight against him insistently. J.D. was looking everywhere at once hoping someone would make a move to turn this around, but the rest were marking positions and waiting on Chris' play with a dead calm that alarmed some of the soldiers. "What is going on here?" Orrin Travis strode into their midst feeling like he was parting sword-blades to do it, but urgently feeling the risk of interruption was far less than what might happen if he did not. "Captain Monroe," He demanded, his black eyes raking the troops unhappily, "Why are you pointing guns at my men?" Gerald turned him a smile as smug as anything Travis had ever seen, confident - he could not know how falsely - that the seven would be cut down before they could clear leather with their own weapons. Travis saw satisfaction in Monroe's face - he had something on them somehow, and the hair on Orrin's arms prickled under his shirtsleeves. "I'm arresting these three men - " A gesture including Vin, Chris and Josiah, "And anyone who interferes, for running guns to the hostiles." His brown eyes danced with enjoyment and Stephen actually laughed out loud, a sound a nasty child would make in being given a gift he lusted after and hadn't expected to have. "That's preposterous!" Travis retorted - but was it? He looked at Vin and saw the truth in a hawkishly direct blue stare. Not only did it, but wouldn't deny it, either, even if he should. Yes, he'd taken guns to the Lakota and he was as glad he'd done it as he was furious that it was necessary. Orrin swore before he could stop it, but not at Vin, as Gerald thought - he was furious with himself. He knew Vin Tanner's old-world sense of honor, knew how deeply disturbed Vin was by the wickedness being worked on the frontier for the sake of gold, and he damn well should've expected the man would do exactly this from the first, Vin wouldn't see any other choice! Genocide on such a grand scale against people he loved would overrule loyalty to the six men with him, to the Judge, even the law rendered meaningless in corruption. No matter what it cost him, and Travis suspected what Four Corners and these six men meant to Tanner. Not many men as solitary as Vin found a hope of hearth and home, but he'd be duty-bound to give it all up. Travis was equally anxious about the speculation in Gerald's eyes, he was wondering if he could entrap Orrin, those mysterious backers, in Vin's crimes, searching like a snake at a rat-hole for further advantage even while celebrating the victory he'd already achieved. Orrin's hands fisted with frustration - they were so close! Gerald had begun sending letters east the moment they arrived and James had found a way to intercept them, they were so close! "Buck, take the rest of the boys out of this fort." Chris said, his eyes never leaving Gerald Monroe's face and his voice clear enough to be heard above the murmuring ranks. "I'm afraid that won't be possible." Stephen presumed to reply, and Chris turned to Orrin and waited. None of the seven had made a single move to give their guns up despite two dozen rifle-barrels and half that many pistols pointed at them. They hardly seemed to notice that, and the soldiers shifted uneasily as if they'd been threatened. Orrin heard Mary coming behind him, arguing with a soldier who was trying to keep her back and winning by the sound of it. This could be a bloodbath in a heart-beat and he knew what Larabee needed, what had to happen if any of them were going to remain free to help the others, and though he didn't like it, he had to agree. Cut these losses. "You have no cause to detain the others, Captain, they've been with us the entire time." "They're in cahoots!" Stephen shouted aggressively because he knew Gerald didn't want any of those men out of his sight or control, provoking nervousness among the soldiers to imagine that possibility themselves. "I won't allow you to isolate me in this fort, sir - or do you presume to accuse me, as well?" Orrin's words dropped like ice-cold iron onto the ground, and Ezra, miffed to be suspect along with the rest, tugged at his shirt-cuff and said, "Now, now, now, Mr. Travis, I'm sure that isn't the case! Why, we've become such good friends, after all." His gold tooth caught the light and his smile was charming and warm, his voice dripping honey. Orrin let him go, sensing he had an idea and trusting him by now. Having to. "Why, I've even included you in the most brotherly terms in certain correspondences I've sent since leaving Four Corners, regaling them with the colorful stories your brother Stephen, here, shared with me along the trail. My correspondents ... treasure my missives." Stephen swallowed so hard it was audible in the silence, feeling Gerald's stabbing look and not daring to face him. Gerald