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:
Jules considered the situation carefully through the pre-dawn hours, trying to think of all possible courses of action and outcomes. When the jagged horizon of mountains began to gray, she knew the gunslinger could see her even though she was sitting within the shadow of the lodge-door, his cool blank face seeming disembodied above the slender darkness of his body. Like a cold flame on a black candle, a burning captive in ice. Her heart felt like it was laying on the ground in front of her, her eyes burned with tears that were as much fury at herself as worry for her Uncle, sorrow at his choices and reasonings. She should've done this thinking long before now, but she'd just been going along like a child and not thinking past the moment ...
She knew where her Uncle had gone, and why, and that he couldn't be kept from it and shouldn't be. Part of her wanted him to keep her father and Uncle Stephen from the gold Aunt Duley had written about. But more important was the certain knowledge that he could easily die in the doing, one man against such power as her father had. And more important still, as she thought about it, was the realization that she might never see him again whether he survived or not. Respect for her Uncle and his fealty to Duley warred with that fear that had begun working in her since Vin had slipped under the hide wall of the lodge. A fear that had increased when she realized Chris Larabee was sitting guard there, and why.
There would be trouble when it was discovered he was gone, the day was coming fast and she still didn't know what to do ... Hugging her arms around herself, she sat in the chill entrance of the lodge and watched the gunslinger watch her, feeling connected to him now in a way she'd never expected.
Methodically she searched her memory, gathered up the glances the others gave her Uncle and Larabee when they edged around each other, sometimes ignored each other: Plainly that wasn't how it usually was between them or the rest wouldn't have been uneasy, nor would Uncle Vin's eyes have been so burdened with regret. It was the gunslinger who was maddest about Vin risking his life, and that meant Vin's life mattered to him, maybe even more than to anyone else. Clearly all of them had given Uncle Vin their loyalty, it was what made her love them - even that gunslinger who could still strike a shaking chill in her with one look. But it might also have led most of them to make the same mistake she was coming to understand she'd made herself, loving Vin too much to hold him back from this duty she hadn't realized might take him from her forever. The gunslinger was the only one who'd known it from the start.
Last night, when he'd thought she was sleeping, when she'd lain quietly and breathed regularly so he could go without fuss, as she knew he had to ... but had he been saying good-bye more than just for now? Regret, grief, longing ... the same look he'd given his friends, one by one, over the past few days, he'd given to her last night, and she'd never thought about what it meant until now.
Uncle Vin expected to lose his friends over this, and expected to lose the family he'd only just come to know - he expected to lose her, and she'd never thought of 'after' because ... well, she'd just never thought about it, and still didn't want to. But she had to, now, it couldn't be helped.
Her Uncle expected he'd be doing unforgivable things in maybe having to kill her father or Uncle Stephen, he went to carry out a duty he accepted might tear him from them all, but he'd still do that for Aunt Duley. Jules had never resented the love he bore Duley before, the haunting touch she could sometimes almost see that seemed to bring him such comfort ... it was more insidiously dangerous than that, she realized, it was a terribly selfish thing that made him live his life in the service and memory of the dead. He would give up all of them, his friends, her Aunt, even Jules herself, for the sake of his dead wife.
It was a very hard thing to understand, now, that her Uncle Vin wasn't planning on coming back to any of them. That was wrong, it was just plain wrong, and it was a rejection that hurt somewhere so deep she could hardly bear it. She was alive, her Aunt Elizabeth and all his friends were alive, they were the rightful parts of his life that should matter more than a ghost! Wrong for him, for his friends, for everyone, and not something she could ever accept. Nor could Chris Larabee ... now she understood his anger, oh, now she understood!
Mr. Larabee was probably the only one who could keep that from happening, because he needed her Uncle Vin in a way Jules had not yet been able to define. There was something broken in him that her Uncle Vin's friendship patched over and made bearable, and he no more wanted to lose him to a ghost than Jules did. All his friends needed him in their ways - just like he needed them, whether he could see it or not. Vin was alive and Duley was not, and though she respected and even wanted for herself the sort of love that transcended death, that bound souls eternally together, when it came to losing him herself for the sake of that love ... well, Jules would never be as generous as that.
Finally, she stood up and ducked outside, her decision made. Her eyes rose fearfully as the gunman came to his feet at her approach like a panther crouched in the grass waiting for prey to wander near. She didn't like that analogy much and clamped her teeth together to keep her jaw strong, hiding a growing desperation that she would never see her Uncle Vin again if this man didn't go after him and bring him back.
Behind her she heard her Aunt emerge from the lodge and felt her alarm, because everyone avoided Larabee for fear of setting off the perpetually discontented violence in his eyes. But that didn't matter now and she couldn't be afraid of anything but his refusal. Uncle Vin was what mattered, keeping him alive, keeping him from exiling himself into the wilderness thinking he was a criminal and weighted with that guilt that would forever taint the joy he'd taken in discovering he had family. Oh, she hated that most of all - that he would look back at the time they'd spent together and feel only sorrow and regret.
This gunslinger was the one who could keep that from happening, and she was as sure of that as she was that Buck could smile at any woman living.
He waited, hard and narrow and forbidding as a cliff-face, but she marched right up to the tips of his boots and craned her head back with a look as determinedly fearless as she could make it.
"He's left." She declared with a defiance that wavered only a little at the leap of fire in his jade eyes and the sudden tightening of his face. His knuckles whitened on the butt of that fearsome gun and he opened his mouth ...
"Yep, n' it appears J.D. went along for the ride." Buck's voice, equal parts exasperation and pride, took the gunslinger's ferocious attention from her and she was ashamed to be relieved, taking a step back from the sudden fence of long legs.
"You mean I've been sitting here freezing my tail off all night and he's gone? And J.D. knew??" Larabee hissed, and Buck was nodding his head regretfully, eyebrows high and helpless. She was as surprised as the gunslinger to have Buck step right up to him, a few good inches taller and a cautious intent firmly in his eyes.
"Chris, the kid did what we should've done - I'd've gone if I'd seen him slippin' away." A short chuff of a laugh puffed in the cold grim air; "Hell - you can't stop Vin when he's set on something - when have you ever?" And though his shrug was philosophical, there was still a warmth in his eyes unphased by the gunslinger's deadly cold regard, "All we can do now is follow on n' make sure he rides on out the other side."
"That's right!" Jules interrupted stoutly, startling both men. Buck put a hand out, gentle but firm, to keep her back, but she wasn't about to be left out of anything that would keep her Uncle Vin whole - and that had been what she'd wanted anyway, right from the start!
"I bet he'd follow you if you needed him to, and he wouldn't care why, either!" A shrewd cock of her head up at him, her eyes wiser than they had a right to be. "You have to, you know what he has to do and you know what he'll think he has to do after! You can't let him just ... disappear!"
Chris glared down at her and Buck was content to hold his peace, deeply bothered by the eventuality Jules and Chris seemed to agree on - that Vin didn't intend to come back, ever. Little gal glared right on back up at Chris like she knew she had him, and damned if she didn't. Damned if she didn't have them all. Chris had tried to keep Vin out of it, he'd done everything a man could do, but Vin had gotten off anyway. It was time to reckon with that and nothing else, and obviously Julianna had already done so. Chris' glare diffused and went into private considerations; his old friend had faith in Chris to do what had to be done.
Buck let the girl lean back against him, doubting she even knew she'd done so but giving the comfort she needed. Women took a good deal of comfort from a strong man's kind touch, and though she was yet a girl, Buck already saw the admirable woman she would become. Standing up to Chris Larabee, by God. His Mam had that sort of spirit, brave and independent and standing up when she had to no matter the odds. But he still hadn't figured out Julianna's attachment to Vin, nor the bigger puzzlement of Vin not only allowing it, but wanting it.
Now, even with Billy, it was clear childhood was not a state Vin understood, their excitable impetuousness strange to him. Buck knew a few like that, never children themselves, never allowed that innocent thoughtlessness his own Mam had made sure he'd had himself. Yet Vin was easy with Julianna, and it was an oddity Chris had never mentioned. A powerful curiosity in Vin's eyes when she talked to him, and a way he looked at her when he thought himself unnoticed ... Longing. Love. One thing Buck never mistook was love, he had an instinct to that graciously abiding emotion that had never been wrong. Vin loved this girl like she was his own, and Buck had the growing suspicion that Chris knew why.
Nathan and Josiah came shoulder to shoulder through the softening darkness of the lodges, drawn from sleep by a sense of things happening among themselves that the camp also felt as it woke. A significance centered on the four men, that bold girl right in the middle of it, her Aunt watching from a distance but still part of whatever council the whites had convened before day had even come.
Chris paced off a little way from the rest, to the Lakota a sign as clear as a man's robe drawn over his head that he was thinking hard about a serious matter. They respected it, and went about the pre-dawn business of the camp at a discreetly curious distance.
"Vin's gone, isn't he." Josiah murmured to Buck as they came to him, not a question and not the least surprised. He folded his arms across his chest and balanced his muscular weight on both feet, watching Chris and Julianna Monroe attentively. Things were coming to a head, then, and he was glad of it.
Nathan, with a surge of helpless anger and concern that filled his expressive face, imagined Vin on horseback the way he was banged up and shook his head in mystification. What was Vin so set on doing that he'd attempt it in the shape he was in? And why were they all so outside of it after the trust they'd built between them in Four Corners? Vin was a deeply private man and they all respected that, but he was also forthright and honest, sometimes almost brutally so, he never took a cut corner when it came to what was right or hid his motives or feelings about a cause as he was now ...
He looked to Josiah, and the Preacher's eyes reflected the same question. What they'd all been wondering for too long, because men didn't ask what another man didn't want known.
Unless it was time to ask: Josiah and Nathan both saw Buck decide that time had come in the slow tilt of his yoke-handled shoulders and the drop of his head as he considered how to do this with a man as touchy as Chris. They couldn't afford Chris stalking off in a temper, not now.
Finally, in a tone of old friends, Buck asked it: "Chris, what haven't you been telling us?"
Chris' shoulders stiffened and he didn't turn around, but Buck wasn't going to let it go.
"There's something between you and Vin, and by now I figure it's time we need t'know what it is, ain't a one of us gonna sit still for Vin just takin' off thinkin' it's the only option he's got." He felt Josiah and Nathan's alarm at that, it mirrored his own. "You've never been one t'let your friends step in it when you could warn 'em off."
Chris swept his coat back and Julianna jumped guiltily at the sudden motion, though he only held the tails back behind his hooked fingers on his bullet-studded gunbelt. Though he didn't turn around, he got off a glance at Buck like a gunshot before turning back into the safe shadow of his hatbrim.
Finally he said, "It isn't mine to tell, Buck." He faced the three of them with a helplessness that obviously frustrated him past bearing, "I gave my word." He knew Buck would accept that, as would Josiah and Nathan, but just by saying it he'd told them there was something they weren't privy to. The knowledge was in his eyes, and Buck was surprised to see it in Elizabeth Monroe's, too, as he caught sight of her over Chris' shoulder. Pallid with the receding fear of that secret being revealed. He hadn't meant to bring Chris' attention to her, but Chris was far too sharp not to notice and he turned on her like a bear rising up on two legs.
"You told him!" He accused, and she paled, unable to deny it despite the way he bristled, "He wouldn't have left now if you hadn't, he's in no damned shape to be riding! You damned well told him and you damned well knew he was going! Did he even have to ask, or did you just tell him from the git-go? Was this your plan all along?"
Her mouth opened in protest, her eyebrows drew down, her hands rose and fell in a series of helpless gestures, defenseless. Though Larabee never moved toward her, the threat of him vibrated through her bones.
"Chris ..." That quiet reasonable warning tone had infuriated him so many times, and Chris never took his burning eyes off of Elizabeth Monroe, finding a focus for his fury and a justification for it.
"Shut up, Buck, you've go no idea what she's done here. I asked her not to tell him when her brothers planned to touch off their damned war, and instead she sent him on his way to kill 'em for her without letting any of us know it!"
Elizabeth gasped in horror, stunned to have such perfidy attributed to her at all, much less publicly.
Buck shook his head at the flare of Chris' rage, but he knew better than to try to temper it, such things just had to burn themselves out. There wasn't anything Elizabeth Monroe wouldn't do for Vin, and though telling the tracker her brother's plans might have been foolish, it was not selfish or wicked. The woman loved that half-crazy half-hermit tracker, and everything she did was based on that hopeless hope. It made Buck sad to know it.
"I did no such thing!" Elizabeth finally cried, "He insisted I tell him, I'm sorry, I know I said I wouldn't, but he insisted, I couldn't stop him any more than you could have, Mr. Larabee, I couldn't stop him!"
"I wouldn't've sent him off alone to kill my own flesh and blood for me, lady! None of this is coincidence, you coming to Four Corners and enticing him out here, getting him into the middle of this so you could claim your gold!"
Her face reddened hotly in the dawning light and her jaw tightened with a scalding rush of pure rage to be so purposefully maligned and misrepresented. Hands fisted in her skirt, she crossed the little clearing before the lodges to confront him.
Julianna halfway interposed herself between them, seething in her Aunt's defense and hoping Elizabeth was finally ready to give him a goodly piece of her mind - she'd seen her Auntie riled, and she had a tongue that could rip a man's flesh from his bones.
"If I could use a gun half as well as you, Mr. Larabee, Vin would never have gone alone! But all you cared about was stopping him, he couldn't come to you for help! You know very well what he is to me ..." Her head was cocked aggressively toward him and her eyes were fierce with meaning, knowing her comment roused the suspicions of the other three men there who did not know how she and Vin were related. "What right do you have to tell him what he may and mayn't do, who he can or cannot care for, what causes he should or shouldn't take up? What sort of a friend are you to force him to sneak off this way instead of being at his side?"
Chris was pretty damned tired by now of people getting into his face, and he leaned toward her so fast their foreheads nearly banged together, his fingers white on his gun-belt and his eyes meeting her blazing look with unconcealed threat.
"I've been tryin' t'keep him out of doing your dirty business for you! None of this is his doing, not a damned bit of it, but you've got him goin' on like he's the only one who can stop it, like he's the only one who can put it right! It ain't his to put right, it ain't even something that can be put right! This damned Indian war is gonna come, and chances are more than good that he's gonna get himself killed making sure you live long enough to claim those grants and get rich!"
"You know why he's doing this, Mr. Larabee, it has nothing to do with me!" Elizabeth cried, acutely aware of Josiah and Buck and Nathan all watching her intently, gathering what they could that might explain Vin's actions since everyone who seemed to know refused to say.
"Oh, I know why, alright, and it's got everything to do with you even if it's her he's doing it for!" Chris snapped, looming over Elizabeth now, every line of his body taut with barely leashed fury. The boys wondered who the her was, he could feel it and regretted saying even that, but his eyes beheld his enemy before him, and Vin's, a woman who'd seduced his friend into a plot that would be his ruin. Even if he lived through it he'd be destroyed, Chris knew it, Vin's literally biblical sense of honor could never reconcile killing his own kin - even if only by marriage, and even if other of those kin wanted it. He'd lose his niece - who Chris suspected had been set to weasel her way into his heart by her Aunt without caring how much it would hurt them both when it was over. Chris didn't have Buck's blindness when it came to women, he knew they used their intuitions and insights as viciously as any man used a knife or a gun - more so, maybe, because they seemed so incapable of it and found those vulnerable places a man would never look for.
Vin was a smart fellow, skilled and capable and enduring and independent as no other he'd met, but he had no defenses where this girl or this woman were concerned, the promise of having a family overrode every bitter experience and Elizabeth Monroe had used that fact ruthlessly.
Looking like Vin's dead wife, offering her niece as a surrogate daughter, seeing the need in him and using it to coax him into her family's war against each other. Wielding him like a weapon, ruining his friendships, the life he'd begun in Four Corners, tainting the very memory of Duley that was all that sustained him day to day. Sarah was painful to him, the memory of her and his son a constant sorrow that sometimes drove him crazy, but Duley ... Chris had understood since that night in Nettie's orchard that Vin still lived with Duley, still needed her. Once that was gone, once he realized he'd been used in Duley's name for so wicked a purpose, Vin would have no reason to keep living and Chris knew it. Just as he knew a good deal of his own unformed hopes would end. This woman before him, this pale civilized sophisticated heartless bitch standing right in front of him, had taken a friend the likes of which he'd never in his life had from him, and Chris looked down at her wanting to kill her for it, glad to have her blanch in terror to see it.
But Elizabeth Monroe did not retreat despite seeing all of those thoughts in his face, knowing herself a villain in his eyes. Disdain and even hatred burned in his eyes, but she searched his face earnestly nonetheless for a way to move him, frightened, but determined to bring him to Vin's side any way she could. She'd known Vin would go, but not precisely when, she'd thought he wouldn't be able to, was ashamed to hope his injuries would be too severe, but she should've known that wouldn't stop him. Lord, she should've known. And she'd never thought of Vin not returning to her, just to imagine it devastated her. Now all she could think to do was to send these ferocious men after him to keep him alive as he fulfilled this duty to her sister, a duty that had loomed so large in her own mind that she was stunned to have it now matter not at all.
"I know I cannot convince you of my innocence in the matter of those land grants, Mr. Larabee, you suspect every move and word from me, I can't change that. I know you attribute my affection for Vin to what he can do for me, I know you think I'm manipulating him to some dire personal purpose ... but it wasn't me who set him on this course! How could I know he was in Four Corners? How could I know my brothers had intercepted her letters? Started ... all of ... this!" Tears flooded her eyes and she gritted her teeth against them, knowing he would scorn them as only another manipulation that he was certainly immune to. Her hand went toward him in supplication and withdrew when he glanced down at it like it was something disgusting.
There were only the two of them there, no one else mattered now, because only this man could save Vin and nothing else was of any concern to her. Not what he thought of her or what he did to her, only what he could do for Vin, because if he died in Duley's cause ... she would never forgive herself, or her sister.
She took a trembling breath and squeezed Julianna's hand without realizing the girl had slipped it into hers and was standing like a rock beside her.
Jules glared like a loaded gun aimed at that gunslinger who had no idea who her Aunt was, who was saying such cruel and entirely ridiculous things about her ... so afraid her Aunt would take Vin away from him, as if no one else could love him that much or want nothing but to never be parted from him ...
"Mr. Larabee ..." Elizabeth entreated, her voice laden with the need to be believed, "Please ... I'll do anything you ask if you'll only go after him. I'll sign the land grants over to you ..."
"I don't want your damned gold!"
"Then to Vin, to a charity, to anyone if it'll prove to you that the gold doesn't matter to me and never has! I can't bear to have my brothers do what they're planning to do any more than Vin can, but I don't want him sacrificed to their crimes no matter what you think! Please!"
"I'm not gonna help you get your way, woman! You think Vin can't do it? Is that it? You think he's too banged up to carry it through, so now you want all of us in there, too!"
"No! No! That's not it at all!" Elizabeth gripped her hair in her hands for a moment of sheer desperate frustration; "Are you being purposefully obtuse, Mr. Larabee? Are you so set on making me entirely reprehensible that you'll ignore good sense and your own wishes to keep Vin alive, for heaven's sake?!" Elizabeth cried, frantic with thinking the gunslinger would do nothing rather than fall prey himself to what he believed to be her manipulations.
