Chapter 6
The Rio Grande ran brown and low in the summer heat, pulled back from its banks and leaving a pale crust of dried mud at the waterline like a ring around a tub.
Abe had been riding close to it for two days, using it as a reference point more than a road, because the road south of San Antonio went to pieces in this country and the river at least was honest about where it was going.
The brush country down here made its own arguments against comfort. Mesquite and scrub oak and catclaw acacia that caught at his sleeves when he pushed through it, the thorns small and curved and efficient.
The ground was pale and hard and cracked in the low spots, the grass gone yellow and sparse, and the few cattle he’d seen were thin and looked at him from under the brush with the dull patience of animals that had made their peace with the climate.
In the distance, the low hills shimmered in the afternoon heat, and the sky was the particular bleached blue that meant no weather for days in either direction. Not a cloud since Laredo.
He’d bought the horse there, a dun gelding with a white sock on the left rear and a sensible disposition, which mattered more than speed in this country.
A nervous horse in brush country was a liability. This one picked its way through the thorny stuff without complaint and drank when water was available and didn’t spook at the snakes, of which there were several.
Abe had named him nothing. Naming horses led to a kind of attachment that complicated decisions you sometimes needed to make quickly.
He was following a dry creek bed east, working around the bottom curve of the state, when he heard the voices.
They came from over the next rise, indistinct at first and then clearer as he climbed. He pulled the horse to a stop at the crest and looked down into the flat below.
A single mesquite tree stood wide and gnarled about forty yards off, its trunk the gray of old bone, its branches spreading low and crooked over pale ground.
Four men on horseback were arranged around it in a loose half circle, their horses standing easy the way horses stood when nothing urgent was happening.
There was a fifth figure under the tree, on foot, hands bound behind him, a rope around his neck that ran up to the nearest branch overhead.
The man under the tree was shouting.
“Please. Somebody. Please, I haven’t done anything. Please.”
His voice was raw, like he’d been at it for a while.
The four men on horseback were having a conversation among themselves, unhurried, the way men talked when they’d agreed on the outcome of something and were working out only the small details that remained.
One of them said something and two of the others laughed.
Abe sat his horse on the rise for a moment.
He looked east along the creek bed. It ran straight for a mile before bending out of sight behind a stand of brush.
He looked at the flat below. He looked at the man under the tree, who had stopped shouting and was now looking up at him with the focused desperation of a person who has found the one thing in the world he needs.
Abe rode down.
He came in at a walk, no hurry in it, and one of the four men heard the hooves and turned, and then the others turned. He kept his hands where they were and his face neutral and rode to within twenty feet before he stopped.
“Afternoon,” he said.
The four of them looked at him. Two older, two younger.
All of them armed. The older two had the local look, sun-cured and deliberate.
One of the younger ones was maybe nineteen and had the bright, eager quality of a boy who’d been invited to something adult and was working hard to seem like he belonged.
None of them pointed anything at him yet. He noted the yet.
“Passing through,” Abe said. “Saw the gathering. Thought I’d see what the trouble was.”
The heavyset man with the reddish beard going gray looked him over with the systematic thoroughness of a man who’d had to read strangers quickly and had developed the habit.
“No trouble,” he said. “County business.”
“Whose county business?”
“Ours.”
Abe looked at the man under the tree. He was young, maybe mid-twenties, dark-skinned and lean, wearing a cotton work shirt torn at the collar. His boots were good, working boots, the kind a man wore when the work was real.
The rope at his neck was rough hemp and the knot was properly placed, which said something about the experience of whoever had tied it, and none of what it said was good.
“What did he do?” Abe asked.
The heavyset man settled in his saddle, the creak of leather. “Found him with a white woman. Out at the Connelly place.”
“Fornication,” the young one on the end supplied, nodding like he’d contributed something.
Abe looked at the heavyset man. “That’s a criminal matter in Texas,” he said. “Which means it’s a matter for a court, not a tree.”
The heavyset man’s expression didn’t change. “The law and what’s right aren’t always the same thing.”
“Maybe not. But you’re standing on the law’s side of this whether you like it or not. If it’s a violation of statute, a judge handles it.” Abe kept his voice even. “You handle it this way, you’re the ones breaking the law.”