had only to glance at his brother to know how valid this careful provocation was. James had forced Stephen to admit he didn't remember half of what he'd said to Ezra on the trail before they'd met up, and Standish had gotten him drunk regularly, obviously to his own purposes. Never once did Ezra stop smiling. Letters saying what in whose 'treasuring' safe-keeping? Surrounded and caught dead to rights, and damn if most of them weren't going to weasel right out of his hands! Orrin pushed, a scowl on his face that had set strong men shaking in his courtroom, "If these gentlemen, indeed, delivered guns to the Lakota, Captain Monroe, it was a private bit of moonlighting no one else was aware of. My colleagues are not men to abide personal distractions by their employees." His coldly threatening eye turned on the three men he needed Gerald to believe were acting on their own to exonerate the rest. "Particularly not on so important an undertaking." Gerald's eyes narrowed suspiciously. But whatever Stephen had said under the influence of drink and flattery was obviously enough to make that slick riverboat flim-flam man confident of blackmail if Gerald pushed them. And Travis - suddenly he looked as dangerous as any of his hired guns, and who knew where his contacts reached? What did these bastards already know about his businesses? His contacts and machinations at home and on the frontier? He hated being sidetracked when there was so much far more important work to be done. It was, he swore to himself, the very last time Stephen would prove the weakest link in his chain of command. Both the gambler and Travis, however, seemed willing to cut their losses with the tracker and his two friends, which left three less to watch out for and free rein - which Stephen was anticipating with gluttonous eagerness - to do whatever was necessary - or desired - in questioning them. Perhaps luck had just given him the makings of lemonade. He made his decision, yet hesitated as he was not prone to do. "Point made." Gerald finally agreed after a moment that was far too long, a moment in which Chris Larabee's hand drifted light and quick above his pistol-butt. "Go, Buck." Chris said, but he could see the broad brim of Buck's hat rocking just behind him and the light lazy drawl came, "I don't know as that's a grand idea, Chris, we ..." "Go. Buck." Sliced off hard as a razor and his head turning to fix his old friend with a look that told him everything he needed - this is big trouble and I need you out there free, not in here, imprisoned. Buck read that as plainly as Chris read his loyal reluctance to leave them. "You're in no position to be giving orders, Larabee, I haven't decided yet whether to ..." Larabee seemed not to have moved, but suddenly those glittering jade eyes caught Gerald like gunbarrels and he said in a quick low voice, "You could point a hundred guns at my head and I could still blow your fuckin' brains all over your brother before they could think to get a shot off." Cool-eyed, without anger, but a sure certainty that made Gerald's blood run cold. Not boasting or even threatening, just saying it was a thing he could do like saddle a horse, or breathe. As easily. More willingly. In that moment, though, Gerald forgot to notice that Travis was not arguing against their departure despite having just expressed discomfort at the thought of being isolated among these troops. Buck didn't wait, catching J.D. up by the arm as he passed him and hauling him along, protesting in as quiet a way as J.D. could. Nathan was torn, but Josiah's eyes told him to get while the getting was good so they'd know there was help beyond this fort. He followed Buck, jogging to catch up. Ezra, however, remained, and Travis offered a tip of his head that expressed both gratitude and relief. Like a lamp going on, the gambler's smile became real. In less time than any of the soldiers thought possible, Buck, J.D. and Nathan went past in a thunder of hooves, two pack mules at their heels taking the saddles and goods of those they left behind for safekeeping. "We won't be far, Chris." Buck called over his shoulder, wheeling his grey around where the road dropped into the river valley and looking at the soldiers, at the Monroes, as if he were an army in himself that they'd be wise to fear. "My friends better stay real healthy." Mary, at a walk so quick her grey gaberdine skirt snapped against her calves, still didn't get there in time to discover why Buck, J.D. and Nathan were riding out, grim-faced, towing two heavily laden mules and obviously expecting to be gone for some time. She was confused even further, and then outraged, to see guns leveled at Vin and Josiah and Chris, but the Judge caught her forearm as soon as she was near