"He won't do it for you, Auntie." Julianna said suddenly, and the girl withstood Chris' lashing glare better than her Aunt had, her chin strong and her eyes filled with a temper that was every bit his match. To have her Aunt spoken to this way, accused of such terrible motives and deeds, infuriated her, but did not blind her to the source of the gunslinger's rage. Just as she'd known this morning as she'd approached him, it was fear for Vin that roused this fierce will to protect him from himself, from her Aunt, from anyone who would do him harm. And while it felt selfish to her, she knew he loved Vin and would move heaven and earth to safeguard him. That was what needed doing in every practical sense, that was all that was important, and she was determined to make it so. Uncle Vin could not be allowed to disappear after doing what Duley needed him to do, Jules would never be able to forgive herself if he got away from them and had to live with that terrible misgotten guilt ever after. And she knew Chris Larabee didn't want that either, so no matter how pig-headed he was being, he was still on her Uncle Vin's side. He was still her best ally.
"One day you're going to know how wrong you've been, Mr. Larabee." Julianna said, sharp and calm as she could be and surprising her Aunt with her composure. "My Auntie is a wonderful lady, good and kind and generous and honest - do you really think Vin is so stupid that he could be fooled for so long by anyone? That he's so foolish a pretty woman - even one who reminds him of ... " Oh, she had him there and didn't need to betray her Uncle any further. Buck and Josiah and Nathan stood watching and listening with bewildered intensity, but she didn't finish the sentence that so confused them. She saw the flicker of sudden doubt in Larabee's face, in his eyes as he glanced at Elizabeth's pinched and desperate face.
"That doesn't matter right now, does it? What was or what might be or what anyone else wants? You want to go after him because you know it's the right thing to do, but you're thinking not to just because Aunt Elizabeth wants you to as well. Cutting off your nose to spite your face, Mr. Larabee? Are you willing to risk Vin's life for your suspicions?"
Buck couldn't help laughing, he turned and walked off a few paces and strangled it as much as he could, but Julianna taking Chris head-on reminded him so much of Nettie, standing there with her hands on her hips and her eyes snapping while she spit the truth right into Chris' face.
"Come on, Mr. Larabee - are you saying you aren't smart enough to do what you know needs doing without falling into any Monroe traps?" Shrewdly slicing right into the core of his stubbornness and Chris had never wanted to smack a child so much until she said. "He's going to leave us all, you know." Looking up at him with that grief in her suddenly softened face, looking up with every hope focused right on him. For a moment the two of them regarded each other with nothing of their fears or hopes concealed, wordlessly coming to an understanding - Vin was all that mattered.
It was like one enormous breath being held, but Jules was certain about what they'd do. Let him rage, let him accuse and argue and condemn, but she had no doubt at all that the gunslinger and all the rest would do what J.D. already had -
She was not the only one who knew that.
The sound of muffled hoof-falls on dewed ground came on them and their horses appeared out of the darkness, ears flicking forward, eyes bright, almost as if they just come walking in of their own volition. But their leads were lightly held in one of Little Eagle's small old hands, frail as a bird but holding the great creatures obedient to her. Saddled and outfitted, walked warm and ready to run, the service many Lakota women performed for their warriors, and Josiah understood the signal honor it was that she had done so for them.
The fringe on her white deerskin dress swung into the air as she extended the reins to the four men, strings of shells chattering soft as distant music.
"It is time." She said in heavy and uncertain English, but her posture, her eyes, were sure and composed. She abandoned the strange language, having depleted her meager store in so few words, and said; "Amba, cola ... tok sha ake wacinyuantkin ktelo." (Good-bye, friends; I shall see you again.)
Josiah understood little of what she'd said beyond being named friends, which honored him, as she was a woman important among her own people who he'd come to admire greatly. He took the reins from her hand with a courtly grace, bowing formally over her wizened old hand.
"Thank you, unci." He flashed Chris a pointed glance; "It is, indeed, time we went after our friend."
"Wakan tanan kici un." She replied to him gravely, and he accepted her blessing in the name of the Great Spirit, then straightened with an expectant look at the glowering gunslinger.
The three of them, Buck and Josiah and Nathan, would go on their own if he refused, and they wouldn't wait much longer for him to decide, worried about Vin more than about what wasn't being shared with them. Resenting that some, but putting it aside because there was nothing else to be done. Chris had to accept that, too. He couldn't win anything here when their wishes for what he would do were the same as his own intentions. Impotent rage churned and gnashed in him, a helpless surety that they were all being manipulated by the Monroes, the whole world was being manipulated by the Monroes. Well, they might just be surprised how things worked out, because he had no intention of leaving a single Monroe fat or happy when this was done, and if some of them were dead ... well ...
With a final scathing look at Elizabeth, he took his black's reins from Josiah and said, "Let's ride."
Gerald lay back long and deep in the high-armed upholstered chair, elbows elevated on the arms and his head set low between his shoulders. Smoke trailed from the cigar in one up-cocked hand. He could have been asleep but for that cigar and the narrowed fixation of his eyes fixed sightlessly on the polished toes of his boots.
Mechanically he arced the cigar to his mouth, moving only his forearm. The cherry glowed for a long ferocious moment, the cigar levered back up again, and a slow thin cloud rose over his head to weave into the drift of previous ones.
It was time to marshall his thoughts, to set into motion the sequence of events his entire future - and that of many other powerful men - depended on. It could be no accident that every unfolding event corroborated his own wisdom and foresight. Now it was time to take what was owed to him, to exact the revenge that had been spur and motive and the very breath of life for as long as he could remember. It was almost surreal the way unanticipated circumstances folded so neatly into his scheme, almost like a blessing out of Hell, a promise in exchange for his worthlessly immortal soul that nothing would stop him. He was a long thinker, was Gerald Monroe, and a canny businessman always considered eventualities. That some faction of the government was trying to stymie him did not surprise him in the least, there were self-righteous do-gooders everywhere decrying the eradication of these noble savages. Ironic how much less noble and more savage the Indians were thought to be the further one traveled from the east coast.
"Are you competent enough with that bow, Stephen?"
Stephen, reclining on the settee with a whiskey glass balanced on his chest, rolled his head toward his brother with a feral grin. If it killed, Stephen could learn its uses, and he'd been practicing discreetly in the stable, then out on the plains away from everyone else, until he could send an arrow confidently and accurately every time. By now he was chaffing to try it on a living target.
"You know," He said reflectively, "it's a skill that might really come in handy in the future, too. Quiet, discreet ... savage."
Gerald didn't return his smile nor think beyond what must transpire tomorrow, all his will and heart and mind focused on that pending culmination. "Red Cloud arrived last night, he's the last chief they were waiting for. They'll all be coming tomorrow, and Crook will negotiate his damnable peace ..."
"It doesn't matter!" Stephen crowed flippantly, "Let him do whatever he wants, it's going to be war no matter what they decide or what they want! We just have to control the when, and that, my dear brother, is assured!" He laughed so happily that Gerald actually smiled to hear it.
That smile was very small, and very wicked. He tipped his head onto the back of the chair and gazed at the ceiling with an expression of supreme self-satisfaction. Are you listening, you old bastard? He thought with savage glee, Are you watching? Oh, watch, father, see what this useless son can do to you and everything you loved!
The earth they lay upon ran hollow with the thunder of retreating hoofbeats as Lakota boys took the pony herd out into the morning from the sprawling camp. For an instant Vin was struck with a joy almost physical to see the panorama of lodges under the smoky haze of cookfires, but Fort Fetterman stood above them, hard-cornered buildings and regimented shapes and a blacker smoke that disdained the blue sky.
He'd wanted to get there much sooner, long before now, and would've if he'd been able to let Peso out the way he liked to run. Loved rough ground, crazy hammer-headed horse, liked to race through brush-choked gulleys and broken slopes breakneck as a mountain goat, like it was a victory of will never to slow down no matter what. Hard as it always was in terms of scrapes and bone-jarring jolts and twists and sheer work to stay on, Vin usually thought it was right good fun himself. Just now, though, he couldn't even remember the last time he'd had fun.
Earlier in the day, Peso had become so irritated with his gingerly pace that Vin had been wearing himself out holding the damned horse in, it'd sapped his strength and started to hurt in a fairly urgent way. So he'd stopped and got down in a graceless but efficient slide, and once he had his legs steadied under him, he handed the reins up to J.D.. J.D. had taken them quizzically, his fine-boned face eloquently worried.
Vin had hooked a finger at him telling him to get down, not standing entirely straight himself, and said, "Take this son-of-a-bitch and run some of the mean out of him for me, J.D., before he makes me kill myself holdin' him back." He bent over and braced one hand on his knee, waving disgustedly with the other in the direction of their back-trail through a long snaking puzzle of gorges cut by countless spring melts.
"Take 'im back all the way t'that lightening-struck cedar; I'll take your horse and head on straight for that butte, there." Making sure J.D. saw it and having to do so quickly, because the kid was nearly as impatient as Peso to cut loose some. By the gleam in his amber eyes, J.D. was eager, having ridden Peso once, to try him on a longer and more interesting course. Vin heard the kid say something low to Peso as he went around his head to mount that made the black snap his head up and his ears follow J.D.'s progress all the way up into the saddle.
Peso squatted back on his bunched haunches, lifted both fore-feet off the ground, and launched himself forward before J.D.'s butt met leather. Didn't matter one bit, Vin knew J.D. had ridden steeplechasers back in Baltimore, and he was standing in the stirrups laid low over Peso's bobbing neck, knees tight up on the black's withers and his hands working a short stretch of reins in concert with the horse's head. A faint whoop drifted back into the dust that had risen up around Vin, and he shook his head. Another time he would've laughed, but there was nothing even resembling humor in him right now.
For awhile he'd walked because he was too stiff to mount, and when he finally managed to get up into the saddle, he found the mare spritely but obedient, he could rest his hands down onto the pommel and work with his knees alone. She was a right restful ride after Peso's tightly coiled impatience, which presented its own problems.
When J.D. came thundering up out of the mouth of the wash behind him an hour later, Peso gleaming with sweat, Vin hadn't hesitated to swap mounts at once, so tired that the comfortable rock of J.D.'s mare had brought him snapping out of a doze several times. Ordinarily he would've napped without a second thought, but not in these times, or in these lands overflowing with hostility. Exhaustion weakened his guard, relaxing even more so, and he didn't want the thoughts that came flowing over that faltering wall, dark with guilt and bitter fear.
By sunrise, they'd come within sight of the Fort, and an hour later had brought them to this isolated ridge where they lay on their bellies, the horses in an arroyo behind them.
Vin took a quick overall look through the glass, then settled down on his elbows to examine the Lakota camp. There had to be soldiers in that fort who'd spent enough time on the frontier to know the abundance of coup feathers on display were far more than decoration ... shields set on tripods sporting streamers of trader cloth and feathers stood before many of the lodges, tall willow coup sticks sheathed in brilliantly beaded leather with dense lines of feathers fluttering like poplar leaves in the breeze, favored war-horses staked right beside the lodges in full paint and decoration.
Warrior histories, signs of determined readiness for war and intentions in that direction plain in the displays of weaponry - except guns. There were no guns to be seen anywhere but the occasional old rifle in a mounted warrior's hand. But Vin had no doubt at all that there were more rifles there than the soldiers could even guess at, hidden in the lodges, under the saddle blankets of the mounted warriors, under robes, and probably hundreds of hand-guns, which the Lakota found very convenient to use from horseback, many carried two or more. Surely someone had to be experienced enough to know what all this meant.
The Council lodge, larger than the others, had been erected in the center of the sprawling camp, the knotted bristle of lodge-poles rising out of the smoky wrap of hide, festooned with feathers and beaded talismans that danced in the wind. Hunts and famous battles had been freshly painted over designs first inscribed by honored grandfathers. It was a camp celebrating a coming war, not one believing in the prospect of peace. He passed the distance glass to J.D. so he could take a look, watching the side of his face with a pang at the kid's awestruck expression.
"Dang, Vin - every Indian in the west must be here!" J.D. whispered, wide-eyed, and Vin knew this was the impression the Lakota wished to convey, some of the lodges obviously out of use for a very long time and likely standing empty to bolster the sense of their numbers. They were not even a fraction of those de-camping from the Rosebud, the Crazy Woman and other locales to make the march to the Powder; Two Badgers had said there would be 6 or 7 thousand Lakota there by the time everyone arrived. He wanted to see that so badly, the people gathered in joy of their strength, all the chiefs and famous warriors, firelit councils and stories and great feasts and drumming that set the blood rushing in common rhythms ... probably for the last time in man's experience, another of a growing list of subjects Vin refused with all his will to go near.
The memories clamoring at his tight-shut gates made him ache everywhere, pressed against the earth so his heartbeat reverberated though his body, answered by that deeper heartbeat that had dropped him helplessly on a distant ridge so many years ago, thunderous and all-encompassing. The world sweeping over him, time rushing around him, the sky and the earth coming into him like he was a doorway that could never be shut against it again ... he scooted back and got up; it was still there, from the soles of his feet up the bones of his legs, in his spine and in his shoulders and in his hands. Bigger than him, bigger than any army, or any one man's plans. He took in a deep breath, and another, and only managed to make himself dizzy.
The Lakota would let a man go to an honorable death if his visions said he must, they would offer their caring council, but they would not interfere with the spirits that moved another man's heart. White men were different; lacking any understanding of visions or spirits, they intruded upon those they cared about, he'd seen it many times and he'd known the other six would do it from the first. Duley wouldn't want him to die for her cause, and she wouldn't want him in this fight alone even knowing it was how he always did things. Moving him from beyond the grave, yes, he knew she was doing that and didn't resent her for it, was glad to help her. But he was more and more certain that she was moving them, too, using their attachment to him, trying to secure his life even at the risk of theirs. Maybe if he'd told them from the beginning he could have found a way around that, but it was far too late now.
Duley knew him too well. She'd know he wouldn't risk his friends, she'd know he'd try to do it alone and, knowing her brothers, that it wasn't something a solitary man could do - he couldn't look down at that Fort and lie to himself. So she'd ensured they all traveled with him, men who would Stand by him if they had the chance. Only one had found the way to do that so far, and he wished it was any of them but J.D., too young, too determined. But she'd always been smarter than he was, and the rest would not be far behind. The breath he drew in shook, too fragile and too torn between relief at their stubbornness and fury at putting them in harm's way.
"Come on, J.D., we've got to get up behind the camp there and it's gonna be a long ride around 'em all."
J.D. handed back the distance glass back to him wordlessly and slid down the slope to the horses, digging in with his heels as he went. Vin came behind him moving far more carefully, surprised when J.D. cupped his hands by Peso's stirrup. The kid looked up at his prideful scowl with a determination so like Larabee that Vin didn't know what else to do but set his foot there and have J.D. heave him up to the stirrup, stronger than Vin realized in the easy lift.
He was lighter than J.D. was happy to notice.
It took nearly two hours to swing in a wide westerly arc around the camp and the fort both. Before they found a good spot to spy down on the fort, they met a group of Lakota scouts - not the only ones moving around out there, either. Vin spoke with them a moment, everyone remaining mounted and his knowledge of the language no longer an immediate sign of brotherhood, but they recognized his name and were respectful upon hearing it. Tashunke Witco had spoken of him, and of a task he said the white tracker would undertake that should not be interfered with. They did not ask him what the task was, but warned the two white men of where the soldier patrols passed each day, and pointed out a vantage they had been using themselves that allowed a clear line of sight into the camp. Vin spoke to them a few minutes more and got a nod from one of the warriors that made J.D. wonder what they'd just agreed to between them. When they rode on, J.D. turned back to find that warrior watching them intently out of a mask of white lightening stripes, and it made every hair along his spine rise up and prickle.
The ridge they came to was placed almost immediately north of the camp on the high ground there, so far away across the vast shallow slope between them that the soldiers looked like birds. Vin sighed and shook his head, again handing the glass to J.D. and nudging it with his knuckles while it was at his eye until J.D. saw Stephen, too, sitting on the porch of the Officer's quarters in a bright blue coat. A cold anger rippled up J.D.'s back. Some men needed killing, Buck had said, and his humorless smile had Stephen Monroe all over it.
Clouds that had stacked up to the northwest now sent a tumble of shadows over their heads and into the camp, the temperature dropped noticeably. J.D. looked up uneasily at that ... like the whole world was putting out a warning, the air electric and tight with the building weather. Vin glanced up at it, too, but J.D. noticed nothing like apprehension in him, just a grim agreement.
"That one's my target, J.D." He said. J.D. made no comment other than a quick glance before going back to his study of the camp; he sure didn't envy anyone who Vin chose as a target, and he figured he'd better know where everything was before all hell broke loose, because all hell was what he'd been seeing in Vin's eyes all damned day.
By the time J.D. was done and took the glass from his eye, he found that Vin had turned over onto his back, heels braced against the incline and his hands folded across the hollow of his stomach in a pose of deep contemplation. He was staring up at the endless, ageless sky and his hat was on the ground beside his head, nothing moving but tendrils of his light brown hair in the breeze.
"Vin? We stayin' here or movin' on?"
Vin didn't answer, though J.D. knew the tracker had heard him. After a moment, the tracker sat up and bent his widespread knees, resting his forearms there and putting his hat back on, scanning around, but less like he was really looking and more like he was putting something off.
"J.D. ..." He said finally, cocking his head so his blue eyes, underscored in shadows, met J.D.'s.
For another long moment Vin just looked at him, struck hard by how young he was, how utterly ignorant of what he was getting into, and yet willing with his whole heart to do so for Vin's sake. It was that fact that Vin had to reckon with at last. He pressed his tongue up hard to the roof of his mouth and sucked after whatever moisture he could find. Wished for a drink, but it wouldn't stay down anyway.
If this war would begin with the death of one man, Vin had decided that it would not be the trader's innocent son, but one of the villains who'd set this all in motion. If this dark tide looming over them was going to slip across the world one way or the other, then at least the ones who'd set it in motion would reap no reward. That seemed like justice, like the only thing that would right Duley's balance and a fitting punishment for men who didn't balk at murdering one sister to get the gold another had innocently written about. Unless he only told himself so and was doing what his own vengeful heart craved; his ideas of what was right were sometimes a far piece off from other folks, and from the law. That he'd wonder ever after about his own motives was a price he was prepared to pay, it had to be done, it was the chance he had to take. But it was not a risk J.D. should ante up on.
This was a duty, but only to him - J.D.'d never even heard Duley's name and owed her nothing. Vin hadn't figured out the 'after' and didn't really care one way or the other for his own sake, but for J.D. ... he had to care. A man had to tell a friend willing to die for him why he was taking that risk, especially when it might well be seen as criminal in some eyes. He didn't fool himself that Gerald and Stephen were the ultimate villains here, nor that their associates wouldn't holler for his head on a platter any way they could arrange it when he ruined their careful plot. He couldn't have J.D. getting mixed up in something that might put a price on his head without so much as a word of warning to him, which did not make exposing Duley's shame the least bit easier. He kept taking breaths to speak, and having that breath just leave his mouth on a sigh. J.D. wasn't long on patience, though, and finally Vin said,
"J.D., there's some things I gotta tell you about why I'm here - and why you shouldn't be - n' I'd be grateful if'n you didn't ask any questions about it when I'm done. I'm just gonna tell you what you need to know to make the right choice, eh?" He couldn't afford any questions right now, his own were becoming far too strident and it was a continuously more difficult struggle to focus on the task at hand.
J.D. cocked his head like a curious dog, paying strict attention to Vin and his dark glossy eyebrows going into a low tangle over his nose at Vin's hesitant reluctance.
"Well ... sure, Vin." Wondering at the naked distress in the tracker's eyes, at the bony triangle of his face and the stark line of his wide jaw, his eyes huge and so troubled that J.D. suddenly didn't want to hear what disturbed Vin so much to even think of saying.
"The fact is, J.D., that the Monroes are kin to me, of a sort." J.D.'s head jerked backward on his neck and his expression contracted in confusion, obviously trying to figure out how that could be.
"I was married to Elizabeth Monroe's sister some years back; she died."