“We’re keeping order,” the heavyset man said. “Which is more than the law does out here half the time.”
“And the natural order on top of it,” the young one added. He seemed pleased to be contributing.
The heavyset man glanced at him and the young one went quiet.
“I’m not familiar with the relevant statute,” Abe said. “I’m somewhat new to this part of the country. Walk me through the particulars.”
“Texas law prohibits cohabitation between the races,” the heavyset man said.
“Has since before the war and after it both. Doesn’t matter what happened between them or who consented to what.
The law says it’s criminal and the natural order says the same, which makes it about as settled as anything gets. ”
“Russia, originally,” Abe said. “More recently Arkansas.”
The heavyset man looked at him. “What?”
“You were about to ask where the accent was from.”
The man’s jaw tightened. “Long way from both.”
“I keep hearing that.” Abe looked at the man under the tree. “What’s your name?”
The young man looked at him carefully, reading the situation, reading Abe, deciding something. “David,” he said.
“David.” Abe looked back at the four men. “If the law’s on your side,” he said, “turn him over to the marshal and let the court handle it. That’s what the law is for.”
“The marshal’s two days out,” the heavyset man said. “And this isn’t a matter that needs a marshal.”
“You just told me it’s a criminal matter under Texas statute.”
“I told you what the law says.” The heavyset man’s voice had gone flat. “I didn’t say we needed the law’s help with it.”
Abe looked at him for a moment. The quiet older man on the far end still hadn’t spoken. He was watching Abe’s hands with the focused attention of someone who knew exactly what he was looking at and had stopped pretending otherwise.
“I want you to cut that man down,” Abe said. “And we’ll all go our separate ways and nobody will have a bad afternoon.”
The heavyset man laughed. It was a real laugh, surprised out of him, genuine amusement. The young one on the end laughed too, and the one beside him smiled. The quiet older man didn’t laugh. He was watching Abe’s hands.
The quiet one was the dangerous one. Abe had already known this.
The laughter stopped in the middle.
The two shots were close enough together that the sound ran into itself, a single broken report. The heavyset man’s right arm snapped back and he grabbed it with his left hand and his horse came up and turned under him.
The young one on the end rocked forward over the saddle horn gripping his shoulder, his face going the pale gray of a man processing something he hadn’t prepared for.
The quiet older one had cleared his gun halfway. He looked at the muzzle of Abe’s pistol and put the gun back.
The fourth man’s hands were already up.
Abe held the pistol loose, not dramatic about it. A faint ribbon of smoke came off the barrel and flattened in the still air.
“Both of you need a doctor,” he said to the two he’d hit. “The sooner the better, so let’s not waste more of your afternoon.” He looked at the quiet one. “Cut him down.”
Nobody moved for a moment. The heavyset man was breathing in short pulls through his teeth, his face the color of old brick. He looked at the quiet one and moved his chin.
The quiet one climbed down and took a folding knife from his vest pocket and walked to the mesquite without looking at Abe and cut the rope at David’s wrists.
David pulled his hands free and reached up and worked the noose off his neck with fingers that shook once and then steadied. He let the rope drop into the dirt.
“Come here,” Abe said.
David walked to him. He was taller than he’d looked from the ridge, and he moved with a deliberate evenness, not rushing, not looking back at the four men. He took Abe’s foot out of the left stirrup and used the saddle horn and got up behind him, settling his weight and finding his balance.
“Your friends need their horses pointed toward town,” Abe said to the four men. “I’d get moving.”
He turned the horse and rode back the way he’d come.
Behind them the heavyset man said something, the words clipped short and hard.
Abe didn’t look back and didn’t slow down.
He rode north along the creek bed until the flat was well behind them and the brush had closed in on both sides and the voices were long gone, and then he breathed out and let the horse find its own pace.
“They’ll follow,” David said, behind him.
“Maybe. The two I shot won’t. The other two will think about it for a while first.” Abe guided the horse around a tangle of catclaw. “Thinking takes long enough that we’ll have distance on them.”
“You knew that before you rode down.”
“I thought it was likely.”
“There were four of them.”
“There usually are,” Abe said.