enough and held her back behind him without even looking at her. Her mouth opened, and his fingers crushed down so hard she flinched, but his face was nearly expressionless when she looked up in shocked hurt. She closed her mouth closed in sudden dread. Headstrong and impulsive and even sometimes naïve, Mary Travis was also intelligent enough to know that, and she didn't mistake the cutting tension nor the furious scowl Chris was leveling at her. Loud as words, that look - shut up, don't do anything that'll get me killed, stay out of it. Mary needed no more to understand the mortal danger of the moment. She assured her father-in-law with her stillness that she would not make matters worse, very afraid of the eager triumph in the faces of Gerald and Stephen Monroe. "These men didn't have no idea I was packin' guns t'the Lakota, Monroe." Vin said, and Mary gasped out loud in shocked dismay, unwittingly strengthening his hand in her obvious innocence. Vin glanced at her, bothered by that, and feeling the hard and heavy burden of endangering her, the boys, the Judge, leaving Jules and Elizabeth too nearly alone in this fort ... he had to keep the boys out of jail. "Hell, Larabee's got two damned holes in 'im from Lakota arrows," He declared hotly, "You think he's disposed t'give 'em gifts? I told 'em I'd kill 'em if they said anything!" Vin's eyes narrowed dangerously when Gerald broke into mocking laughter. "I find it hard to believe Mr. Larabee would quail before such a threat." Gerald scoffed, "His wounds don't appear to constrain him any." Chris gave him a sharp-toothed grin to assure him that was true and Gerald's temper raised a notch. Lord, Vin thought, he hadn't been careful, he hadn't been ready, he'd never even thought ... that was a lie, he certainly had considered that this could happen, but he'd done it anyway, hoping it wouldn't. "You think we're going to take your word for anything, Tanner?" Stephen sneered, "They went with you, they were there when you passed the guns along! They're here with you now, aren't they!" Vin growled low in the back of his throat, and only the need to exonerate Chris and Josiah, to get them out of trouble where they could be of help to the Judge and Elizabeth, stayed him. Vin wasn't a man who wasted himself in hate, but he wanted nothing but the plain simple act of killing both these damnable men right now and hang the consequences. "I tried t'get off alone n' you know it, Monroe, I couldn't stop 'em from comin' along - n' I tried to." "That is true." Orrin said, seemingly thoughtfully, "I didn't think much of it at the time, but ..." "It doesn't matter! They went, they were there!" Gerald gestured to his troops, impatient now and wanting to get control before these three armed and deadly men did something disastrously impossible. He did not like the feeling of fear. "Disarm them and escort them to my Office." With gravest reluctance the three men handed their guns over, but their faces remained as dangerous as if they were still armed to the teeth. Orrin wanted to insist they be treated well, he felt Mary start beside him with that same urge, but too much would be lost if they interfered now. He fixed Vin Tanner with a scowl only half theatre, and the tracker flushed under it, not ashamed of his deception but regretting the complications it forced on others. Travis was doing an important thing out here, too, probably far more significant than a few measly guns, and Vin wanted him to succeed. Travis could slow the rush west down considerably if he proved corruption, and time was all anyone could hope to give the Lakota now. Vin vowed to hold up however long he could to give the Judge the time he needed. "Well." Travis said sternly, "I'll leave this to you, then, Captain Monroe. I assume Mr. Standish is under no suspicion?" Gerald's nod was grudging, and Orrin, using every shred of will he possessed, turned his back on the three regulators, taking Mary's arm hard in his hand and pushing her ahead of him, forestalling her immediate and predictable refusal by saying very softly, "Walk away, Mary, we're of no help to them right now." "But you can't just ..." "Indeed I can't if I'm sharing a cell with them, do you understand?" Flinty, and his fingers biting again into her flesh as he propelled her forward with him; she looked back to find Chris watching after her, waiting for her. Knowing it was the smart thing to do didn't make her feel any less a coward deserting them, but her father-in-law wouldn't risk them so, wouldn't leave them so vulnerable in such hostile hands unless there was no other choice. Chris released a soft sigh as she acquiesced, his shoulders relaxing. Allies in the fort and allies outside it, and he didn't much care what authority or