Vin had to stop and swallow, saliva rushing into his mouth now like he'd been hit there and a panic beating in his chest that he had to control. J.D.'s jaw dropped in astonishment that would've been comical any other time, but Vin had to hurry, he felt sick to his stomach and had to get this out now.
"We married and lived among the Lakota, and she wrote letters to Elizabeth, one of 'em about gold in the Paha Sapa. Her brothers got 'hold of those letters and connived with Custer to see if it was so, influenced the Army to send him on that expedition. It's a sacred place, J.D., I know you don't understand that, but to the people, the Paha Sapa is the heart of the world, the center of everything ... " His voice cracked and stopped, he had to look away from J.D.'s earnest face because just saying this out loud had dragged his strongest emotions up right under the skin.
"Your wife? Vin, we never knew you were married ... does anyone else know? Wait - Chris does, right?" Sharp kid, and Vin nodded once, shortly.
"Thaaaat's why he's so mad!" Obviously a great deal suddenly made sense to J.D., "And that's why he's blamin' Miz Monroe for all of this, isn't it! He thinks she's connived you into all of this, that she's set you to killing her brothers so she can have the gold!"
Vin nodded again, "I know. He's wrong, but he thinks so. This ain't Elizabeth's doin' ..." It was Duley's, but he didn't say so nor could he even say her name out loud, unable to explain what he had no words for even in his own mind, that a ghost had been moving him from the very beginning and that he was so glad of the touch of that revenant spirit that he'd gladly march straight to his death for it.
"She never meant this to happen, she was a fine woman and loved the Lakota, but it did happen, and now I'm bound t'set it right if I can, for her sake."
"How?" J.D. asked, with the blunt simplicity of a child unknowingly posing the question of the ages. Indeed, how could such a thing ever be set right? What was coming over this country was too enormous to change and too inevitable to deny, even J.D. knew the Lakota would have to lose, being as white as Vin and knowing his own just as well, if not better. Nothing they could do would stop it, but that wasn't the center of what mattered to him, and Vin resolutely turned himself from thinking about that, either.
"It doesn't matter ..." J.D. said hastily, seeing how it troubled Vin to talk about this and his own mind awhirl with the idea of Vin being married, and maybe even having his dead wife's sister in love with him - because Buck was sure the lady had strong feelings for Vin, and say what you would about Buck, you could always rely on his instincts in that area.
But Vin's eyes flared with true fire then, his mouth whitened in unexpected fury ...
"Hell it doesn't matter, J.D.! You're lookin' t'get killed helpin' me here, n' even if you don't, you could end up a wanted man along with me! Dammit, kid, listen t'me! This is mine t'do, not yours! I don't want you mixed up in it, I never wanted none of you mixed up in it, that's why I never said nothin'! I'm tellin' you this now so's you'll understand why I have to..." But there was a stubborn fire in J.D.'s eyes and Vin knew then that nothing he said would drive the kid away. J.D. was all the noble heart of a frontier man without any of the tempering experience. He shook his head, his expression frustrated and helpless and futilely angry.
"J.D. ... I plan t'kill Stephen Monroe before I let him kill an innocent man just t'start an Indian war." Expecting some discomfort at the announcement now that J.D. knew the Monroes were his kin, but J.D. just shrugged, his hazel eyes bright and steadfast.
"I can sure see why you'd do that, Vin. It's the right thing t'do, isn't it?" Obviously thinking so himself, obviously remembering what harm had been done to Vin, to Chris, in that fort, angry about that and wanting to avenge them.
Vin saw that boyish urge to defend his friends, but he also saw that J.D.'s determination was not the least boyish. A man didn't abandon his friends even when they were doing something crazy, and J.D. would no more leave Vin right now than Vin would leave him if the thing was reversed. More than that, though - Vin saw it and understood it in the same instant: J.D.'s faith in him was so absolute that he wouldn't hesitate to back Vin up in anything, certain it was the right thing. That the right thing now might be illegal and deadly dangerous and maybe change the course of his life forever after made no difference to the kid whatever - and it wouldn't have made a bit difference to any of them if he'd told them. How could he expect they would do things any differently than he would himself?
Vin's eyes fell, he half shrugged, half shook his head as his hands knotted between his spread knees, a confused gesture reflecting his true state. Moved so deeply that he couldn't speak and at the same time overwhelmed with despair at the risk J.D. was so willing to take for him - because it wasn't Duley's cause J.D. or any of the others looked to serve, but Vin's own. Not for her sake, but for his. As he would for them.
He started to say so, struggled to find words to thank J.D. for even considering it, but J.D. was quicker.
"Vin, all the boys would've backed you up on this if you'd just told us from the beginning! You can't just go off on your own and figure your friends'll just let you get killed! How could you ever think so in the first place?" Stopping short of telling him he was a fool to think so in remembering how oddly ignorant Vin could be of what folks had in their hearts, especially those that cared about him.
Vin stared at him, knowing how wrong he'd been from the very start but not wanting J.D. to be able to use it against him this way, to force him to let him stay and be part of what would happen. J.D. would follow him blind and never resent him for a second no matter what kind of trouble he ended up in. They all would. And that was why he should have honored them with the truth a long time ago, too stupid and solitary to see what their insistent intrusions were other than problematic for him.
J.D. tugged the narrow brim of his bowler had grimly and leveled a look at Vin that made it plain his mind was made up.
"I'm not leavin' you here to do this alone, Vin, so don't ask me to. Don't." J.D. was getting good at deciding things for himself and having them stick.
For a long moment they regarded each other, and it was the first time J.D. had ever felt the true equal of any of the men he rode with. Not because Vin realized he couldn't be talked out of it, but because he was there for the right reason. Vin was his friend and a good man down to his bones, and J.D. understood the risk and didn't balk from it even though it scared him. A man didn't back away from what was right just because it scared him, and anything Vin held right enough to risk his life for, J.D. was bound to help him with any way he could.
Vin knew if he tried to send J.D. off he'd just follow on or blunder into something he shouldn't, the kid was as stubborn as Chris - hell, he'd had to be just to be accepted among them, half the reason they ended up liking him was him never giving up. If he'd just told the rest from the beginning, J.D. wouldn't be here on his own with him, he'd have guns at his back that he realized with a bleak despair he needed very much. Again, Duley had been right in making a decision for him that he would never have been able to make himself in involving them like she had.
J.D. was right, too, about the others backing him up, he'd known that before they'd taken a single step out of Four Corners, it was the reason he'd refused to tell them his private causes, not wanting to risk them and too used to handling things on his own. Not one of them would've left him to do this alone no matter why he was doing it or even whether they agreed with him - even Chris would've gone along once he understood it was something Vin was bound to do. He didn't like that feeling of being hemmed in whether he wanted them with him or not, he'd felt it more and more frequently the longer he stayed in Four Corners and he didn't like the way it made him feel so threatened. Like they were trying to take something from him, trying to change him, and though he hadn't yet left for good over it, he didn't like it in a deeply fundamental way.
And now he knew why.
Because the minute he cracked open his heart to care about the living, his connection with her in her world would end. Refuse it as he might, that was exactly what she wanted, the intent hung over his head more fearful to him than his own death. Duley had made sure they all came, stymied every try he'd made to leave them out of it, forcing him to make those connections and succeeding more than he wanted to admit. Today he couldn't help wanting them here, nor deny that he would need them despite having refused their help all this time. He'd felt like none of this had anything to do with them, only with him. Only him, and only Duley.
Every day since she'd gone he'd been fighting to hold that tiny space he lived in that connected his world to hers, blocking out anything that would jeopardize it, never wholly engaged in living because the one he loved did not live. It was how he honored her, backwards and superstitious and so far inside himself he seldom knew how to act around folks. He'd been happy with her as he'd never even known himself capable of being, wide-open and free in such unexpected ways that he couldn't believe it could come more than once in his life. He just couldn't bear to lose that, or her, and there was so little of her left in his world to sustain him. Dreams he longed for more than waking each morning, a voice he listened for more carefully than any living sound, memories he hoarded in secret like a miser hoarded gold, not even speaking her name for fear it would deplete that small precious store.
Connections of the heart among the living were avoided at all cost, because he already knew he was too damaged to sustain more than one such loyalty, and he feared that trying would break the one to her that was already so frail. All he wanted was to be with her again, it was all he wanted, all he lived for. Except that he wasn't really living - and she'd been trying to tell him that for a long time. He didn't want to hear it now any more than he ever had, and she wasn't with him right now to insist, but J.D.'s eyes did it for her. Chris' anger, Buck's sympathy, Josiah's understanding ... the friendship they gave him whether he returned it or not, as if they understood why he couldn't and accepted it, as he couldn't seem to accept them. Don't push me into their hands, Duley, don't do that, don't' choose for me, girl. But she wasn't anywhere in him right now, and it was a terrible taste of what he'd be without forever if she had her way.
"Alright, J.D." J.D. would've grinned victoriously, but Vin's eyes when they lifted to him were too burdened for it and there was no relief in them, as J.D. had halfway expected. For a second he almost got mad thinking Vin had just accepted his presence as something he couldn't avoid, another liability he had to deal with, but then Vin said,
"I owe you thanks, n' I won't never forget what you done for me." And his heart was in his eyes, open as J.D. had ever seen it.
Vin being sorry about it confused J.D. a little until he realized that even if the tracker was just going along because there wasn't anything else he could do, he still appreciated and valued J.D.'s loyalty. That was good enough for J.D., who did grin, then. Vin didn't so much as smile - indeed, his eyes darkened forbiddingly, but his hand came to rest on J.D.'s shoulder for a moment and his fingers gripped hard enough to hurt, and it was as close to an embrace as J.D. figured Vin could come.
"J.D., we've gotta keep that bastard in our sights all the time, I don't have any idea who he plans to take out or when - and sure as shit he ain't gonna be wearin' that pretty coat when he makes his move, he's lettin' himself be marked by folks in it so's he'll disappear when he takes it off. It means we're gonna have to be shifting around out here a lot as he moves through the camp, he's gotta be in our line of fire all the time."
Vin was talking quick and urgent as if the fight was already under way, and J.D. wondered at him rushing at something that was still going to make him wait. His voice sounded odd, too, tight as a scream choked back.
"If we lose him somewhere, we'll split up both directions from where we lost 'im, and the one who spots him first sends up a little dust, alright?"
J.D. nodded, moved to reassure him in any way he could without really knowing why except that Vin looked so ... tattered and worried and exhausted and ... like he was sure he was going to die no matter which way the wind blew today.
Vin went on; "I'm bettin' they're not going to do anything 'til after today's council, so I'm gonna get a little rest here if I can. Won't be able to shoot worth a shit 'lessn' I rest some ..." Looking down at the fine tremor in his own hands as if chiding himself for allowing his body to get to such a state. "I'm countin' on you to keep a sharp eye below, alright?"
"I can do that, Vin. You go on and rest." And he took the glass from beside Vin and turned it back to the Fort resolutely. The next time he looked over, Vin was gone into exhausted and seemingly troubled sleep, and only then did the worry show on J.D.'s face. Only then did the glass range beyond the Fort and beyond the camp to the hills where he hoped Chris and the rest would soon be coming.
Special NOTE: Artistic license has been taken to weave fiction and history together; the council that occurs in this and the previous chapter is based on the Lone Tree treaty council that took place September 20-23 1875, between the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail agencies on the White River. Our story is set around Apr-May 1876, when Gen. Crook was, indeed, at Fetterman, preparing to corral the free Lakota as he already had most of the Apache. By this time, Gen. Alfred Terry and Custer's 7th were marching west from Fort Abraham Lincoln, and Col. John Gibbon from Fort Ellis was marching eastward.
Two Badgers pointed through a thicket toward the rough steep terrain beyond, and Chris looked at it, and then at the path they'd used to come to the camp, shaking his head.
"Shape he's in, he'll stick t'the road." He said, words bitten off and impatient. His horse dipped and side-stepped under him irritably.
Two Badgers nodded thoughtfully, comfortably slouched on his pony and drawing a strand of mane through his fingers, his eyes calm on that motion. Behind Chris, Nathan, Buck and Josiah mounted up in a quiet creak and slide of leather. Three other warriors, also mounted, waited beside them in the chill of the morning mists.
"He was not in a hurry, then?" Two Badgers said blandly with a glance of droll dark eyes, and Chris could feel his temper jerk like a teased dog at the end of an already strained leash.
"Oh, I'm sure he's in a big damned hurry, but ..."
"Then this is the way he will go." Two Badgers said with a warm smile; "Stubborn man, that tracker. And his horse, too." He straightened and turned his pony in that direction as if the thing had been decided, and Chris felt himself stiffen all the way down to his toes. But when his own horse answered the involuntary tightening of his legs by stepping out behind Two Badgers, he didn't stop him. Couldn't, because Two Badgers was right, it was exactly what that damn-fool stubborn tracker would do.
Josiah lifted his reins and brought his mount into line, his upturned eyes thanking a merciful God as he eased his tall horse out behind Chris' before the gunslinger changed his mind. Buck and Nathan exchanged equally relieved looks and he met their eyes with a grim smile. Dealing with Chris these days was a constant series of disasters averted, but at least they were being averted. The Lakota warriors, far from being nervous, had shown only curiosity at the exchange, plainly interested in who would prevail if it came to a physical confrontation. That told Josiah a great deal about Two Badgers' fighting skills.
More important, though, it was the first time a common understanding of Vin had been clear between the warrior and Chris, and that uniting of purpose Josiah had fervently hoped for. He'd been pondering Chris' reactions all along this strange trail, the jealous flare they all knew was more than jealousy. Obviously Chris resented the fraternal embrace between the Lakota and Vin, but Josiah got the feeling it was like salt in a wound none of them had yet seen. As if Vin had betrayed him somehow beyond wanting to help the Lakota without involving his friends - which Josiah found perfectly understandable. They'd talked themselves in blue circles among them and finally ran out of ideas as to what the thing was between the two, but they were damn sure it wasn't all Lakota or Monroes. Well. Josiah figured they'd be finding out presently. He dropped his head and let out rein as his mount's front hooves dropped over the lip of the ravine into deep rocking downward steps, its pale tail swaying and then vanishing into the misted dark.
Buck leaned down and capped Julianna's head with his big gloved hand as he walked his horse by her, a wink and a rueful little smile meeting the grim fury of her young face to be left behind. Elizabeth had a hold of her hand with the obvious intention of keeping the girl at her side the rest of the day to prevent her running off after them.
"We'll look after 'im for you, Jules." He said to her quietly, but it was Elizabeth's thanks he heard as he went down the steep incline into the forest, and he didn't have to turn to know they were standing, those Monroe women, with their hearts in their eyes watching until the last warrior strung away into the mist and shadows.
They'd been riding for an hour at a good pace, considering the terrain, by the time Josiah realized that Two Badgers was not following any path, nor even tracking Vin. He was literally going the way he'd said Vin would, the destination fixed in his mind and needing nothing more than that to go the most direct route. Then he realized that Chris knew that, too. Warrior and gunman intent on the same purpose, as if they'd made a wordless pact to get there and keep Vin Tanner alive. That sullen cooperation, reluctant or not, might keep them all alive in the days to come.
For men so certain of their mastery over both the land and the events that would transpire, the Commissioners knew remarkably little about the Lakota who finally approached just after noon on the third day for council.
The people came together out of the camp, Red Cloud and Spotted Tail, famous Lakota chiefs, and their warriors, and with them the Missouri agency chiefs, the Minneconjou under the leadership of Big Foot, No Bows with his Blackfoot people, Two Kettle's Hunkpapa, as well as some Yanktonai Lakota. All the extended family and friends of the Lakota were represented here, and yet they deceived with their numbers, for there was a larger, unseen, convergence of the seven campfires headed for the Rosebud. Word went back and forth constantly to those moving camps of the nations, disagreements grew and passions were inflamed as never remembered. Though today the people walked together to this council, matters remained undecided and they were deeply divided.
The prior evening had been spent in the council lodge smoking and counciling among themselves in a futile attempt to single out one of them to speak for the Lakota nation. They had to go today, the chiefs knew this, because the mood in the camp was becoming too violent, and the hostiles from hundreds of miles around were riding in and messengers going out to more war-parties concealed in the hills and folds of the plains, and who knew when those wild ones might begin shooting? The white men would not wait much longer, and both Red Cloud and Spotted Tail knew from long experience that war would serve the white purpose far better than peace.
Spotted Tail, called so because of the unusual spotted raccoon tail he was never without somewhere on his costume, had risen first, his broad square jaw set grimly and a pair of eagle wing-feathers slanting across his dark hair. Fifty years old and a veteran warrior of fearsome reputation who had once worn a warshirt decorated with 100 locks of hair from the scalps he had taken and the horses he had stolen. Uncle to Tashunke Witco, although no one was surprised that he did not invoke that revered name now, with so many enemies around the council fire - even among his own band. It would not be good to advertise their differences now, the hot-heads did not understand that survival must come first. The deep lines around his mouth became deeper still; it was a bitter thing to be a Chief in this time, to chose between honor and freedom or the very existence of the people. Many did not think it a choice at all.
Spotted Tail had swallowed his pride yet again and urged the council to take whatever the White Father offered for the lands, since they were sure to take them anyway. There were grimly eloquent words spoken about the terror and exhaustion of their women and children and old ones, the lack of buffalo to feed the people and the loss of spirit in poverty, the waste of lives and any chance for fair payment for their lands if it came to war.
Crow Dog, one of Spotted Tail's band, sat turning a bullet in his fingers, smiling malevolently as the old chief spoke. The Washichu, the whites, honored him for his intelligence and foresight as a peacemaker, but Crow Dog was nephew to the great chief Conquering Bear, who Spotted Tail had succeeded in great controversy. Crow Dog had often said Spotted Tail was chief by the will of the Wasichu, not the people, that the great warrior had become as vain and lordly as any white man once he had led his people into the reservation and fallen prey to white flattery and bribes. This bullet Crow Dog kept for Spotted Tail in the event that he disgraced his high position, and obviously Crow Dog felt that time had come.
Spotted Tail ignored him, as sure of his leadership as he was the inevitability of losing the sacred Black Hills and everything else the whites decided they wanted. It was a sad thing, and unpleasant, he said, it was even wrong and wicked - but it would come, and the people must not die away from the face of the earth.
Red Cloud, who had been to the Great White Father's city more often than any other Lakota and bore a silver-chased rifle across his arm that was a gift from that Chief of the whites, had risen then before the gathered council as though his authority was absolute. His long deeply seamed face and straight thin-lipped mouth were grim as deep winter. He had fought the Wasichu, the whites, to victory many times, had closed the Bozeman trail for awhile and been the voice the people listened to.
Now he argued that they must hold out for a high price, 70 million dollars and supplies for seven generations of Lakota. He told the council the whites were as plentiful as grasshoppers, that their cities covered over the earth as far as the eye could see, their roads and buildings standing dumb between them and the voice of the good world. They did not hear the songs in the wind, nor see the spirits in the trees and stones and waters. They did not know about harmony or balance, only about conquering, using without gratitude or foresight the gifts the Creator had given into the care of human beings. But they were more plentiful, and more powerful in their unrestrained ignorance, than the nations could even conceive.
He spoke as an elder statesman, reminding them that he had long fought to keep the traditional ways and to protect the people against impossible odds. Though he did not mention the treaty he had negotiated at Fort Laramie in 1868, and the warriors and chiefs assembled did not shame him by speaking of it, that broken hope lay on his proud words like a mist. He insisted there was no other choice but making the best trade they could, and he swore he would find a way to make the white man keep his word. Though some voiced quiet agreement, many did not.
That morning, there had also been a private council between Tashunke Witco's friend, Young Man Whose Horse We Are Afraid Of, and a certain young warrior with lightening strikes painted painted like a storm warning down his face. Young Man had drawn his blanket over his head after they had talked and he went to walk awhile. He was deeply divided from his friend, Tashunke Witco, these days, seeing no option himself but eventual surrender and grieved by the disagreement between them as much as that terrible inevitability. But he was comforted by the evidence of his friend's continuing respect in the information the young warrior had brought him. Even separated by distance and opinion, Tashunke Witco did what he could for his friend, and Young Man allowed that to comfort him. While that lightening-faced warrior visited this campfire and that, Young Man stalked the dry cold plains listening again to what Tashunke Witco had said until he knew what he must do.
Young Man Afraid had said nothing in the council, only watched with his grief like scars in his eyes. Red Cloud and Spotted Tail were wise and noble men of legendary courage who led their people as well as they might in new and dangerous times. But the hostiles at this campfire who had never submitted to the reservations and never would were listening to Tashunke Witco. Their visionary was not present, but his spirit loomed larger than any tame Chief to those who had never walked any other but the Lakol wicho'an, the Lakota way.
Though the two chiefs seemed to argue, their differences were not in debate of any course of action, only the finer points of giving up, as if there were no other choice.
Tashunke Witco's words were remembered and quoted by the hostiles; one could not sell the land one walked upon any more than he could sell the air. The Lakota had a duty to Stand for the sacred places that were the people's soul, must protect the earth and the waters and the forests in gratitude and thanksgiving to the Great Spirit - had not the land nurtured them since time began? Were they not favored of the Great Spirit? The buffalo would be called back, there would be a sun-dance in the Powder River country greater than any in all the people's memory! They must not be afraid of this great testing that was upon them!
The Chiefs listened respectfully, their hearts both burdened and uplifted to hear such brave things spoken that resonated in their souls, and yet believe from their own experience and wisdom that the people would never be as they were again. Their time of power was gone, and all they could do was try to survive, to keep their ways alive and not disappear as if they'd never been.
That the nations were flocking to Tashunke Witco on the Rosebud was also known, and word went quietly that Sitting Bull was also there, as were so many of the great veteran war chiefs that the young warriors here could barely be restrained from rushing off to join them. They stayed to listen to what was spoken at Fort Fetterman, to see what was done by the peace Chiefs, and to take what they learned to the Rosebud to be folded into the plans being laid for the protection of the sacred Paha Sapa.
It was a bad thing to be led into surrender by chiefs who had once been so formidable in safeguarding the earth and the ways they now said must be given up. Who would they be, the young warriors and passionate dissidents asked, without the traditions and ceremonies and rituals that bound them to their honored ancestors and to the Creator? What gave purpose and value to life? They would become invisible on the world, lost and useless and dreamless until they would just as well be dead - what flesh could hope to live when the spirit was dead? What future could they survive when the sacred tethers to the world, to the Creator, to each other, had been sundered by white men who had no idea they even existed? The mutterings were dark and grimly unhappy, trepidation and fury in equal measure.
Crow Dog and many others protested bitterly that the Wasichu had never kept a promise and only a fool or a frightened old woman would believe them. Little Big Man, another friend of Tashunke Witco at this council, cut his breast and stood before the council with blood running in defiant rivulets down his scarred sinewy body, setting off the fiery hearts of many others who were ready to die for the sacred lands. Many young warriors left the council with him in anger, stripping off their ceremonial garb for the breechcloth of war, tying up the tails of their horses and loading all their guns. Ominous threats were made to kill the first chief who stood to sell the Paha Sapa or their last hunting grounds on the Powder. No one knew what would happen today. The only point of agreement, unspoken but living in every eye, was that the people's world was forever changed.
Now they came together from the camp up the incline to where the Commissioners and Gerald and his officers waited under their open tent, seated in ranked chairs with their soldiers ranked behind them just as before.
Young Man walked without any adornment but the standing feather of his rank in his hair. Every face echoed a richness of grief and fury and terrible sorrow, from eldest to youngest knowing they stood on an inevitable brink this day. The Commissioners smiled a paternal welcome, completely unaware that death drifted near. Whether it was the end of the people or their last chance at survival Young Man did not know. He only knew the unknowable future of the people was beginning.
Once, a few months after they'd married, he and Duley had been checking trap lines along a rocky river, and he'd caught sight of her ahead of him at the end of a path overhung with trees. Glorious in a shaft of sunlight and everything else in shadows, as if the whole world saw her as he did, the only thing of worth. Turning, smiling. At him. It had filled him up from toes to crown in a rush so warm and fast he couldn't move, even though she laughed at the stupefied expression on his face just like she always did when his love for her overwhelmed him to the point of idiocy. She was always catching him like that, and her gladness to understand his heart in those moments made them even more powerful in him. God, he loved her, was grateful for her, needed her like the air he breathed or the life that she quickened in his blood. That woman, that glorious woman gilded in sunlight, had grounded and anchored the lost and drifting man he'd been, given him reasons ...
Maybe he just had to remind her how much ... how impossible it'd be without her. He just had to catch up with her in that sunlit spot and grab her up like he'd done that day, lay her down right where she was and steal her crooning laughter with his mouth. Her arms opened to him as he came, willing, her smile flowed like light into every dark corner of his soul out of her golden eyes ...
"Vin?"
J.D. was glad he'd known better than to touch Vin to wake him, because he came up with a jerk and a ring of honed steel, his eyes bright and unfocused as the knife-blade defensively gripped in his hand. J.D. scooted back from him a bit, ashamed of the cowardice of the instinct.
"It looks like the Indians are comin' to the meeting."
Vin took a hard shuddering breath and let go of the dream his heart clutched after like the breath of life, tried to slow his heart as he put the knife back in the scabbard. He plucked the distance glass from his pocket and rolled over onto his stomach, looking down into the camp overhung with smoke and dust and seeing the dark columns of the people coming like a tide around the west of the plateau up from the river, and the neat squared ranks of soldiers behind the broad pale expanse of canvas shading where the Commissioners and Officers and other dignitaries sat.
Carefully he identified Travis and Mary, Ezra obvious in a bottle-green coat that he'd probably chosen as purposefully as Stephen had the bright blue, but for different reasons - he didn't want Vin shooting him by mistake. Stephen Monroe was still wearing that blue coat, but Vin kept the spy-glass on him until the bastard turned and he could confirm the face, just in case.
J.D. watched him with fearful curiosity, a low-grade terror simmering in him that things would happen before Buck and the rest could get here. Vin's angled jaw worked and his body, even laying down, was so tense that the toes of his boots dug holes in the ground. All J.D. could do was tighten his grip on the rifle and on himself - if it turned out it was just him with Vin, then he'd damned well acquit himself as proudly as he could. He didn't want to die, no sir, and he had no intention of dying, but he wasn't so young or naïve anymore that he didn't know it could well happen here. Helplessly, he thought of Casey and so much not yet even begun with her. He thought of Buck and then didn't want to think of how Buck might take it if he got himself killed here before the rest of them could get into it. Finally he just stopped thinking altogether.
Ezra was pale and drawn tight as an overwound watch, not the least relieved to have found a Lakota warrior staring at him in the mirror as he'd straightened from the wash-basin not an hour ago. Grinning at him, lightening strikes painted down the sides of his face and astonishingly bare in breechcloth and paint.
"Tanner is above, there ..." The warrior had said, pointing out the window to the ridges in the north. Nothing more, and Ezra's rather shaken questions received no reply as the Indian bent curiously to the buttons on his vest. Either the warrior knew no more English or he simply had nothing more to say, a moment later he'd gone out the window in a dusty slither. And in a camp full of soldiers, not one raised an alarm - that didn't do much for Ezra's confidence in their protection.
Mary sat in the last row beside Travis with Ezra on the far side of him, her stomach in a knot and her fingers aching around the journal she opened as the Lakota began to come from the camp.
Orrin covered her steadily flexing hands with his own, startling her, but holding it there, warm and dry and as reassuring as the thin flex of a smile he turned to meet her anxious eyes. She tried to smile back and failed, and he leaned toward her in a dry rasp of wool and starched cotton, fatherly and solid, and said,
"Vin's out there, Mary."
"But what can he do, one man?" She whispered urgently, a kingdom full of worry in her brilliant eyes that wasn't helped by a glance from Ezra that was eloquent with sarcastic agreement. Orrin surprised her with a soft laugh that brushed her cheek like a caress, holding her eyes with his own so she would see his faith and certainty.
"Mary, do you think Chris isn't aware by now that our wayward tracker has escaped him? If Vin is here, the rest will be on his heels."
She searched his face earnestly, wanting to believe that and grateful to find reason enough in level gaze. No, they wouldn't leave Vin on his own or abandon the three of them trapped here in Fort Fetterman, and it didn't matter how impossible the situation seemed to be. They would find a way, because that was what they'd been doing together since the moment they'd met. Orrin was right, and she realized that with a rush of corroborating memory so strong it brought tears to her eyes.
Vin and Chris walking calm as angels through the dusty street of Four Corners that first day, shoulder to shoulder strolling after the maddened and murderous crowd she'd been helpless against herself. Strangers, she knew they'd never met before, and yet perfectly synchronized down to the rhythm of their walking, as though they had worked in such wordless tandem all their lives. No, Chris wouldn't leave Vin on his own any more than he would leave her.
The tremors left her, the smile that had been so false became true, and she removed her hands from under Orrin's and took up her journal and pencil with a renewed confidence of back and chin and eyes.
Orrin refrained from embracing her, but his dark eyes shone with admiration; such faith in men she had so little understanding of, so much trust in men most would consider untrustworthy. Perhaps in that one man who both fascinated and repelled her. A woman like Mary would have to fear what she might lose of herself to have a man like him, and Travis couldn't see how the contrasts of dark and light in the two of them could be reconciled. He sometimes wondered - as he knew Mary did herself - how much of her desire was for the man, and how much for a man who seemed so impossible to kill. One who would not do what Stephen had done - die.
He shook his head and put aside the worry he had so often put aside since Chris Larabee and his daughter-in-law had noticed each other. It didn't matter right now other than to ensure he wasn't offering empty reassurance to her - Larabee would not let her come to harm. He and the rest would get here, if they weren't already, and they would have a plan. And even if they didn't, they'd still manage to do whatever had to be done.
Watching the Indians walking up the incline in solemn quiet, he remembered the first Indian face he'd ever seen, and a time when he'd been young and keen and strong and as drunk as any frontiersman born on the unfettered and liberating magnificence of the wilderness. He remembered that warrior's face, calm and serene, laughing at his astonishment, dark eyes without the visions of ruin and hatred that rendered them all so brittle now. They had been brotherly, the people of that warrior, quick to laughter and generous and good to one another. He knew what this world had been before the white hand had extended over it, and Vin Tanner knew it even more intimately. The regret that lay like a stone on his heart must be crushing to their solitary tracker. Indeed, it might be more than Vin could take without doing something that would put him on the wrong side of the law that Travis was honor-bound to serve. This was the only point of uncertainty he could not find his way around.
He could bend that law to avoid judging on precedence rather than justice, he had bent it around these seven men many times, built with it a defense around them of unspoken protection and privilege. But if Vin ignored his head to follow his heart ... with a shudder, Orrin Travis realized that if the tracker did so, he would be bound to arrest him and judge him by laws that made very little sense just now. They were on a brink, both Indians and whites, that was represented in every sense today. Choices would be made that could be the ruin of the nations he loved as much as he loved his own kind. So accustomed to authority, to being the final word and to having truth measure justice, Judge Orrin Travis could only sit here now in the pale afternoon of this day helpless to change whatever course of events would come.
Beside him, Ezra was as nervous as a cat caught in a circle of bully-boys. Orrin knew the gambler had serious misgivings about whether Vin's presence would be helpful or disastrous, he hadn't been shy in the least about voicing them. Ezra didn't trust easily, and when his life was in danger he reverted to the overwhelming and hard-learned instinct to save himself. As though no one else ever had. But Orrin suspected that Ezra had never had such friends before, and the gambler's actions - or lack of them - bespoke a faith in them whether he knew it or not. Ezra was doubtful, yes. But that he hadn't crept off with his considerable winnings told Orrin more than Ezra likely knew himself about how far self-preservation has been changed to a hesitant trust. A tentative hope of a purpose greater than any his mother had ever prepared him for.
The man groused and complained and voiced bitter doubts, but he was still with them, and he looked to the hills as often as Orrin and Mary did, and with the same thought of rescue. So Judge Orrin Travis lifted his chin and squared his shoulders as he sat between his daughter-in-law and a gambler, among his own kind, among soldiers and captains of industry and officials of a government he had sacrificed for and sworn to serve. He watched the last Indian nation come and spread out in a dark tide of fluttering buckskin fringes and brown sinewy chests, and his fear was not for himself, nor even for Mary, but for them. And for Vin Tanner.
It was beginning.
Special NOTE from last chapter applies.
It began as it had three days ago, at noon with 200 mounted warriors thundering straight for the treaty grounds in a whirlwind of dust, turning aside only at the last moment to go racing in a broad loop around the massed ranks of soldiers and the council place. Gunfire reverberated in the air, and no less strident were the war songs they sang. At last they stopped in a solid line before the commissioners.
From out of the dark horseshoe of the gathered people, then, the chiefs came forward, Spotted Tail leading his men to their places across the council fire from the white officials in their canvas chairs, then Red Cloud, and finally the Missouri agency Chiefs. Colonel Crook nodded to each, but did not approach them to commence the council because none of them stood forth to engage him. Indeed, they sat down and smoked and counciled among themselves, still trying to decide who would begin the talk-making, and though the Commissioners were affronted at this, they found nothing to fear in it. They perceived warriors running a long loop around the council grounds as a quaint native display pretty to watch and absolutely harmless. Gerald's smile was utterly at ease.
But at a signal from one of those mounted warriors, all similarities to the events of three days ago ended. A second group of warriors rose up upon the ridges as if emerging out of the ground to stand in a jostling row against the hard blue skyline. Bright paint and bare brown skin gleaming in the noon-day sun, fluttering with eagle pinions and tail-feathers bound to the crowns of their heads, to rifle barrels and bowtips and festooning small round hide shields. As if the collective involuntary gasp of the surprised whites was a signal, the warriors leapt down the incline toward the treaty ground - and then a third line jolted up onto the ridges even further away and came behind them. A thousand armed warriors, the sharp cries of a thousand brown throats, power in their unity and the fury of so many who were already hostile and made more so by the sight of ruin in this country they hadn't seen since the whites set their tracks upon it.
Shooting into the air and crying out their enmity and defiance, white teeth bared in masks of such terrifying beauty that only a sharp-cried command from Crook himself kept the soldiers in formation; bayonets wavered in alarm like a wheat field in a sudden wind. His command kept the Commissioners seated as well; chairs creaked with weights being resettled, but the majority were pale and looked around at one another in poorly disguised trepidation.
Mary was too busy trying to see everything to be afraid, her wide eyes darting up and back from her journal as her hand flew across the pages, the pace of her heart out-stripping it and despairing of getting everything down. From the corner of her eye she saw Ezra leaning forward, his handsome face bland and cool but keeping a bone-knuckled grip on the pistol at his side, which she hadn't even noticed he'd strapped on. A glance at her father-in-law found him watching Crook like a hawk, because that man would give the first indication of true cause for alarm.
Although the Colonel remained standing with his hands clasped behind his back and his face as calm and neutral as a man with nothing at all on his mind, his shoulders were stiff and his eyes were watchfully quick.
A sudden gust of wind cracked the canvas above them sharply, startling a low moan of nervous sound out of those gathered beneath it; no one was sure whether it was a true wind or one given life by the astonishing rush of warriors around them.
"Sit down." Gerald hissed at Stephen, who had come to his feet despite Crook's command; "They did the same thing last time, it's a show! Now sit down!"
But Stephen, responsive as a pack dog to the wordless threat of violence in those milling warriors, protested, "It isn't the same, Gerald, they're running a double circle around us, and they've got a hell of a lot more rifles than we thought they had! We're trapped!" His eyes jittered cra/zily as he tried to keep certain warriors in sight, instinctively recognizing in them the hot urge to bloody mayhem and murder that so well in himself. Their cries had a razor-sharp edge of true savagery that they hadn't had three days ago, and what had seemed then to be a helpless and sullen anger had kindled now into a hot ferocity that was reiterated in violent gestures and faces closed around rage tight as a fist. Oh indeed, there was nothing helpless about the warriors raising a whirlwind of dust and noise and intent around them now!
Gerald's hand closed like iron on Stephen's forearm, fingers biting deep so Stephen jerked futilely against the pain of it and found himself caught just as hard in his brother's eyes.
"This is just what we want, Stephen, I certainly won't have you firing the first shot, you idiot! Now sit. Down." Gerald said, looking up into his brother's face with a half-smile, his voice quiet and pleasant, but his eyes implacable as cut diamonds. Stephen let himself be pulled down into his chair again, staring into his brother's face and finding not a shred of misgiving there despite knowing full well that Gerald had in no way anticipated so many hostile Indians today. He didn't know whether to be reassured or terrified by such confidence that even those numbers were of little consequence, but he chose the former because Gerald had never been out-witted or out-maneuvered before. And because he had no other choice.
Neither noticed James, sitting two seats down from Gerald with the corpulent and over-dressed wife of one of the Commissioners swooning against his far side while her husband paid less attention to her than to the terrifying display of barbaric threat. He could feel the blood drain out of his face as sweat broke in sudden beads on his forehead and made his hands clammy and cold as death. They might just all be killed right here and now! Gerald had wanted a display of anger to justify the murder of the Trader's son, not a hoard big enough to wreak bloody mayhem! How had he not known this might happen? How could so many Indians be in the area and be completely unnoticed?
God, oh my God ... he glanced back at Orrin and Mary, at Ezra, and the gambler was the only one who noted it. James had only a glimpse of suddenly sharpened green eyes before he turned back to face the front, terrified of giving himself or his co-conspirators away and frantically trying not to believe they were all going to die here today.
Orrin looked at the Indians gathered across the council fire, noticing that General Crook kept glancing there as well, as was Gerald Monroe, with a pallor under his sun-browned skin that belied the confidence of his squared shoulders and calm face. He hadn't expected this, and knew he was as likely as any white man here to end up dead if the Indians turned to violence, all his grand plans, all his power and money and schemes, draining away like blood out of a corpse. That nearly made Orrin smile.
The Indian nations stood like the stoic eye of the whirlwind their warriors made, watching the whites with a silent stillness that was itself a faint threat. No attempt was made to disguise the prideful knowledge that their warriors were enough to take on the mass of soldiers in this fort with every hope of winning, and there was even a hint of humor in enjoying the fact that most of the whites did not know this yet, though some were beginning to understand.
More warriors than they'd imagined, and the Lakota loved the white's surprise. Warriors who had hidden in the dips of the earth and in arroyos that seemed too shallow to conceal a man, warriors who had laid their mounts flat on the grass and waited. So many warriors that none of the military men had noticed in their separate comings and goings until now, when they were gathered and enclosing the whites and their soldiers in a tightening double-ring. Soon every white there knew that even a thousand soldiers might not be enough ... A woman, the wife of one of the Officials, screamed thinly, and the voices of other women rose as if freed by her admission of fright.
Ezra gathered his feet under him and leaned forward, his pistol blatantly in his hand, now, wondering where in hell Vin Tanner was and whether they were all doomed to die down here because the tracker had gone off from the rest on his own and now couldn't figure out how to save them from the unanticipated immediacy of this war. That the Monroes could as easily die and have their plot dashed so unexpectedly was little comfort. Some, but not much with his own handsome skin at risk. Ezra turned in every direction, looking for escape routes, cover, somewhere he could drag Mary and Travis to and defend them as best he could.