advantage Gerald had with odds as good as that on his side. He set his shoulders; they'd been in worse fixes. Monroe might have an army, but Chris Larabee had some mighty impressive friends. They were taken to Gerald's office and questioned separately for an hour, a beefy Sargeant taking no obvious pleasure in smacking their heads around when they proved entirely uncooperative. Gerald was being careful, still uncertain of Travis' influence and not wanting to antagonize him - or his backers - until he was certain this little crime would improve his hand with them. Stephen glowered in a rising temper over his brother's shoulder as Chris and Josiah both professed a bored ignorance about whatever Vin had done. Vin himself swore neither of them knew a thing about it and confessed to everything from the purchase to the delivery of those guns trying to get Chris and Josiah freed. He wanted to spit what he knew of the Monroe's crimes in their faces, wanted to ram their self-righteous authority into unpleasant places, but he couldn't let spite or even hate cost the Judge his investigation. When it became obvious that Gerald had no intention of letting anyone go, Vin quit talking. The expressiveness of his loathing was as loud as a shout. When that hour was done, Gerald was at the end of his patience and Stephen several lengths beyond. He hadn't much cared what answers they gave, he was just going through the motions for the record, but they'd managed to infuriate him completely anyway. Seething, he regarded the three standing before him, bloodied but definitely unbowed. Two soldiers guarded each and were insufficient by the scorn of their prisoners, as though they remained only because they wanted to. As though nothing Gerald could do would have any impact whatever. The Captain knew by then that the tracker was the only one who would ever admit culpability, and that was just fine, he had cause enough to hold them all and refused to admit the relief that he could do so. The preacher he wanted in custody because he looked like he could wade through a regiment without breaking a sweat, and the gunslinger ... that one was for vengeance's sake, to let him know how small a man he was without his guns, how beyond weaponry true power was. He wondered when Larabee would realize that. But the frontiersman - Stephen had sworn bitterly that Vin Tanner was the very personification of their father, and today Gerald saw it was so. Vin Tanner Gerald hated with an unreasoning and unquestioned animosity, as if his father stood before him again with that terrible dignity that had always made him feel shabby and clumsy and callow. There was nothing in the world that could render him so impotent as his father, nothing that could rip away his faith in his own power and cunning like it was rotted gossamer over emptiness. He hated him for it, despised him, scorned him like an animal too wild not to savage every civilized thing around it, and yet the old bastard was at the center of everything he'd ever done, whether in a futile plea for approval or for pure hateful spite. Tanner's bold blue eyes stared back unflinchingly. Gerald had never risen to his father's archaic standards of manhood, never been able to please him. Those memories tainted everything in his life to this very day. After a lifetime of trying so hard and never knowing why he failed, he'd actually begged for his father's pride in him. Standing here looking at Vin Tanner, he remembered that, how his father's uncompromising face had filled with a soft sad pity. Worse, more hurtful than anything else, the realization that his father loved him but would never like him, or admire or respect him. He could still hear the sorrow in the old bastard's voice as he'd said "Son, you're blinded by the false shine of meaningless achievements, you've got no more concept of the true worth of a man than you do of the wilderness. I'm sorry to say it, but it's so." From that day on Gerald had hated his father with a pure driven ambition, and hated the wilderness Vin Tanner wore like a secret in his eyes. Destroying the Indians, plundering the places his father had abandoned them for, leaving everything in worthless ruins, forgotten and gone forever - this was his goal, the work and sacrifice of years to achieve and signifying more than the wealth he would gain or the power ... it would be his ultimate triumph over his father, it would banish every emasculating memory forever. He could taste it already, it was in his hands and there was nothing to stop him. Tanner said something in Lakota that made the preacher bark a surprised laugh, his eyebrows rising, and Stephen slapped him before he could stop him. Tanner smiled at Gerald, slow and almost sweet. Gerald felt a chill that went