Suddenly the mounted warriors parted behind the chiefs, and one warrior, Little Big Man, came charging through on a tall gray American horse brandishing a Winchester rifle in one hand and a full belt of shells in the other. He was stripped to a breechcloth and his bare, scarred breast was fiercely decorated with paint and his own blood.
Crook held, the ranks held, as if spellbound by the sight of that one warrior driving his horse down upon the council like a hunting wolf rushing trapped sheep. He drew up across the council fire in front of Crook using his legs alone, his horse tossing its fine head, wide-eyed and blowing powerful chesty huffs of air through its nostrils. The animal turned and danced and half-rose under the warrior as he continued to shake his rifle at the Officials and even at his own chiefs, screaming the same short sentence over and over.
The throng of Officials drew back with a sudden surge of frightened sound as if they were one enormous beast cowed by one Lakota warrior, all together in a rhythm of retreat and alarm. None had to understand the language to know this warrior intended to kill the first white who threatened to steal his land, or the first Indian who offered it up.
Young Man Whose Horse We Are Afraid Of saw the treaty men turn paler than pale, like sickly women in sudden incapacitating terror as they finally comprehended the wall of warrior guns around them. That wall of sweating horses and warriors was pressing so tight around the soldiers that they had no room, now, to bring their guns to bear without cutting their fellows to ribbons on their fixed bayonets. Then, in Crook's despairing eyes, Gerald understood that even the chiefs standing across from them in all the brilliant raiment of their authority wielded no authority over the warriors around them, some too close to fulfilling Little Big Man's threat without waiting for the betrayal to be voiced. No! It could not end like this! He would not die at the hands of these wretched barbarians that his father had loved more than his own family! He would not!
No one breathed on the white side, and a sigh went around the Lakota like a shared breath, a sound of anticipation, of fearsome hope. No one around the Chiefs or white Officials moved at all lest they become the center of that screaming warrior's attention and call to themselves the shot that would start a massacre of these whites.
A Lakota voice rose over the reverberation of hooves and the warrior's sharp chivvying cries, an old Lakota man with his own brave deeds lighting his eyes telling those fierce ones to move now. Other voices followed, gaining strength as that suggestion was agreed to and repeated - kill these whites who had believed themselves commanders of the day, of the people and of this council and of all the holy places! Kill them and frighten the rest out of their country! Show the invaders what the people, finally pushed beyond what they could bear, could do to preserve the places that were the beating heart and generous hands of the Creator. It was such a near thing, that mortal mayhem, it loomed so heavily over them, that several women among the Officials fainted, causing the Lakota women near the front to laugh behind their hands and wonder out loud if it was a white form of self-defense to fall down that way like a possum.
Ezra's hand shot out and clamped on Orrin's arm, the Judge turned to him, his alarm plain in the pallor of his face and making no protest when Ezra jerked him nearer and whispered in a raw voice,
"We are in a far more precarious position than anyone anticipated, Judge. Nothing any of us intended, including the Monroes, make a damned bit of difference here now. If that line breaks ..." Tipping his hatbrim toward the massed warriors, "Our only hope is to work our way out the back of this gathering toward the munitions building there."
Orrin seemed to follow Ezra's line of thought with rapidly escalating dismay and their eyes locked in the same frantic acknowledgement of helplessness - they could do nothing to stop whatever happened, the people massed here in defense of their sacred lands wouldn't stop to judge innocent from guilty. Orrin knew a moment of such profound despair that he had to turn away from the gambler, his daughter-in-law's trusting glance striking his heart like a sharp-edged rock.
When he looked back at Ezra, however, his cleft-chin was set hard and his eyes were determined. The gambler nodded at him in agreement. Together, they would do everything they could to avoid dying in what looked to be an inevitable massacre. It was all they could do. Gerald and Stephen, their crimes and sins, suddenly were far less important than living through the next few minutes.
Crook reluctantly reached for the revolver at his waist, knowing he had waited too long and overcome with despair that the impending massacre of all these white people would be his legacy, martyrdom used as an excuse for the larger massacre of every Indian living. But as he drew the gun clear of its holster, an Indian man rose from the circle of counciling chiefs and stood tall and straight and silent before them all.
His arms were folded on the blue blanket around him, his unbound hair was long and glossy as a blackbird's wing, and a single eagle pinion twisted on the crown of his head. Despite his humble appearance, the thunder of hooves diminished as the wheeling circles of warriors slowed, and stopped.
Young Man was not the only one here who knew Tashunke Witco's wishes for this council, nor, he suspected, who knew about the task that white tracker had taken up for himself and the people both. Killing the whites here, today, would serve no purpose, and the odds were nearly equal, many warriors would die. Too many, with what lay ahead. No, they would not make it easy to blame the Lakota for the war he knew would come. It broke his heart to know it was inevitable, but at least this white Captain would be discovered in his infamy by his own kind and proved a criminal. It might help the people. It might not. But surely if the warriors slew all these whites today, more whites would come, enraged and thirsting for vengeance, and not an Indian man, woman or child would survive. He turned his head from side to side, looking only at his people and not caring what the whites did at all.
Tasunke Witco did not wish the chiefs to negotiate over the sacred lands, everyone knew that. And he also did not wish the war to begin on the white man's timetable or to serve any white man's cause. Too many could perish here today and jeopardize the plans being laid around the council fires of the great war chiefs on the Rosebud. Young Man took the long ceremonial pipe from Red Cloud's unresisting hand and held it cradled in his arm, signifying his intent to speak only truth even though the pipe was cold and smokeless.
At last he spoke. "Go to your lodges, my foolish young friends!" He said in a quiet, strong tone, and the translator's voice broke with desperate hope as he repeated Young Man's words in English. "Go to your lodges and do not return until your heads have cooled! We are not children to be led to actions against our own good!"
For a moment that spun and stretched as brittle as blown glass, there was not a sound, nor a motion. Indian and white alike waited for the shot that would bring Young Man down, but it did not come.
"He says this!" Young Man declared, which no one but the Lakota understood, and which none of them mistook. So few words, yet more than enough, and all knew they were Tashunke Witco's words in Young Man's mouth. He looked at Red Cloud, at Spotted Tail and the other agency chiefs, seeing their anger at having their leadership usurped and defying them to speak against him. There were too many hostiles around them who already scorned any Indian who had succumbed to reservation life. Too many who were already leaving those reservations to join the free people on the Rosebud, too many set hands to knives now, waiting for what the peace chiefs who had accomplished nothing here but subjecting the people to scorn would do. They did nothing.
There was a movement among the Indians behind the soldiers, a clumsy racket of rifles and protests among the uniformed ranks as they startled into each other like a herd of steer packed tight into a pen. But the warriors only backed from the circle and turned away, departing in a proud line to the west. Then another and another followed after them, and the white women began to weep with relief, the Officials and soldiers to tremble with the adrenalin of near-death, so unexpected. Finally the wild ones, silent and orderly, even Little Big Man with his gun and his scarred and bleeding breast and his eternally threatening eyes, turned and went, the sweating haunches of their ponies bobbing as they walked almost insolently away from what might have been a killing ground.
Almost as one, the Indians across the council fire turned their backs and went away without farewell, leaving the Commissioners and Officers and ranks to exchange stunned glances overflowing with a relief too great to conceal. Gerald's face was a strange confusion of fury and nausea, and General Crook stood over the sudden ashes of the ceremonial fire and stared with unhidden worry after them. Nothing had been decided ... no war, perhaps, but no peace, either, and the hope of it growing more and more distant. Dust rose behind their fringed heels, and one young boy stood off to one side for a long moment and stared back at them, solemn and purposeful, his eyes wide and black as agates.
"Form escort." Crook said to his company, and then he had to say it again in a louder voice because his soldiers, from private to Officer, were watching the departing warriors as if hypnotized by an apparition of their own death that had inexplicably passed them by. There was comfort and safety, though, in their routines, and the Officers formed them into units with as much precision as shock-numbed legs could accomplish. In those units they surrounded groups of Officials and Commissioners and onlookers and guarded them all the way back into the Fort.
From their vantage over the fort, Vin took the rifle down and dropped his forehead into the dirt in front of him, overwhelmed. He could hear J.D. breathe in a sudden starved suck of air, as astonished as he was that war had not come.
Vin knew who it was who had stood up at the end and risked his life to inject reason into the call to battle. Not today, not yet ... there would be no massacre of women and unarmed peace men to incite the government to carnage, though the realization that his warning to Young Man had also saved Gerald and Stephen Monroe's lives was as bitter as poison in his mouth. Tashunke Witco would be proud of his friend, as Vin was in a vague unsettled way himself. The warriors who would have perished here would live to fight another day, and that day was nearly upon the people. His hands trembled as he rolled over onto his back with a soft grunt of pain and closed his eyes, drawing in shaky breaths that refused to inflate his lungs entirely. He hadn't the strength to do anything but hope the people would be packed up and gone before Stephen made his move so there would be no Lakota at hand to blame.
The war would come, but Crazy Horse needed all the time he could get to teach the warriors how to fight the white man's armies, using strategies and designs rather than simply throwing themselves into battle all for personal honor and glory. It was the people's far larger cause the warriors had to serve now, the honor and glory of these last battles was for them all to share.
"Vin? What do we do now?" J.D.'s voice as from a distance, and he just couldn't answer for a moment or two more, his stomach roiling and his hip and side aching too much from lying on the earth for so long. He needed to be alone, Lord, he couldn't bear being around J.D. right now, couldn't explain ... he was on the last of his strength, his bones hollowed and his eyes burning and refusing to focus after so many intent hours through the distance glass. Ezra drawing his gun down there had made his heart stop, and it hadn't evened out since, he was too conscious of how irregular it was, sometimes far too hard and fast, sometimes far too slow and slight ...
He was beginning to be afraid he didn't have enough left to do what had to be done. How long had it been since he felt whole and hale? Injured even before they left Four Corners, he'd done nothing but add to those injuries as they went until he was bruised and battered it seemed from head to toe, couldn't make a move that didn't twinge somewhere, couldn't take a deep breath without pain cutting it off in his throat. Absently he rubbed after a deeper itch than he could scratch on his flank where the cat-claws had raked him, feeling the prickling tug of the bandage so he knew it had stuck to him again. But it was his chest that bothered him most; when he'd positioned the rifle on the ridge, the up-draw on his rib-cage had caused a sudden spike like bone ends grinding that had stopped him short. It'd taken a minute after that to get into position, moving slow and careful around the hurt to get there. The recoil from firing the damn thing would likely kill him.
Well. Wasn't a damned thing to do for it, he had a job in front of him that he was hewing to like a man in the desert to water, thinking of nothing else, doing nothing else. Wanting nothing else.
Finally he lofted a hand, and felt J.D. catch it and gently pull him to a sitting position, where he sat for a moment more, his head low between his shoulders, his arms dangling over his knees, just breathing. Just trying to center himself again.
"He'll make his move at daybreak." He said, opening his eyes at last to find J.D.'s wide and worried as an owl, waiting. He swallowed a digusted sigh and thought again about dropping the kid with a rifle-butt upside the head, tucking him somewhere safe and taking off on his own. But he just couldn't do it to him, J.D. was standing with him on loyalty and friendship, and even though he was still a kid in so many ways, he had a man's grasp of the danger they were facing and a man's courage in facing it. His smile felt wan and weak, but J.D.'s shoulders dropped a little to see it. Kid was scared - but for Vin, not himself. Probably didn't really believe he could get killed. But Vin did.
"It's what the hostiles would do." He said, knowing J.D. wondered how he'd come to that conclusion but wouldn't ask for fear of looking stupid - Buck had made him real leery of that, and hadn't done him a favor by it in Vin's mind if the kid was afraid to ask after what he had to know. He explained it.
"We gotta figger the Monroes know that much, too, if they're planning to blame it on the Lakota, these ain't stupid men. I been keepin' an eye off n' on to the Trading Post, we gotta get around to the west of the Fort after nightfall."
Where he'd have a good line of fire to the Post store and surroundings, the only building set off by itself at a good distance from the Fort proper. There were only a few places an assassin could hide, and he'd spent as much time as he could examining it today for angles and cover from which Stephen might act. He kept trying to do what he needed to do, what a hunter had to do that being a hunter of men had always made more difficult - put himself in the mind of his prey. An animal he understood, what moved it, how, when and why. A man - he had a hard time understanding men unless they'd been driven to the point of acting like animals. The Monroes, however, weren't men on the run, they were cunning criminals with the luxury of time, opportunity and authority.
Still, if Gerald was intending to murder a man and lay blame at the Lakota's feet, he'd do it at dawn where the confusion would be enlarged by semi-darkness, where he could plant whatever evidence they intended to point the finger of blame at the Lakota. Vin had to stop him. That was all he knew with any clarity anymore, so exhausted he couldn't sleep, caught and held in a cloistered space where nothing, not even himself, seemed quite real.
Bent nearly double to keep below the rim they'd been watching from, he and J.D. made their way down the slight incline to their horses, and when Vin stood up, wavered shakily and grabbed hold of his stirrup to stay up, J.D. made no move to help him other than to take Peso's bridle hard in hand from the other side of his head as the big horse tried to jerk away. There was something burning in Vin's eyes he didn't want to tempt out further, something taut and fragile as liquid bulging over the top of an overfilled glass. If he touched it, the tension would break and spill away, and he sensed without knowing how that Vin desperately needed to keep that tight hard grip on himself right now.
At the same time, though, J.D. was afraid of Vin looking so ghostly and drawn, a fine tremor had become nearly constant and the fading bruises on his face looked livid. He wasn't moving with his usual ease and slouching grace, either, but like every joint was stiff as an old man, like he hurt in too many places to ease any of them. He'd seen Vin tired, and he'd seen him injured, sometimes badly. But he'd never seen either to the degree he was seeing them now and he watched in an anxious sort of awe as the tracker just kept going. Knowing he would keep going, no matter what, until he'd done what he'd come here to do.
J.D. aimed to make sure he lived past it, because he was pretty sure by now that Vin didn't care about that part of it. Josiah said nothing in life of any consequence was accidental, that there was a purpose in everything, in every situation a man found himself in. Since he hadn't the distance shooting or stealth skills Vin had, he figured he was there to keep Vin alive. He figured the rest were counting on him to do that until they could get here (Lord, please let them get here!), and he didn't want to be the one who let Chris Larabee down when it came to Vin's life.
"Vin, you take my horse for now." He said, ignoring the expected flare of blue eyes that came at him under the hard arch of Peso's burly neck, but Vin didn't argue. Peso yanked his head out of J.D.'s grasp momentarily as if boasting the wisdom of that choice, a wild look in his eye and his hooves churning under him with the day's madness of so many Indian horses running, frenzied with speed and the fury of their riders. He was in a mood Vin didn't want to try right now, so he let J.D. hoist him up into the saddle of the bay mare, and the two of them slipped further out onto the plain to await nightfall.
There would be no more councils. Crook sent a message to call Red Cloud and Spotted Tail and the other agency chiefs to the Fort in two days to negotiate, but no one thought it would do any good. Those Chiefs would name their various impossible prices for the sale of the Black Hills, and while all parties argued and pontificated and threatened, many of their reservation bands were with the wild ones going to join Crazy Horse.
Before the soldiers had even escorted their charges to the Fort, the tops of many of the lodges in the river valley swayed and fell, their contents already packed and waiting for lodgepole travois. By two hours after dusk, the sprawling Lakota encampment across the river from the butte where Fort Fetterman stood would be nearly deserted, melting away into the dark so quietly that the soldiers wouldn't know which direction they'd gone.
"We will be there by nightfall." Two Badgers said as if talking to himself, but having fallen back from point position to Chris' left so he knew he was addressing him. Chris only nodded shortly, glancing back at Buck and Nathan, Josiah riding drag. By now he was furious at the route Vin had taken that was proving so hard even on relatively healthy men. His thigh ached, his arm as well, reminding him that he wasn't wholly up to snuff himself, either. Nathan kept shaking his head, and every time he did the worry got deeper.
Sunset layered reds and purples laced with gold in the western sky, colors that cast out onto the plains in a faint wash of bloody color. They went at a trot in the relatively even terrain, the horses tired, but the men anxious to get there. Chris glanced over as Two Badger's pony remained near him and found the warrior looking directly at him.
"Your friends - they do not know about his wife." He said, so quiet Chris had to strain to hear him. He knew his face was hard as stone and he didn't apologize for it, but Two Badgers continued somber regard said he was being engaged in a conversation unlike any they'd had. Then he realized what Two Badgers had said. He'd known Duley.
"But you know. He has told only you." Two Badgers said, enough admiration in having gained so much trust from Vin that Chris kept his mouth shut and listened, squinting hard at him in trying to figure out where he was leading. The dying light was at a strong angle across his face and cast the flat high bones of cheek and brow starkly, and the warrior only looked back with a steady gaze, a bit of stubbornness sparking deep in his eyes. He was the only man Chris had met so far who'd known Vin's wife, or even that he'd had one, and the temptation to ask questions, to talk about it, was powerful.
"I knew a woman once whose man died." Two Badgers said with a strange formality, turning back to the trail but holding Chris with the weight of his voice; "This woman, she refused to stop her grieving after the time had passed for it, she never smiled, she forgot how to laugh. She wore a face where all that was beautiful ran into lines going down ..." He shook his head and his mouth thinned as if around a bitterness, showing Chris with a mournful engraving of his own face how that woman looked.
Chris cocked his head, not sure what Two Badgers was talking about and beginning to be impatient. Two Badgers flashed a brief wry smile at him as if sensing this inner battle and approving his decision to stillness.
"Among the Lakota, a well-loved person is honored by the grief of his relatives. Then the spirit of that person has to be let go or terrible things will happen - they want to go on the star road, into heaven where they belong, even a beloved spirit might get angry if the living hold them back."
The gunman blinked at him, dyed red in the sunset, and Two Badgers hesitated thoughtfully before going on.
"This woman ... after a year had passed, which is the right amount of time to grieve, and then another year and she still refused to stop being sorrowful, to take up her life with thanks for it ... she began to lose those among the living who she loved. Her daughter, first. Then the next year her father, and the next her sister. All the people knew it was because she wouldn't see where she belonged, in the living world instead of pining after the dead like a buffalo calf who won't leave the carcass of its mother. That is what happens."
A silence came between them that again struck Chris as somehow formal.
"Since you are alive," Two Badger's said without a smile, in all seriousness, "I know you have not known Vin Tanner long."
Two Badgers watched the gunman's pale eyebrows knot over his eyes, pale strange eyes filled now with the reflection of the setting sun, filled red and gold and the urge to protest anything Two Badgers thought he knew of him or his friend. Tall and narrow in his saddle, hard with suspicion and his own mortal thoughts. Two Badgers gave him the grace of time to consider, turning to check the terrain watchfully; there could be patrols even out this far from the Fort.
It only took a minute for Chris to realize that Two Badgers hadn't offended him - quite the opposite. In Two Badgers' view, Vin loved him, which put him at the same risk the loved ones of that grief-stricken woman faced. Because Vin had not let go of Duley. It seemed too simple, it seemed like an inoffensive and obliquely offered confidence and so it shouldn't have infuriated him, but abruptly Chris felt like he had insects running up and down his back as something deep shook loose in him. He felt himself tremble unreasonably and wanted to explode into senseless violence.
"Grief held too long is a bad thing." Two Badgers said, his glance finding the gunman's eyes hot with a crazy sort of anger the warrior did not understand. But in the next breath, like a third eyelid hooding over, the gunman was concealed again in a stare as cold and blank as gunbarrels. Two Badgers regarded him with a new wariness; how truly deadly this man was with those skills and a heart that could empty so utterly, harden so entirely in its own defense, that battle was a relief and a release. Were he Lakota, he would be nailing down his honor sash in every impossible battle.