down to the marrow of his bones. Gerald had no faith in things of spirit or soul, but he saw something in Vin Tanner at that moment that made him wonder like a wide-eyed fool if the old man could fight his way from the grave to stop him. He hardly recognized the panic that thought provoked and it took every shred of will he had to refuse it. He had a fort full of soldiers at his disposal, he had had Stephen's viciousness to let loose. Tanner might be fey and unknowable as his father, but he wasn't the huge bear of a man their father had been, frighteningly strong. Tanner was unarmed and slight and breakable, and when his brother looked at him, he saw in his flushed tight face the same hate, and the same reasons, the frontiersman a lightening rod for the hate and hurt of a lifetime. The brothers agreed. This man they could make pay the revenge they'd never been able to exact from their father, it would be over and they would be free. Gerald smiled at Vin, then, a horrible expression that only Stephen seemed pleased to see. Yes. Tanner was just like his father. Crowded rooms, crowded towns, roofs overhead and closed doors and windows. Every man could be broken and made small, and knowing his father gave him Vin Tanner's vulnerabilities on a platter. He nodded toward Josiah. "Take that one to the guard-house," he said, standing up and tugging sharply at the hem of his uniform coat to bring it back into line. Josiah stared at him impassively. "Shackle him. And shoot him if he gives you any trouble." They went at Josiah's languid pace, his guards looking like a pair of flies driving a buffalo. Vin and Chris exchanged a glance as Gerald gestured out over their heads and said, "The box." Which meant nothing to either of them, but the electric anticipation in the brothers made them very uneasy. Night was falling outside, the air was cold and the encroaching darkness endless, but it was a friendly darkness with Buck and J.D. and Nathan out there, Travis and Mary, Ezra, James and Elizabeth inside the fort. Neither doubted it would be enough. They were prodded and shoved across the parade ground and past the far corner between the Infantry and Cavalry barracks, out a few hundred yards further into an empty place at the plains-side edge of the compound. The faint scent of bread and soap mixed uneasily in the air from the bakery and the laundry. As they went, they heard the sound of a heavy door being locked far to their left, a glance between them agreed it had to be the brig, where Josiah was. They stopped. Angular shadows deepened in the dusk. "These, gentlemen, are the Boxes." Gerald said, indicating four iron shapes the height and length of a half-grown man. His voice was smooth and ripe with satisfaction, and his younger brother could not keep still, pacing and chuckling and shaking his head in admiration of his brother's cruelty. Chris gave them no reaction but a faint disdain when he realized what they intended, but Vin was another matter. The half-smile the gunslinger had put on his face to drive the Monroes crazy vanished when he glanced at Vin. The tracker had gone clammy white, and when they laid hands on him at wrists and biceps, his heels dug in with a jerk, eyes darting between the Monroes and the black caskets in the middle of the hard ground. Gerald's smile became a grin so wide his eyes nearly disappeared into slits, and Stephen actually took a little hop of glee and giggled. "No ..." Only once, quiet as a breath, but utterly steadfast. When Gerald moved his hand and the soldiers tried to take him there by force, all hell broke loose. Those two soldiers, bigger by half than Vin, were mighty surprised when he ripped himself free and slithered out of their hands like a tom-cat coming out from between a pair of dogs, laying about him with fists and feet and elbows. Chris grinned and figured to let Vin get some good licks in even though he'd likely take a couple of lumps in return - sometimes it was worth it. But in the next moment he saw that Vin wasn't just resisting, wasn't just wanting to land a few good punches - he didn't intend to be put in that box and he'd do anything he had to in order to prevent it. Not holding a thing back, viciously lethal blows of all-out power, Indian-learned, four of them swarming him now and one went down like a sack of grain under a straight-armed shot from the heel of his hand. He wanted out of this fort enough to fight for it even against impossible odds. Enough to kill. Now Chris fought to get loose himself if for no other reason than to keep Vin from getting himself killed against those impossible odds. Gerald and Stephen were barking orders and soldiers were converging and none of them was making a dent on what was going on right in front of their