Nonetheless, he held Chris' eyes and said mildly, "Dangerous, too."
Irrationally, Chris didn't know whether Two Badgers was talking about Vin or about him, and that stung so deeply that his fingers itched for his gun-butt and there was a sound in his ears like red thunder. This Indian didn't know a damned thing about his life, or Vin's, he couldn't know ... Fury battered inside him, sharp and insistent, and he heard Buck coming up behind him, alerted by the instinct to Chris and trouble brewing that he'd always had. Two Badgers just rocked calmly with the sway of his horse and looked at him, his expression unyielding, but at the same time strangely kind.
It was slow to come, gradual but unstoppable once begun, eroding away like windtorn sand that hope he'd been holding so hard since the day he'd met Vin Tanner. Two Badgers couldn't understand how revelatory his words might be to him, not knowing him or his history, he was talking about Vin, but he'd just said a thing so true only the horse's tired inattention kept them moving. He understood his mistake. His mouth opened and then closed again on a disappointment that became sympathy like nothing he'd ever felt. Vin was no better off than him. All this time he'd been looking to Vin to find his peace with his grief, the peace he thought the tracker had found, but Two Badgers was telling him that Vin had never found it himself. He'd never let go of her, just as Chris had never let go of Sarah and his boy. Both of them were still holding on to ghosts and dreams of a future that no longer existed, and Vin couldn't tell him how to let them go because he never had himself.
What he'd recognized in Vin, and Vin in him, was more than common losses and sorrows, more than similarities in character and outlook. It was ghosts. The ones who haunted him into cold furies only violence relieved, and the one who haunted Vin into solitude. Neither of them ever entirely among the living.
He turned his head down to the trail, staring past his hand resting on the pommel and then at it. No answers there. The truth was that Chris tempted death for just about any distracting cause, noble or wicked, because nothing mattered to him anymore, what had mattered more than being alive had been stolen. Vin did the same thing, but he was a God-fearing man, and suicide even in the hundred ways Chris had tried so far would lock him out of heaven - and away from Duley - forever. Opposite ends of the same sorrow; what was an end to pain in Chris was the last hope in Vin.
"One day the chief of the village came to this woman ..." Two Badgers said, as if finishing a story he'd digressed from and drawing Chris' shaken attention with the calm steady resonance of his voice, "And told her she must let go of the spirit of her husband, that this man had been visiting him and others of the camp in their dreams lamenting his captivity. Even lamenting the love of his wife, which had been like the hearth of his soul when he was alive, because it now kept him in perpetual sorrow as the cause of her pain and the deaths of their loved ones."
He could feel the gunman's burning eyes on the side of his face and was acutely aware of his tight-coiled intensity, faintly threatening in its intensity. Sometimes there were things in words that even the speaker was not aware of, things meant only for the one who heard them. He was not a fool, this friend of Vin Tanner's, and Two Badgers now knew the attachment between them was just as Little Eagle had declared the instant she'd seen them together. It was hard to accept, because he'd never known Tanner to be at less than a remove from all people, even the Lakota, or confide his wounds and shadows to anyone but his wife. Little Eagle had insisted it extended to the other men with them, too, to several more people in Fort Fetterman, even to the white town they came from. That, in particular, had been very difficult to grasp. That Vin could ever feel at ease in such a place, ever wish to return to it and remain, a man who had always drifted the remote places ... well.
This hard deadly man beside him who seemed to care for no one and nothing cared about Vin's life as much as Two Badgers did. Little Eagle had seen it in his anger, had slapped Two Badger's arm and said he was blind as a mole not to see it himself. Why, she'd snapped, would a man bother to be angry at someone he didn't care about? It wasn't the trouble they found themselves in that grated between them, the bond was so strong she said they were like sinews joining them together.
So although Two Badgers couldn't know all of what caused the fury he sensed in the gunman to hear what he already had to know was true about Vin, the gunman listened and did not scorn or deny it. It was time Vin let his woman go to the star road before grief for her unraveled the new life Little Eagle said Tanner had begun, even without his own awareness of it. The people would need every white man such as he in the times to come, she'd said, and he hadn't wanted to ask what she meant. From the corner of his eye he saw the gunman turn forward, troubled eyes fixed on some invisible thing in the air, and Two Badgers sighed softly.
"My God, what are we going to do?" James breathed, his face knotted with terrified distress. "If he finds those letters on me - because I don't dare leave them anywhere - if we're held here too long and word comes back to him that make it clear they never made it to Washington ... " He dropped his face into his hands and shook his head, his ruddy hair in disarray, the picture of despondent anxiety. Ezra glanced at Travis over James' bent back and rolled his eyes despite not feeling much more secure than the youngest Monroe did. James had been charged with 'keeping an eye' on their guests, the only bit of good luck being their apparent uselessness to Gerald right now.
They were in the small parlor of the Officer's quarters with the majority of their dinner congealing on the china before them. Meetings were being convened behind every door around them, Commissioners hastening to reassure businessmen that possession of the Indian lands was right around the corner and they had nothing but profit to anticipate. Officers assuring the Commissioners that the hostiles wouldn't dare act against them even in such numbers, they were quite safe and would be able to force the agency chiefs to the agreements they wanted. Commissioners writing reports for couriers to take back to Washington the following day reassuring their constituents of eventual success, the Black Hills and all that gold would soon be pouring into the national coffers and the Indian problem would be settled forever.
The meeting convened in this small parlor, however, was not so reassuring to James, he was nearly beside himself with terror - if his brothers found out what he'd been doing, that he'd been helping, even in a oblique way, the very Indians Gerald intended to destroy ... he shuddered and shook his head and gripped his hair again in his fingers trying to be a man about it, to think clearly and of someone other than himself. What would happen to Elizabeth and Julianna among the Indians when word came to them of the Lakota being blamed for a murder they knew had come from a white hand? Could even men as daunting as the seven keep them from vengeful harm?
Mary's face was pinched in the setting sun through the window and she kept glancing at Ezra as though befuddled by his good appetite. Indeed, he was the only one who had finished his meal, and even now he was raising eyebrows inquiringly at the remainder of the bread, taking it when no one objected, applying butter and jam and then consuming it as though blithely unconcerned about any sort of danger. Mary wanted to look to Orrin for reassurance, but was too ashamed of the fear she knew her eyes would show; her father-in-law didn't need to be worrying about her just now.
"Are you people listening?" James hissed fervently, his hands spreading incredulously off his knees in almost violent hopelessness, "He's going to do it tomorrow, Gerald is going to start this war tomorrow and we were supposed to be miles away from here, not trapped right in the middle of it! Don't you understand what that means?"
Ezra set his coffee cup back in the saucer with a satisfied clink and leaned back, tugging his vest down neatly with a pat of appreciative satiety. To James' utter astonishment, the gambler set one ankle across the opposite knee and drew a cheroot out of the inside pocket of his green coat, running it under his hose with an admiring inhalation before lighting it off the single lamp on the table. He puffed on it once or twice until a swirl of white smoke curled into the air above their heads, and then he noticed James staring at him and chuckled with all apparent good humor.
"Mr. Monroe, do calm yourself, sir! Your brother isn't a fool - be careful, or he'll surely smell the fright on you and wonder at it. I imagine he's got far more pressing matters in mind just now than you - hence your current assignment. I imagine he's thankin' his own lucky stars he's still got his hair on his head - bit of a surprise, that many Indians. Indeed ..." His smile went sly, his head tilted significantly, "It's mighty surprising they didn't kill us all."
"Ezra ..." Orrin warned as James got even paler - which hardly seemed possible, but he managed it. Travis appreciated the gambler's nonchalance, but he was worried about Mary's safety if Gerald managed to work his will despite everything they could do, if Vin somehow couldn't stop him ... and he still had no clear idea just how Vin would stop him short of ...
Travis blew out a harsh breath and refused to pursue the thought. God, starting a damned war, genocide for gold, it was so far beyond him that he ... again he pulled himself back. There wasn't time right now for outrage or righteous indignation, he had to get Mary out of here, first, to get out himself with their information and get it to Washington. He'd vowed that no one with a hand in beginning this war would make a red cent off it, but if he couldn't do it in open court, as he'd hoped ... well, there were other ways that were still legal. His eyebrows swooped downward, his lower jaw went out pugnaciously. No, this crime would not go unpunished while he had breath in his body.
Ezra rocked back in his chair watching the Judge's grim introspection. His hands spread as if gently scorning the depth of that worry.
"Come now, my brave compatriots! Do we imagine Mr. Tanner just sat up there all day and, what, took a nap? I do believe we can safely assume, by his timin', that he knows exactly what Captain Monroe has planned - so, someone told him. And I'm assumin', again, that it wasn't Chris or any of the boys or he wouldn't be here on his own - which leads me to conclude they're likely hot on his heels. I've also come to another conclusion - this one admittedly requirin' a great deal of consideration - that he also had a hand in the way matters resolved themselves today at that council."
Orrin looked at him sharply, realizing at once just how possible that was. Ezra's instinct to self-preservation might just save them all, and the gambler's smile got wide and satisfied, as if he'd plunked salvation right down among them. Travis glanced at Mary and saw the same unexpected hope. Vin would have warned the Lakota, just as he'd sent word to Ezra of his presence - indeed, he'd probably identified them to the Indians to gain their protection in case it came to violence, he certainly had enough friends among them to guarantee that much. The knot in Orrin's stomach loosened a bit, his mouth relaxed. Perhaps matters weren't as totally out of control as he'd been thinking. He patted the table near Mary's fingers and straightened his shoulders, smiling at her; her answering smile was nearly blinding with relief. Vin was very likely ensuring their safety, and Ezra seemed sure of it, which explained his shift in attitude from his fury on the parade ground earlier to this nearly laconic faith in rescue.
Ezra was inordinately pleased to see those smiles. "I'll lay odds that Tanner has been lookin' down at this Fort all day determinin' precisely what Gerald's plans are and makin' plans of his own." Ezra said, exhaling a thin stream of smoke and studying the eddys and whirls of it like it was a pleasant oracle. "Consequently, he must also knows what a tenuous position we are in, and I'm sure he's got somethin' up his sleeve in that regard. He may be uneducated, but he's one of the wiliest fellows I've ever met. I hope he forgives my lamentable doubts of this afternoon."
Orrin paid closer attention to Ezra now, trying to determine whether this sudden faith in Vin was a real understanding of the tracker or just a good job of self-deception. They were a contentious pair in the best of times .. but still, the logic was sound. Vin was a simple man in his loyalties, his word given, he'd do whatever he had to without considering consequences to himself. It was a blunt and graceful simplicity he was gratified to know Ezra understood.
He swore Ezra blushed at the warmth he could feel in his own smile.
"But what is he going to do about it, Mr. Standish!" James insisted, "He's alone out there, how do you think he's going to get us out from under the guard my brother has posted outside these doors?" His beetled brow and hushed voice obvious proof of that constraint.
"Well, I believe Ezra is right, I doubt he's alone anymore." Mary said. She had faith in Chris Larabee, if in no one else.
"Oh fine! Wonderful! So they're all out there, all six of them! Heaven's, that should be no fair test at all, only a thousand spooked soldiers who will be at war in less than twelve hours! Oh, that's just marvelous, I feel so much better now!"
One thing Ezra Standish appreciated was sarcasm, and he himself had voiced just such scoffing opinions before he came to know the true capacities of the other six men when joined in common cause. So he laughed indulgently at James, more reassuring in that smug paternalism than he probably realized.
"Mr. Monroe, I'd think you would have observed first-hand by now how much those six men are capable of. I have no doubt that they will find a way. Now, my advice is to pack a bag, one bag, and a small one at that." He'd be leaving a considerable portion of his own wardrobe behind, but he was content that his winnings would afford him new, and better.
"Our 'bodyguards' remain at the foot of the stairs against our venturing out of doors unescorted, but they haven't felt it necessary to watch our rooms upstairs. Therefore, I recommend we convene in the suite Mr. Travis and I share after we formally - and visibly - retire."
"Why?" James asked, his heart-rate slowly ebbing in the face of Ezra's lazy authority but in a fog of terrified bewilderment in which he couldn't conceive of actually surviving this. Could he? Might he find his sister and his niece alive and well? Take up a legitimate life at home out from under the oppressive shadows of his older brothers? It was nearly too much, too impossible a hope, and he was wracked with guilt to even consider it at the expense of his brother's lives and freedoms. But he was human, and he wanted to live. And to hope.
"Why?" Ezra said with a dry laugh, "Well, I would think that's obvious, sir! Every time contact is made with us, I am confronted with either unwashed desperados lounging on my fresh linens with their spurs on or half-naked Indians prospectin' after my gold buttons, it's more popular there than a telegraph office! I declare, I wouldn't be surprised to find all six of them up there already waitin' on room service!" Laughing when everyone involuntarily looked up at the ceiling toward that room as if that was the best possible thing that could happen.
Orrin folded his arms on the tabletop and leaned toward Ezra, glad enough to have been drawn into this enormously reassuring approach but too old to ignore entirely how dangerous their position still was. Though he wouldn't say so in front of Mary or James, he thought Ezra knew as well as he did that the three of them, in Gerald's view, knew far too much to just be allowed to walk away, not when he believed their cohorts held his sister and the land grants. Gerald wasn't a man for loose ends, and though he might be engaged now with more immediate matters, he had no intention of anything but a good Christian burial for them all once things got going. He still hadn't entirely convinced himself that Gerald might use them to start his war if the Trader's son was inconvenient.
When he was satisfied by the fade of Ezra's smile and the hard light that came into his green eyes that the gambler had factored those possibilities as well, he inhaled deeply and said in a firm voice, "I agree with Ezra." He nodded once, decisively, and Mary laughed at the feisty spark in his eye; "Mary, pack your carpetbag and come to our room as soon as you can. We can't be sure exactly when all hell is going to break loose, but we can be prepared for it."
Ezra's soft laugh layered hers and he shook his head, saying "Oh, I daresay I know precisely when it will occur, Mr. Travis, no hour other than dawn would ever do! Dawn, Mr. Travis, when decent men are in their beds, I'll bet this twenty dollar gold piece on it!"
Vin didn't make a sound for three hours, walking the dark moonless plain in a southwesterly arc with J.D. behind him leading the horses. He seemed aimless sometimes, but J.D. knew better. He seemed like a ghost sometimes, too, and J.D. wasn't sure about that one, so he just followed on, everything standing still inside him with a kind of numbed readiness he didn't want to lose.
Three times in the last hour, though, they'd met bands of Lakota moving toward the Rosebud, and Vin had parlayed with each a few minutes before going on. None were surprised to find him out there, or evinced the slightest suspicion over his presence, and J.D. noticed that although formal introductions were made each time and there was no sense of recognition, the warriors Vin spoke with seemed to know who he was. He also noticed that they looked at him, too, approving him just for being at Vin's back; he was proud of that and determined to live up to it.
J.D. took his directions and instructions from Vin's eyes, his chin, flicks of his fingers, watching the tracker moving with a damaged focus that was almost ethereal. As though he'd walk through a solid mountain to get where he was going; as though it was everything he'd ever cared about and all that powered his battered body. J.D. never took his eyes off him, expecting him to go down any minute and filled with a terrible fascination hen he just didn't. Wouldn't.
It was cold, frost a white dusting on the ground and their breath clouding the air above them, but J.D. kept one hand bare under his arm in case he needed to draw.
Vin was cold and aware of it, which he usually wasn't on such a hunt even when he should be. Cold, heat, wet, nothing much touched him in that place he went to in his own mind where he let go all he was of white or man and became a predator. Where nothing mattered but the lessons of wolf and panther and eagle and the long journey out from among his own that had left him starved and scarred and forged hard as iron. But tonight, though his body fell into the rhythms and instincts that had kept that child impossibly alive, he was only a man who was cold as a grave down to the marrow of his bones.
Every now and then he'd hear J.D. behind him and be nearly startled by the noise, having forgotten the kid was there, so he knew his peripheral senses weren't working very well. Everything seemed to be fixed too much straight ahead, too tight on what he was bound to do so everything else was passing unnoticed. That wasn't like him, a man who lived complete in each moment, and especially when lives that were important to him hung in the balance. But folks being important to him to the point of such worry that the task at hand went sloppy ... hell, that wasn't like him, either.
As he abandoned the latest of several vantage points he'd scouted, he felt a flutter of something he couldn't recognize in his clenched and empty belly. Uncertainty? Fear? Daylight would be here in a few more hours and he still hadn't found the right spot, the choice made more difficult by the necessity of getting J.D. out of it alive once he'd taken his target. If he'd been there on his own that wouldn't have mattered, but he wasn't, and the adjustment had to be made. He blew out a breath and shifted the Winchester to his other hand, pulling cold air in through his nose and trying to pull himself together with it.
Worry about the Judge, Mary and Ezra kept chipping away at him because he hadn't figured out how to get them out once it all broke loose. What it'd come down to now was a hope that Ezra would do that for him. Wasn't like the gambler hadn't known all along about Gerald's plan and when it would break, nor why it'd been kept from Vin. Wasn't like he wouldn't have figured all the angles - including Vin managing to find out and show up to stop it. Ezra was ever quick to the safety of his own skin, and Vin had no choice but to count on that instinct. Realizing he could count on Ezra also made him realize that his low opinion of the man had not been justified by his actions on this journey. Damned fancy river-boat con-artist had stood up right into the teeth of it today and been ready to fight if it came to it, so no matter that he'd lied to him, the duty Vin owed them all had to cover Ezra Standish, too.
J.D. was startled by the sudden wolfish flash of incisors and a breath of sound like ironic laughter from Vin. Made him nervous to hear. But finally Vin stopped, looking through the distance glass in every direction while J.D. wondered how in hell he could see anything. Dark as pitch, yet Vin hadn't missed a step or a dip or a rise yet. J.D. looked around himself, squinting and tired and hoping this time ...
"This'll do." Vin said quietly as he slipped the glass back into one of the inside pockets of his coat, his face in utter darkness as he stared down at the Fort so impossibly distant below. J.D. looked down at it too, and back to Vin, then back to the Fort again with an eloquent doubt on his young face he was wise enough not to voice. If Vin could shoot that far ... well, that'd be something to see.
Vin dropped down onto his haunches and folded his arms across his knees, the slender length of the rifle threaded through that loose embrace as he watched the somnolent fort with an oddly impassive intensity. J.D. hung back nervously, Vin's expression and posture too much like a starving wolf examining his own hunting grounds in casual expectation of causing blood to flow upon it. It made J.D. shiver and not want to have Vin's eyes turn to him just then. So he went to the horses, not wanting to see the coldly detached presence of death sitting where Vin had always been before.
He rummaged around in his saddlebags until he found the last of the jerky, waiting until Vin glanced back at him, the bleak mood broken, before taking it and a canteen to Vin's side, sitting down beside him. Immediately he felt the cold through the seat of his pants seeping up into his body, but he'd never yet figured out how the tracker could squat on his heels like that for hours without it bothering him in the least. Actually, he'd tried it a couple of times; the first time he'd been wearing spurs - a painful piece of stupidity he was extremely glad no one had been around to see. The second time his legs had gone to sleep so he'd fallen over as soon as he tried to stand upright - Casey had been there that time and she'd laughed ... the memory of her broad grin flickered behind his eyes and he was surprised by the both the unexpected clarity of her face and the force of his own sudden longing.
He nudged Vin's arm with the canteen and waited while the tracker took a long drink. Then he nudged him again with the jerky, and nudged harder when Vin shook his head in refusal. Clouded blue eyes met stubborn hazel, and Vin took the jerky from him and tore off a piece with his teeth, chewing slowly.
"Yer getting pushy as Larabee, kid." He muttered in an oddly rusty-sounding voice. J.D. wasn't in the least offended.
After a little while spent slowly sweeping the glass back and forth across the Fort, Vin let his arms dangle off his knees, the fringes of his hide jacket ruffling with the small motions of his restless body. He took a deep breath that stopped short before it seemed he was finished and lost it on a cough that struck him still, shoulders high and tight. He didn't move for a minute or so, the slender length of him folded down onto itself into a space that seemed too small, breathing slowly with his eyes closed so J.D. started to really worry. But then he raised his head and looked at J.D. There was nothing weak, nothing vulnerable or giving, anywhere. He would kill his wife's brother and he wouldn't let anything stop him.
A quarter moon finally found a way through the clouds so J.D. could finally make out the landscape around him, the dim details of the fort below.
For a few minutes Vin talked softly, in that low quick tone J.D. had heard them all use in their time, laying out a plan. Vin put the distance glass to his eye and then to J.D.'s over and over, urgently, because dawn was coming, but patiently pointing and directing the brass-mounted lens.
From their vantage on this long shallow slope west of the fort Vin meticulously guided him over the terrain; relatively flat, from above looking like it bulged out into the river, forcing a radical bend in its course. At the furthest point of that bulge the river below had carved an escarpment, like half a shallow bowl had broken away and fallen into the river, and this was the southern boundary of the fort grounds. It was treacherously steep at its furthest point, but the slope gradually broadened and flattened the further from that river-bend it went.
There were a few places on those shallower slopes where the choppy decline down to the river could be traversed if forced to it, a good horse could make it. The faint pale line of a path wound up the soft western-most edge to the plains outside the fort where the abandoned council grounds had stood. The river was a wide line that spread out into fingers as it rounded the bend, glimmering silver in the wan moonlight. Directly opposite from them on the far side of the camp the ramp-like main road crested into the front of the fort, coming up from the river ford they couldn't see from where they were, curving back on itself as it went up the eastern flank into the fort. The boys would come up there if they'd made it in time, it was most direct and safest in the dark on tired horses.
"Alright, J.D. Here's how it's gonna go down." The index finger of Vin's right hand swept toward the rectangular hulk of the Trading post without his arm moving off his knee. The building was situated about twenty yards off the edge of the escarpment east of the stables and paddocks, the ground broken as it rose in a slight uneven rampart then fell away into the river valley.
"Off behind the store is the outhouse, see there?" J.D. squinted hard and imagined he could make out a narrow upright rectangle. "The boy came out at dawn yesterday to use it, and Monroe was watchin' 'im n' checkin' his pocket-watch all the way. Keepin' himself out of sight doin' it, too. Since he don't strike me as an early riser by habit, I figure that's where n' when he intends to get the boy. And there ..." A slight shift of that finger toward the bakery, the near side of which provided a perfect place to shoot someone walking to the privy in the back "... is where Monroe is liable t'hide. I'm countin' on Ezra bein' smart enough to make a move as soon's he hears me shootin' and skedaddle with Mary and the Judge toward the escarpment; they'll be out in the open a good long run, but the barracks are on the far side of the parade ground so they might make it, they'll head down to the river. Likely I won't be the only one shootin' for long ..." This warning J.D. accepted with a tight nod, his eyes wide in the gloom, his fine mouth set sternly.
"If the boys make it in time, they'll be comin' from the same direction we did ... " A slight sweeping gesture indicating the broad river delta beyond what they could see past the escarpment. "Chris won't miss Mary comin' down that slope, and I'm pretty sure Two Badgers and a couple others will be keepin' him and the boys company."
J.D. thought Vin was showing a lot of faith in Ezra considering the tracker didn't usually have half a use for him, but then it dawned on him that Vin was also counting on Chris and the others coming along in the nick of time - help coming was more something J.D. would count on, not Vin, yet the tracker's blunt trust comforted J.D. enormously. Lots of 'ifs', but Vin didn't seem to mind this time.
"We're gonna have a patrol passin' right close behind us that sets out at dawn, n' that could be a problem if Monroe doesn't make his move quick on the heels of sunrise. You're gonna need t'be watching our backs real close, and you're gonna need t'find someplace t'stake the horses where they won't see 'em."
J.D. glanced behind him, doubt again rising strong - where would he hide two horses in the flat bleak landscape immediately around them? The small incline they were on right now was about the only place big enough to conceal a man from the Fort below, and a rider passing too close behind them might spot them.
"You'll have t'take 'em a ways back along the trail we walked comin' here, J.D., there's a cut from winter melts up there about six hundred yards thataway ..." Tipping his head in the direction of their back-trail, "Not too deep, but it's got scrub-brush on the rim, it'll do."
J.D. trusted it would. Vin went back to his surveying of the Fort and after a minute looked over at him again with a curious impatience that set J.D. moving in awkward haste. Now, he meant now. Then he noticed the grey slice of horizon. Dawn was upon them.
Ezra stood by the window in the dark room where he'd been standing for two hours, smoke rising lazily over his head. Finally he reached out and touched the Judge's shoulder in the chair nearby where the man had stretched out to sleep, and Travis came awake in an instant. He needed no explanation as he looked up at the gambler, the fine bones of his face slicked with pale flickering light from the sentry fires outside and intent on something below.
Travis rose quietly and crossed the room to the bed where Mary was sleeping, touching her on the arm and smiling at her as she woke without a sound. She reached to her far side to wake James, who had finally fallen asleep himself with their carpetbags between them like a bundling board. He gasped, as if roused from a nightmare, his mouth opened, and Orrin lunged across his daughter-in-law to clap his broad hand over that mouth.
"Your brother is on the move." He said in quiet warning, sympathetic to the welter of conflicting emotions that burst up in James' eyes, but having no patience for them right now. There was a tightening sensation of matters rising to a head and they had no time for James' fear or sorrow or guilt ... Orrin gave him the bare thread of a reassuring smile in the faint edged squares of paned light through the window, but his eyes made it clear there was no more time to ponder the matter or change course. Then the Judge joined Ezra at the window, following the keen focus of his eyes and finally picking out the shadowy shape of a man slipping along the deep shadows of the barracks to the west of them toward the armory. Stephen broke across the open space toward the bakery and both men saw what he was carrying with a spike of alarm ... a bow and quiver.
Ezra hissed in admiration, shaking his head. "Clever bastard, upon my soul. I thought he was going to shoot him ... "
Orrin had thought so, too, and was wondering why Gerald had chosen a bow despite the obvious ease of blaming the Lakota with a Lakota weapon. The tribes used rifles and pistols in battle now as often as bows, Stephen could hardly hope to find his target with a killing strike no matter whether he'd become proficient in its use ... Gerald Monroe was not one to take such a risk ... there had to be another reason.
"There." Ezra said, pointing to a momentary flash of movement from the west of the Trading post, but Orrin could see nothing further, try as he might. His eyes flicked with obvious confusion to Ezra, who stared intently in that new direction, expression and body both suddenly tight with alarm.
"Stephen isn't alone ..."
"That's impossible! Stephen would never involve anyone else, Gerald wanted no one else involved who could use it to blackmail us! He wouldn't entrust it to anyone but Stephen alone, and Stephen would not dare bring anyone else into it!" James insisted, having risen and been alerted by the sudden tension of the men by the window. He came to them as Mary quickly knotted her hair under her hat and donned her coat, feeling a new urgency in the room that she knew came from unconsidered complications.
Ezra shrugged, "Nevertheless, there are at least two men hunkered down over there just west of the Trading Post."
"But ... why?" James' said, the last word petering out at the last and both Ezra and Orrin turned to him as the terrible answer to his own question occurred to him. He felt himself wash pale and he shook his head in denial of the thought he already knew could not be denied. His voice was a thin line too close to hysteria, his eyes round with horrified speculation and he had to tell the two men staring sternly at him, their lives depended on him now as much as Elizabeth's did.
"Gerald is taking no chances Stephen will miss ... and if he does, if the Trader's son survives and gets away ... " Even in the dark the shamed flush deepened the color of his face, mortified and mortally afraid. "My God ... don't' you see? He's taken out insurance in more ways than one, damn his soul! Why didn't I realize he'd do that? Oh my God, this is awful!"
"Quietly, James." Orrin said, his dark eyes edgy and his grip on James' trembling arm purposefully painful. "It doesn't make any difference to us now, one or three or even more, it doesn't matter."
Ezra, however, had grasped immediately what James had not quite said, and his eyes burned like green flame in disagreement. "The hell it doesn't matter! Those back-ups are right in our intended path, which is the least of our worries if I have correctly surmised what our dear Mr. Monroe has not said - if Stephen fails, those back-ups will kill him in the place of the Trader's son, and likely put at least one of those arrows in his corpse thereafter. Am I wrong, sir?"
James blanched white, but he could not deny it. Indeed, for the first time in his life, he didn't even try to fool himself. Mary stood at his shoulder, her face filled with horror as James said in a broken voice, "No, you are not wrong, Mr. Standish." His eyes pleaded for forgiveness, though the sin was not his this time. It had been often enough. "Gerald will sacrifice Stephen if he can't get the Trader's son, he'll sacrifice anyone he thinks he has to, and losing a brother will put him beyond suspicion. He knows it. In fact ... he might have Stephen killed whether he's successful or not."
Ezra's expression hardened, but he couldn't deny a touch of ironic admiration for such coldly calculated heartlessness despite the shiver that tickled its way down his back. He was astonished by just how far Gerald Monroe was prepared to go, and Ezra was a man with a lifetime's experience of the most devious and deviant people who walked the earth. None of them had been so without limits, so utterly devoid of any strictures of morality or filial responsibilities. Nothing in man's law or God's would constrain Gerald Monroe, which made him the most dangerous man Ezra had ever encountered. It was a kind of madness, it had to be, despite the ruthlessly clear logic of Gerald's manipulations. No sane man could so blithely arrange his sister's death and his brother's as well, or attempt to ignite a genocidal war just for gold. More than gold, Ezra suspected. But that wasn't the entire litany of the gambler's worries just now.
"Alright, alright ... unfortunately, our situation is becoming more dangerous by the moment. I have absolutely no doubt Vin has drawn a bead on that Trading Post by now, and if he sees those other men out there and believes them to be Gerald's, he could as easily shoot us as those ne'er-do-wells. He's determined to stop them, Mr. Travis, he's quite single-minded and not altogether rational in that intention. It's also likely, given the injuries he suffered before escaping this fort, that he isn't altogether in command of his faculties."
But Orrin was shaking his head, his grip on James not abating and his face certain.
"Vin knows the only way we can get out of this fort without walking right through the middle of it is down that embankment to the river, Ezra. And no matter how far away he is, he isn't going to mistake Mary for a man." Mary flushed hotly, but did not look away. Orrin went on before Ezra could voice the interruption that had risen to his open mouth; "He'll be watching for us, and he'll be cognizant of our situation, Ezra, he's more careful than you think. In any case, we can't stay here any longer, you can't argue that."
And indeed Ezra could not, though this unexpected increase in the risk factor did not please him in the least. Irritably he cleared his side-arm from his holster and rotated the cylinder, peering into it closely in the dim light to check the load, his handsome face grim and sharp.
"I do not like the odds changin' after the hand is dealt." Ezra groused, but there was nothing he could do about it. Lord, he hated feeling helpless! He just knew his skin was going to be crawling until they got over the edge of that escarpment and he did not like knowing he'd be in Vin's sights with nothing but the hope the sharpshooter was rational and would recognize him. There was a wild willfulness about Vin Tanner in the last few weeks that disregarded his friends to a degree Ezra had once believed was impossible.
Orrin let James go and glanced back at his daughter-in-law, who allowed no doubt in her quietly determined face. He smiled at her and said,
"Well; the first shot will draw our guards off downstairs, and I suggest we be ready to move fast."
J.D. stared, breathlessly transfixed by the light that flowed through the rectangular tang-sight onto Vin's eye, everything else in shadow but that small spot of drawn-in sunrise reflecting color and depth and detail. Blue as a breathless hot summer sky with dark striations out from the pupil like indigo spokes. Wide and still as unthreatening innocence, but fixed implacably on a life he intended to end. J.D. didn't move. The tracker's mouth was quiet and easy while J.D.'s own teeth ground together until he could hear them creak in his head. Vin's hands, calloused and deceptively powerful, held the rifle with a meaningful comfort and authority.
In an instant the black pupil of Vin's eye widened, then, and his finger stroked the trigger. The crack of that rifle rolled out into the morning heralding a war the tracker couldn't stop, but had chosen to start himself, in his own way and his own time. Vin Tanner's shot, not Stephen Monroe's, hollow with the hope of changing all that would come after it by changing this one small thing.
The recoil drove the tracker back with a pained grunt, but he was sighting again before the echoes had risen.
Chris' head snapped around to the west at the resonant boom of Vin's Winchester breaking open the day. His hands jerked hard into his chest to stop his horse, heels dropping and digging until he was standing off the saddle, the horse stiff-legged beneath him. That was a sound he recognized even distant as it was, and for a brief instant all he felt was gladness - Vin was alive, and well enough to do what he'd set out to do. He didn't doubt for a second that Stephen Monroe had just been felled.
Buck, Josiah and Nathan were close behind him, their faces reflecting an exhaustion that was banished with that report. Two Badgers lit out toward the remnants of the camp scattered across the river delta, calling as soon as he got near enough for the people to rise, to go with whatever they could carry. Death walked after them now, and there was no more time. War had come to the plains.
The four white men, with a look between them that spoke and agreed in an instant, broke into a dead run toward the road that curved up from the ford to the fort on the east of the escarpment like a whirlwind loosed to rage.
Vin didn't need to see Stephen to know he no longer had a face.
He knew what rounds from this rifle did on exiting a human skull, because a man who took life had an obligation to look at the wounds of death and accept that he had caused them. Vin had never shied from facing that. So he knew how gruesome it was, white bone smeared red, brain matter spilled onto the ground ... blood, the same that had flowed in Duley's veins. Inside him he was as empty as an unfilled jar, hollow and silent as dead air trapped inside.
Lamps flickered on in the barracks and buildings, the Trader's son scampered like his ass was on fire back toward the Trading Post, doors burst open in sudden lances of light upon the ground. Then he saw Ezra's bright green jacket as he herded Orrin and Mary and Elizabeth's youngest brother out the back door of the Officer's quarters making a beeline for the edge of the escarpment too damned far away. That was the only good thing he saw.
It was up to him to keep them clear, and with Stephen's corpse laying hard on his soul, Vin kept the Winchester to his cheek and kept firing with a cold relentless rhythm, killing two more who'd come up on the opposite side of the outhouse without wondering why they were there in the first place. He was death, now, the merciless scythe of lives, the harbinger of war, and the voice of his rifle was the only voice he had.
The four men pounded up the broad road, leaning forward intent on the sudden boil of soldiers pouring onto the parade ground into milling confusion, running toward the Officer's quarters struggling into suspenders and coats and boots, rifles and side-arms in hand.
"Chris!" As they breached the rise in the road at the eastern perimeter of the fort Nathan's long arm jerked toward the left, and Chris saw Ezra herding Travis, James and Mary toward the edge of the bluff - he made a beautiful target in that bright green coat. Though they hadn't been noticed yet, the gambler was keeping himself between Mary and any gunfire that might come at their backs. Chris felt a surge of ferocious gratitude.
"Go, Nathan, we'll try n' get between the soldiers and that edge - " He shouted, "Get Ezra and them down that embankment, get 'em horsed and out of the open!" He shouted, and Nathan peeled away without wondering how he was supposed to get them horsed - Chris wouldn't say it if he hadn't already set that up. And indeed, even as Nathan rounded the easterly edge of the outcropping, his horse's hooves slipping and digging into soft sides of the incline, he saw Two Badgers riding out from the Lakota camp below leading a string of horses. Behind him, the Indians were already streaming away into the cover of rough ground to the southwest, even the reservation chiefs fleeing from blame for whatever treachery had broken out in the Fort.
Buck's gray sawed his head up and down against the reins as he pulled level with Chris, Josiah's mount bumping against the two of them as he slewed around behind them. Each looked in a different direction, having to understand what was going on before they could make a move, and Buck squinted toward the west and asked incredulously,
"God, Chris, is that Vin shooting?" Buck's stunned look spread into a grin of astonished admiration; "Damn - "
Again and again Chris heard the resonant boom of Vin's Winchester even among the sporadic sound of other rifles as the soldiers began to fire in blind panic into the darkness. His searching eye found Gerald Monroe in the lee of the bakery standing in full uniform over someone prostrate on the ground. He was screaming commands and, having sent a good contingent of soldiers back the way they'd come, was now sending men Chris recognized as his personal guard after Ezra and the rest as they fled. Vin's rifle sounded again and the foremost of those pursuers fell. In the rest of the camp, it seemed like most of the soldiers were certain only that they were being attacked, but it looked like Crook was organizing some sort of order on the Parade ground, sending a group of men running for the stables, another, already mounted, out into the plains west of the fort. Buck and Josiah looked at him expectantly, so calm you wouldn't think they were facing a whole damned army. Chris wished he was as sure as Buck's grin that they'd all live through the next hour.
Gerald spared a glance at his brother's gruesome remains, but he already knew Stephen hadn't been felled according to any of this own plans - those two assassins also lay dead, and the reports of that rifle were so distant that they rolled and broke through the prairie air. That damned sharpshooter was out there, the sonofabitch should be dead! Would be before this glorious day was done, he was doing nothing but helping Gerald's plan along.
He snatched up the bow and quiver his two assassins were supposed to have removed, fumbling one shaft out before throwing them as hard and as far as he could toward the outhouse. They'd be wondered at, but there would be no way to link them, and if he played his cards right in the next few minutes they'd be just another proof, another way to lay the blame at the Lakota's door - and now at Vin Tanner's too. Bastard wanted to get mixed up in it? Well, Gerald could mix him so deep he'd never get out again, trapping him in treason as a reward for his stubbornness was simply a bonus. Quickly, as if in concern, he knelt over his brother's body with his back to the camp and with a viciously expedient stroke embedded the shaft deep into his brother's back. It quivered in fletched accusation.
His soldiers, following the plan, were coming with that little Commissioner he'd chosen to be his witness, and he immediately snapped out a harsh command to the nearest man to keep the rest of the Commissioners secure in their quarters. Other than this one, they were the last thing he needed when wild cards were being thrown into the deck.
"Captain Monroe!" The Commissioner cried as soon as he was within earshot, "Where are those folks goin'? Who is shooting at us, sir? Good Lord - is that your brother?"
Questions to which he had immediate answers. Gerald seized on the horrified sympathy of the man's eyes as he stared down at Stephen's mutilated corpse, allowing grief to contort his face and then taking a shaken breath as if selflessly gathering himself to his duty. His plan would grind forward over the bones of anyone who tried to thwart it.
"It is, sir, it's Stephen ... he's been murdered, Indians, as you see - but not alone! That man shooting, he was here under arrest for smuggling weapons to the Indians, a frontiersman and Indian sympathizer. My God, I never realized how dangerous that could be! Those people ..." A panic-edged flick of his hand toward Ezra and the others as they ran for the lip of the embankment. "... must be in league with them, they've been spying on our strategic planning, they know where every unit in the west is and where they're heading!" As if he were only just now figuring it out, and his alarm terrifying the little Commissioner in his night-shirt and gabardine trousers who focused on Gerald Monroe, tall and broad and resplendent in his uniform, like his only salvation. It was all Gerald could do not to laugh. Now, to keep Crook away until he'd regained control here ... his thoughts were running with that hot precision he loved, he felt like a great machine chewing across a conquered land.