faces. Little bones in one soldier's foot cracked and broke under the heel of Vin's boot, blood swung out in a jittering arch as he spun another around with a broken jaw, dropped low under a wild swing and came within a hairs' breadth of breaking free and making a run for it when someone hit him in the stomach hard enough to take the breath out of him with a sharp grunt. At this first sign of weakness, Stephen at last entered the fray with a nasty punch into those ribs he had long since noticed Vin being protective of, and Vin went down hard onto one knee, hands instinctively clutching what hurt so badly. Chris lunged ferociously, red-hot with fury, but got jerked back so hard his elbows popped. Vin wasn't done, though, no, he'd stand up and die before he let himself be put into that box and Chris yelled his name, told him to stay down, tried to turn him, but he could've saved his breath. Vin gained his feet for an instant and his fist snapped out quick and true, clipping Stephen Monroe right between the eyes and putting him down on his ass in the dust. But they'd attracted too much attention and too many soldiers; Vin went down again in a dusty tangle. Chris twisted and swore and nearly had his shoulders dislocated as he was driven hard to his knees, then down flat on the ground so his cheek scraped on the hardpan. It took three men to pin his sinuously struggling length there and still he inflicted bruises. For a second he couldn't see Vin, but he could hear the struggle turn into a beating, wet swearing from someone about a broken jaw and the ominous proclamation of one actually dead, the bridge of his nose gone places bones ought not to go. The sound only boots made kicking somebody, the short agonized sounds only a man being kicked made, a dusty flurry close to his head, one of Vin's legs drawing up hard as he cried out once, cut off. "Stop them!" Chris panted, his head pinned to the dirt but rolling his eyes up to find Gerald, "Stop them, you son of a bitch!" Cold eyes regarded him, glanced over at Vin being yanked upright, fighting disjointedly. Stephen got up off the ground and started throwing punches Vin couldn't defend against. Smiling, giving the pain of each blow a moment to sink in, measuring his revenge in increments that obviously gave him perverse pleasure. His smile didn't last long - one of Vin's boots nailed him between the legs, not squarely, but he'd be wearing a nasty bruise on the inside of his thigh to remember this night by. Gerald looked over his shoulder at the scuffling men, knowing there was a point at which the beating would become mortal and not caring that much about Tanner's life - but if he let Stephen kill him now, it could come back to haunt him later with all these soldiers as witnesses. Worse, he saw his own daughter sprinting across the camp toward the junior Officer's quarters, where he'd housed Travis. That witness he definitely did not want. A back-handed blow snapped Vin's head up and back into the shoulder of the man holding that side, his knees buckled and Chris heard a soft anguished moan. "I swear to God if you kill him I'll make you wish you could die, I'll feed you your own bloody parts, you sonofabitch!" Chris rasped, surging against the men holding him, keeping them on edge with constant testings of their grip because they'd slip up, and when they did, he'd kill Stephen Monroe with his own hands. Gerald might've laughed, he turned his head sideways in sarcastic bewilderment that a man flat on the ground - a man who could die as easily as the tracker - should presume to threaten him, but the gunslinger growled, "Kill us both, n' there's three men outside this fuckin' fort who'll make me look like a pansy." Blazing jade eyes reminding Gerald of Buck, Nathan and J.D. so he involuntarily scanned the darkness around the fort before he could stop himself. Gerald's hard look came back to Chris, certain now that the seven were not just hired guns, though he couldn't fathom what, then, they were ... Larabee's harsh breaths stirred the dust in front of his face, eyes burning like he would come straight up from hell after him. Gerald believed him. Stephen was hitting Vin methodically, in the stomach, in the throat once so Vin gagged and struggled for breath, the flank where it seemed to hurt most, displaying a horrible expertise and muttering oddly to himself the whole time until the soldiers understood he meant to kill. None of them wanted to be holding onto this tracker while their Captain's brother beat him to death, the man had friends none wanted on his backtrail and every soldier there was certain that's just where they'd be if the tracker died. Their alarm became evident when they started back-stepping from Stephen, and Gerald's hand flung up indolently, careless and languid and not soon enough to keep the final ham-fisted punch that broke Vin's ribs audibly. Both his knees jerked up, and his involuntary cry was urgently damaged. "That's enough, Stephen." His brother glared at him, hands still fisted, bent in a pugilist's stance and obviously reluctant to stop despite the fact that Tanner was hanging like a long sack of bones in the guard's hands. Gerald inclined his head insistently, and for a moment the only sound was the sawing breath of riled-up men and Vin's uneven blood-wet gasps. At the flick of their commander's glance, the soldiers let him drop, and he hit the ground so hard Chris flinched and cursed. Not unconscious, curling up into himself like a leaf tossed onto a fire, knees and elbows tucking in hard and no longer able to hide how badly he was hurt, every strangled breath screamed. Chris marked their faces, every one he could see, and those who could moved out of his line of sight first. The last thing Chris saw before the iron door of the box they shoved Vin into clanged closed was the tracker's bloody fingers clutching on the rim, refusing to that last with whatever strength he had, and a rifle butt driving him back. Chris went into his own with every sinewy quivering line of him promising bloody death, tucking into the little square as well as he could, just high enough to sit with his head bent, not wide enough to lay down or even fully stretch his legs. He prayed Vin was unconscious. "You can't leave them in his hands, you can't, he'll die!" Jules insisted, wrenching herself violently out of her Aunt's worried grasp and rounding on Travis like she wanted to punch him. She'd burst in through the door not a moment before and had proceeded to stir the entire house into uproar - everyone thought she was in bed, but she was the only one dressed in the room just now. Mary stood in the doorway to her room in her wrapper, the Judge in his shirt-sleeves with his suspenders dangling at his sides. Travis had a deeply worried frown on his face; Stephen Monroe had better hope he hadn't hurt Tanner badly. "We can't interfere, Julianna." Was all he could say, not happy the child was upsetting everyone. He'd known, of course, expecting this sleepless night in the full knowledge that the three men wouldn't escape unscathed, but though it grated on him like knives, he couldn't jeopardize the entire operation protesting too much, nor deny the wisdom of remaining free where he had a hope of helping. Ezra, knowing the same things and hot as a hornet, had still agreed. Orrin hadn't wanted to upset Mary, Elizabeth or Julianna, women didn't understand the worth of taking a few punches when it was necessary, but obviously, Julianna Monroe was a law unto herself. He glowered down at her feeling a strange mix of anger and sympathy and pride at her urgent demand that they help. "They aren't being harmed, Julianna ... " "That's a lie! That's a big fat lie!" "Julianna!" "Uncle Stephen was beating him up, I saw it!" Shouting, standing at a threatening forward lean toward Orrin Travis like she was six feet tall and would rattle him by his ears if he didn't listen to her, "I was hiding by the barracks and I saw it! He hit him, alright, and he liked it, too!! There was blood and he couldn't walk, they're going to shove him and Mr. Larabee into those iron boxes on the parade ground!" That startled Travis, Mary looked at him anxiously, not understanding, but Julianna went on heatedly, "They'll kill him if they can and you know it, Auntie! Uncle James knows it, too! They hate him because he's like Grandfather!" Travis had been studying her despite the blast of her fury directed at him, and he looked at Elizabeth Monroe to see how true the child's words were. True enough to have him getting his suspenders back up, and true enough that Mary ran wordlessly to fetch his coat. There were raised voices across the parade ground and Chris put his hands on the door of the iron casket as it was being closed, pushing in the hope that someone would get Vin out before he came to and went crazy. Gerald glanced down at the movement, having other ideas and stepping in front of the box as he saw Orrin Travis striding purposefully toward him, Standish struggling into his coat on his heels, James emerging onto the porch of the Commander's Quarters and heading toward the junior Officer's quarters where he could hear Julianna's temper being unleashed on her Aunt. "Keep him quiet." He said, which meant a rifle butt upside the head that, indeed, quieted the gunslinger completely. The lid went down without a sound. Gerald met Travis halfway across the compound, and though Travis wanted to check those ominously silent iron boxes, the captain had a good-sized contingent of