On the Parade ground men were rushing toward the stables, where gunfire had erupted, and to fortifications on the west, shouting and shooting into the darkness, several units heading into the Indian camp below.
With an anguished glance at Stephen, Gerald pretended a noble struggle to focus on the military matters at hand, visibly taking command. "It could be an ambush ... " Looking sharply toward the west as the Commissioner visibly paled and stared with him. Gerald's voice was strident, "We need Crook and his men at once to protect our flank, get word to him, my good man, and then get to safety, protect your wife!"
The Commissioner never questioned it as he ran, shouting to any and all that they were being attacked by Indians and desperados, nor did he see Gerald's sharp-toothed smile. This would keep Crook's troops away from the action of his personal command, who were approaching now, fully dressed and heavily armed with their breakfast warming their stomachs, ready for Gerald's war and their share of the gold. By the time Crook figured out it was only one man out there, Gerald's men would've gotten rid of Travis and the rest, it was crucial now to get things back on track. Tanner may have thwarted Stephen, but he would find Gerald a far more slippery foe. The tracker was as good as dead, hardly an impediment.
Travis and the gambler making this move only made it easier to kill them, their flight intimated all the guilt required of a treasonous alliance with the Lakota over gold, Elizabeth's death would only compound it. That had already been planned for, and their making a break for it - probably that gambler, sensitive to the trap closing around him - just pushed up the timetable. He'd never trusted Ezra Standish, and he knew Travis was a more substantial power than he let on. But now whatever they were up to no longer mattered, they would never see it through.
Even with Stephen's blood staining his boot-sole he could think clearly, see his way through these minor complications and twist them to his benefit. He could plot and kill his way to blamelessness, he'd have those gold mines and he'd have his vengeance on the Indians and on the father who valued them above his own blood kin, his own son! Travis' cohorts, those seven men who'd taken Elizabeth and his land grants thinking to out-maneuver him, would be outlaws at his testimony, and the accusations were already scripted - their only choice would be to kill Elizabeth, leave no witnesses, the land grants become nothing but evidence of theft in their hands. Getting out of the country would be their only desire! That sharpshooter's face would be on every Wanted poster in the nation with a reward so substantial he would never know a moment's rest until it was in a grave! But he had to get Travis and his party first ...
He gestured his soldiers on past him; "Stop them!" His voice cracked urgently, gratified when their guns began to spurt gouts of fire at the gambler's distant back ... then he straightened with a suffocating rush of fury - James was with them! His own brother! When had the worm grown spine enough to plot against him? A fearsome panic burst in him for the damage James could do, secrets he could reveal - proofs Gerald was suddenly certain James would have squirreled away against just such a day as this. The need to kill all four escapees suddenly became a much more immediate part of the plan.
"Stop them! Shoot to kill, I don't care who they are! STOP THEM!!" An edge of frothing madness in his voice spurred his troops, particularly those who knew what he was truly capable of. Two of his bodyguards had reached their dead fellows, the two sent after Stephen, and looked at each other grimly. No more than Gerald had they expected the deadly complication of Vin Tanner, but there was no mistaking the caliber of the rifle-shots that had felled the two men. They scanned the distant west for the place that might shelter such a marksman, impossibly far away and yet rendering them all vulnerable. A man who should've been dead, they should've killed all seven of them, they'd told the Captain those men weren't the sort to leave alive on your backtrail ...
"Get going!" Gerald cried savagely - it could be salvaged, it would take more than an illiterate mountain man or the cowardly betrayal of a spineless brother to end Gerald Monroe's ambitions on the frontier! He had an army at his back! Powerful men who would believe whatever he reported about this day's events, he was certain he could ...
With a viscerally gripping chill, he suddenly saw that the tracker hadn't come alone ... from the road at the eastern edge of the fort came a rider he recognized at once, out of place, unexpected and dire ... Chris Larabee. The vertebra in Gerald's spine kinked up with a jerk as it always did when he recognized a grave tactical error. Some of his assumptions suddenly showed themselves for mistakes more serious than just Vin Tanner. He hadn't expected Tanner, but he understood the kind of hate that could provoke men to determined murder, he could use that. Loyalty, though ... that he'd overlooked. To each other, and to their employer. If Vin Tanner was there, the others would be, too.
But what could seven men hope to do against an army? Rationally, nothing!
"Sir?" The soldier beside him said, and he knew by the tone that he'd betrayed his anxiety. Scarlet crescents bloomed in his hands from the white-knuckled pressure of his fingernails. Larabee was bearing down on the troops chasing the gambler, and two other of the seven split off from him in an attempt to come between them. Gerald refused the irrational infringement of fear with a glacial effort, his mind racing around the burning obsession that anchored his will. Years of impotent hate, more years of driven study and grating servitude in capacities far beneath his capabilities until he'd come to this day.
Freedom from his father's disappointment, vindication of the righteousness of the civilization Gerald so magnificently represented, and the final ringing denunciation of every naively archaic dream his father destroyed his mother and his sons for. Failure was not in his lexicon, Gerald Monroe did not fail! His face flushed and his heart ignited at the insult fate offered in Vin Tanner - like his father setting himself before him in another body, setting himself across his path. Oh ... but now Gerald was a man, a power, and he was ready.
So there were more players in the game than he'd realized - well, he'd do what he did best and turn it to his advantage. Loyalty - a desperate human weakness that would make seven men challenge a major military force, a mistake he could exploit. If they were all in one place, then all threats could be removed at once. If he kept only one alive, that one would draw the tracker into ambush, because neither Crook's men or his own would catch wind of Tanner out on the prairie. Well, Chris Larabee had solved that problem for him. The sharpshooter could be smoke and it wouldn't matter, he'd be forced to come to them, and die the moment he was near enough to see Gerald's smile. The same smile that made the man beside him swallow and step back.
"James has committed treason, he has to die, and right now. Get moving - there are only a handful of men out there standing between you and a life of plenty ..." He said with unruffled authority, and the man took three others with him at a determined run, using the men who'd gone in before them as cover. They thought they'd spoilt his plans! Gunslingers and mountain men, desperados, Ha! He'd been thinking rings around savages like these since he was ten years old!
"To me! To me!" He cried, rallying his guard to his side, pointing at their targets with confident authority. This was his war, and Tanner and his friends had done all the damage they was going to do.
J.D. quivered now and then, eyes wide as dinner plates staring down at the dust and gunpowder rising over the Fort, fragmenting the scene into bits and pieces of bloody mayhem on a scale that was incomprehensible. This wasn't a gunfight, this was war! Vin fired and cocked and fired until the rifle was empty, reloading with a grim intensity, and every time that blue eye sighted and that finger stroked as the day spilled into the swirling violence took a man down. He didn't think Vin even knew he was laying there beside him, the tracker had one purpose and the rifle was all he knew, elbows planted in the dirt of the bare rise and his eyes fixed as a dead man's.
So J.D. forgot about the patrol that had set out as usual before daybreak, that was still out on the plain now in scattered pairs searching for the source of the killing fire raining down on the Fort. He forgot all about them until he heard the ring of shod hoof on stone and twisted over in a sudden panic to look behind them. Two soldiers not twenty feet away, one aiming right between Vin's shoulder-blades.
J.D. fired too quick in his startlement and his first shot whiffed by the soldier's head, but the bullet that would've pierced Vin instead nailed J.D. to the ground through the side in a blinding stroke. The certainty that death would follow if he stopped to even flinch kept J.D's pistol steady as he fired a second time, and this second shot took the soldier in the body so he slumped, his horse taking off with him weakly clinging to the saddle. The simultaneous roar of Vin's rifle took the second soldier off his horse, dead.
Vin's hand shot out toward J.D. as he sagged back against the earth with a raw gasp. The faint spray of freckles across his nose became more apparent as his face went pale, he was blinking up at the sky, his guns cocked in both hands. A flick of a look down the kid's compact body took in blood spreading on his right side and for a moment Vin was almost paralyzed with fear. Not him, God, not J.D., he couldn't get J.D. killed ... The rifle was hot in his hands, there was too much gunpowder and dust in the fort for him to be accurate, they couldn't stay here … and he had to get down there, too many formations of soldiers were converging on the bluff no matter how he tried to draw them west to him.
He'd seen Chris and the boys come up that road with a distant joy and could see they were making moves … they'd try to cut Gerald's men off to give Ezra and the rest a way to and down the bluff, but there were so many, and he couldn't see anymore from this vantage whether Ezra and the others had gotten over the edge and, if so, where they were now.
He dropped the rifle and unknotted his bandana with numb fingers, feeling J.D.'s eyes on his face, his expression clamped hard on pain and a rising fear of dying that he was struggling manfully not to give voice to. He made no objection as Vin tore his coat open, his vest, his shirt, his long-johns in increasingly rough successive layers, and his heart lifted at the quick grin that crossed Vin's haggard face as he saw the wound. The tracker shook his head, sandy eyebrows rising in gratified wonderment.
"J.D., you're so lucky Ezra's gonna wear you on a chain 'round his neck. Hold this here, kid." Vin stuffed the wadded kerchief over the wound and pressed it hard, ignoring J.D.'s pained suck of breath and taking the kid's bloody fingers under his, holding them there until he knew J.D. would do as he'd told him.
"It's not bad, J.D., went clean through the muscle no more'n an inch in, way too far t'the side t'have hit any guts or anything ..." He said, and J.D. laughed with unexpectedly true sarcasm,
"Oh, that makes it hurt less, yessiree ..."
Vin grinned at him again, then, his relief infectious, and J.D. latched onto it, feeling increasingly light-headed and the burning lance of pain spreading out like his whole body was on fire. But Vin was grinning, and Vin Vin wouldn't do that unless it was not a life-threatening injury. The tracker bent over him a few minutes later, Peso's whiskered jaw hovering over his shoulder, looking at him like ... no, that couldn't be right and J.D. wouldn't even allow the thought. The tracker thrust reins into J.D.'s hand.
"J.D., here's your horse. You get your breath and get mounted - I'm tellin' you that gunshot ain't gonna kill you by a long stretch; might hurt like the dickens, but it's already nearly quit bleeding. Gather yourself up, kid, you need t'get out of here n' I wouldn't leave you 'less I thought you could."
"You're leavin' me here?" J.D. gasped, and Vin's grin faded, hesitating as emotions he didn't have time for warred in him. One bloody hand touched J.D.'s face and a smile as tender as that touch surprised J.D. "The boys're in there, Buck's there, get on down under that escarpment n' give what help you can. J.D. … you're a man I been proud to have at my back."
Stupefied, J.D. watched him rise, mount, and disappear in a sudden burst of motion. Been proud to have ... past tense ... like he didn't expect to survive the day, but he said it so calmly, without so much as an inkling of regret! J.D. reached out helplessly, far too late, to hold him there, to make him explain, reassure ... but he was already gone. And J.D. knew where. Fighting panic, he twisted to see the wound, his gorge rising as the sight of his own lacerated flesh, his fingers finding the exit wound in numb horror. Hurt like holy hell, but it wasn't going to kill him, and it wouldn't have stopped Vin or any of the others. He dropped his head back onto the dirt with an expletive Buck would've been proud of, his mouth thinning into a pale straight line. Damn if it was going to stop him, either. He hadn't come all this way at Vin's back to let him ride alone into certain death now.
Chris' fire kept the soldiers at bay while Ezra kept his little party moving and finally reached the edge of the escarpment. The gambler turned back there as James went over, then Travis, handing Mary down to one of them. With a jaunty salute, he went over himself and a drifting billow of dust rose a vertical line into the air to mark their passage. Ezra and Two Badgers would get Mary and Travis away from the battle and protect them as they fled, and all Chris cared about was giving them time to do just that.
The gunslinger's mount plunged and skittered under the constant shifting pressures of his legs as he rode a hard line to keep their pursuers from the edge of the butte, his face a pallid fury under the severe straight line of his hatbrim. Shooting and wounding only the ground in front of the foremost soldiers, then shooting and striking thighs and arms so they stalled, a line in the sand drawn by three of their own wounded fellows.
His head jerked around to the left at a distant rise of rolling thunder, and he laughed out loud to hear Buck's whoop as the fort's remuda came streaming around the far side of the Trading Post from the stables, dust exploding into a choking cloud as they poured from the narrowed space between the butte and the wall of the building. Their screams were matched by those of the wounded men caught in their way as they scattered in plunging confusion into the sudden open space and heat of battle. The best horses veered sharply and went over the embankment they never would have dared without a Lakota spearpoint chivvying them from behind. The Lakota had done all they could here, those few warriors wouldn't risk dying in a white man's battle when the people's war was to come.
For a few minutes the four of them, widely spaced, managed to keep the soldiers back, hoping to make a break for it over that edge themselves. But in the end they were facing an army, and a cry had gone up about the Commander's brother being murdered, Indians attacking from the river, their Officers driving them on and there were too damned many! The chaos of the loose horses worked well for men who fought best when all hell was breaking loose, but they were quickly being overrun and cut off from the escarpment ...
Chris took an instant to scan after help, picking Buck and Josiah and Nathan out by the white rise of gunsmoke into the dun dust but in the same quickening rhythm as his own battle. Now his shots took soldiers near enough to mortal to make them drop like rocks as they got in range of his gun, grim and pale as death riding, but then he had to holster the empty colts, snaking the Winchester out of the sheath under his thigh like a whip spouting fire.
He saw it coming out of the corner of his left eye and knew as quick as that he was too late. This time his arm was that fraction of a second too slow, hesitating on the half-healed injury, twisted too far the wrong way in the saddle. An instant of scorching refusal was all he had. The soldier had already sighted his rifle and flame was already leaping from it and when it hit, it was a visceral explosion so big there was nothing else.
Buck swung around toward Chris just in time to see him taken out of the saddle like he'd run into a tree-branch, an angled tangle of long limbs that ended with a bone-rattling collision with the earth. Buck lost him in the dust and the last bit of his temper went right along with him. With an inarticulate yell of absolute frustrated fury, Buck's pistol rose and his head lowered to sight along the barrel, and he took that soldier with the smoking rifle down without a moment's hesitation. Damn anything Orrin Travis said, times were a man had to do what he had to do and worry about later, later! If soldiers got killed, well, they damned well got killed, wasn't like they weren't trying to kill them any way they could!
Josiah snapped around to the suddenly purposeful rhythm of Buck's pistol, alerted by his wordless cry of rage and moving in that direction before he could even see what was wrong.
A crow passing overhead would see them all converging from the chaos unerringly toward where Chris had fallen, the thin black line of his body on the ground a beacon that drew them all. Too far beyond him the lip of the butte dropped away, their only escape. Soldiers on foot were near to filling that gap and cutting them off, trapping the four between them and the soldiers running out of the Parade grounds toward them. Time wasn't on their side and they all knew it, Buck with a furiously defiant yell, Josiah with a prayer, and Nathan with the true fear that they'd all be dead in the next few minutes. All they could do was sight ahead and run.
Peso exploded through the billowing dust all blood-red nostrils and rolling eyes, his ears hard forward and his teeth bared against the bit as Vin drew him back so hard he went down onto his haunches, back hooves digging furrows in the dirt and front lifting off the ground. Like a ghostly avenging angel of bone and sinew and widely tossing fringe, Vin came like a wildfire off that horse, flying to the ground and banging his knee hard when one leg buckled, but keeping his feet on grit and the will to do what had to be done.
He was firing one soldier's colt and had another stuck into the high waist of his pants, guns he'd snatched right out of the soldier's hands as he'd blown by them like a whirlwind, and just because pistols weren't his weapon of choice didn't mean he wasn't deadly as sin with them. He was. Men who'd been celebrating a victory in killing the gunslinger suddenly knew fear again.
Unexpectedly, just as the colt in Vin's hand clicked on an empty cylinder and it looked like he'd be overrun before he could get the second one out of his belt, the dusty bay haunch of J.D.'s mare slewed around in front of him and the kid was there, shooting with both hands while the reins flew free, the horse dancing in constant motion as if the wound he'd taken on the ridge had never happened. Except for the bright flag of blood on his clothes and the pallor of his face, there was no sign of it, his teeth bared with a savage determination as ferocious as any warrior Vin had ever fought beside. A man had been born in the heat of this battle, and would never be a boy again. Vin prayed he lived through it.
Bracketed between Peso and J.D.'s mount, Vin snatched the mare's leg out of the holster. It was a close and messy way to kill, but that suited him just fine right then. One after the other he let loose into the little mob of soldiers converging between them and the edge of the escarpment, firing right over Chris' body and clearing a swath with lead. The soldiers broke in a panicked scurry that became more desperate under a sudden deadly influx of gunfire as Buck and Josiah drew near. The soldiers who'd been with the seven on the trail began to run as it became clear they weren't holding back this time.
Vin jammed the mare's leg into the holster and snatched the other pistol up out of his belt, turning back toward the fort and desperately trying to keep the immediate area clear. He didn't look at Chris behind him. He wouldn't look.
Buck's boot in a stirrup sailed by his nose just as the Colt in Vin's hand emptied, and suddenly Nathan's dark hands were fisting in Chris' glistening black shirt as he jerked the limp man's shoulders up off the ground. They were all there, then, all but Ezra, and fighting like lions, having passed right through his gunfire to get there. The trust that took from them all Vin had no time to acknowledge.
The latigo of Chris' black flat-brimmed hat caught across his sinewy throat as Nathan muscled him as upright as he could get him, looking like he was wrestling with a dusty bolt of jointed cloth. Josiah, still mounted, snaked a hand down Chris' back, tearing his coat out of the way so he could snatch hold of the waist of his pants in the back. With a mighty heave, he hauled him up off the ground and unceremoniously across his buckskin's withers, held him there with one hand pressed into the small of his back. The next instant the big preacher was standing hard forward so his mount bolted into the swirl of loosed horses and milling soldiers, disappearing into the dust-cloud toward the butte.
Buck careened in front of J.D. and shouted, "Go on, kid! Get over that butte before they come between us and it again! Get goin'!"
But J.D. was protecting Vin, it was his job and he'd done it well so far and no intention of stopping now. And Vin wasn't making to escape. Buck saw the mob coming at them from the far side of the bakery and reached after J.D.'s flying reins, but the kid was gathering them up himself, spinning his mare toward where Vin stood stock-still and intent on the Fort as if there wasn't a war raging around him, coming straight at him, at all of them ...
"Vin! We got him!" J.D. cried out, his voice sharp in the din, fading and rising again as if he were turning; "Come on, Vin, we can't stay here!"
He heard them, but in the sudden safety of confusion he was searching back over the soldiers for Gerald, looking for him, wanting him with a poisonous hunger. Finding him framed against the sunrise between the bakery and the Trader's store. Without looking for it, he swept his hand back and found the butt of his Winchester on Peso's saddle-rig, the long barrel sweeping up into the air like a sword being drawn then arching down toward his shoulder, his eye holding dead center on the broad chest as Gerald screamed at his Officers ... Smooth as oil the long barrel came down to his sight, without a prayer or a thought he pulled the trigger.
Buck, though, was fixed more on everybody living than Gerald Monroe dying.
In the same instant the rifle barked, Vin was caught by the arm in an implacable grip and yanked off his feet with a jolt that hurt too much to resist. Buck dragged the slight tracker with him toward the edge of the escarpment, and by the time he let go near the rim, there was nothing to do but let Buck grip his arm again and swing him up behind him. Vin twisted in the saddle as Buck's grey took the downward lunge over the embankment, frantic and furious ... Gerald was no longer standing, but whether he'd killed two of Duley's brothers or only one Vin couldn't know.
To be continued...
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