soldiers at his back breathing hard, their color high and violent. Gerald assured him the detainees were in the guard-house, unhurt, even offering to take him to visit the Preacher at once, if that would ease him. The other two, however, were in solitary, his bloodied men evidence of a struggle that had resulted in the death of one of his soldiers. He'd offered that information with flatly threatening eyes and Travis had to acquiesce. Killed one of the soldiers - was it true? If it was ... The bloodied knuckles and battered faces and torn dusty uniforms told Orrin how much of a fight Vin and Chris had put up and he looked at Gerald with deep skepticism, Ezra tense as a fox-hound on a leash beside him walking almost sideways with wanting to get to those boxes himself. Gerald Monroe smiled at them, knowing there was nothing they could do about it - but nor could he leave a big enough guard on the boxes to attract notice. At every turn a gain, and a complication, always a damned complication with this bunch of people. Travis had no choice under that force of arms but to let himself be escorted back to his quarters, tugging Ezra along beside him, certain only that Gerald Monroe was going to learn a very big lesson in how formidable the helpless could be. There was no sound until well past midnight, and Chris nearly knocked himself out on the door of his own coffin waking to the sound of a thick shuddering gasp followed by a sudden loud clang as if Vin had straightened up all at once and driven himself against the metal sides and top of the box. Then, perhaps realizing where he was, his fists struck the door with bonebreaking force. "Vin! Don't!" "Chris?" A hoarse rasp, and then with a hope Chris could hear shaking in his voice, "Can you git me outta here?" Chris would've given anything to have been able to do that, he closed his eyes and let his head fall back onto the unforgiving metal knowing Vin already knew the answer, but not wanting to say it. "No. I'm in the one next t'you." A soft moan Chris wished he'd never had to hear came, followed close by frantic, barely audible, words; "Jesus, Jesus, Oh no ..." Then silence broken by breathless grunts as Vin braced damaged bones and bleeding flesh and pushed with all his strength, palms and feet, back and shoulders, desperately seeking a weakness. Hurting himself doing it, Chris could hear pain in his effort, but doing it anyway. Terror, and he cursed Gerald Monroe for knowing what confinement in small places did to Vin. How did he know? Who'd told him? He swore viciously and struck the side of his own box with impotent fury and another hard clang reverberated beside him, this time accompanied by a short sharp cry. "Vin, listen to me! I'm right here, it's alright ..." "Fuck if it is!" Panicked, his voice breaking with more than pain, "I can't ..." A ragged breath sucked in quick. Vin was trying to bring it under control, trying to fight a terror he'd never been able to beat, it was the only thing that scared him and he'd never known why. Not dead and buried, just buried. Bright breath-taking flares of agony in each grind of broken ribs, knotted up so tight he couldn't even tell where all the hurt was coming from and no air to vent the scream strangled in his bruised throat, his heart was racing wildly as if winding up to explode. "Vin, I heard Travis, he's gotta know we're here - " Chris said, throwing out what hope he could. Vin was trying not to die in that tight smothering darkness. Chris heard a panicked groan low as a storm wind, and then Vin lost it. Chris shouted then, pushed his hands against the damned cold iron and called, but nothing stopped the battering struggle beside him, the scrape of hands and boots against rough iron, metallic thumps and thuds of knees and elbows and feet and head, just enough room to batter himself to death. "Vin! Don't! They'll get us out, Vin! I need you alive!" For long minutes that awful futile struggle continued, a terrible keening sound under it and then silence again, a quick panting, a liquid cough cut off like it hurt fiercely. "Vin?" Chris called, shaking himself now and pressed against the door above him. Nothing, no sound, no matter how often he called, how angry or urgent. In the depths of that glacial night he woke from a cramped uneasy doze to a soft rhythmic thumping. Vin, rocking from wall to wall, and giving no answer to his insistent calls. But Chris kept talking so Vin would know he wasn't alone, and for the comfort of his own voice after awhile. His leg throbbed and he needed to straighten it out so much. At last the rocking stopped, but Vin never answered and the silence was ominously complete. To be continued... Feedback to Author
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five