Chapter 23
The canyon took the river-sound away and gave him its own in its place.
The rain came down hard and straight between the close stone walls and rang off the rock and gathered already into fast shallow sheets that ran braiding down the dry watercourse at the bottom of the cut, and Abe rode into the dark of it after the four men with his pistol drawn and the rifle slung useless at his back, because the rifle was no weapon for one hand off a running horse and the work coming was close work.
They knew the ground and he didn’t, and they spent the knowing the way a man spends money he hasn’t earned, freely, because there was no keeping it.
The canyon bent and turned on itself, and every bend gave them a wall to put between themselves and him, and a man would lean out from the cover of a fallen slab or the shoulder of a turn and throw a shot back down the cut at him and be gone around the next bend before the report had finished ringing off the rock.
Abe fired at the leaning shapes when they gave him one, and the rain and the bad footing and the moving horse spoiled most of it and he put his lead into stone. The downpour fought every man in that canyon with a perfect indifference.
He watched a man steady a pistol on him across forty feet of streaming rock, square and certain, and snap the trigger and get nothing for it, the cap drowned or the charge soaked through, the hammer falling dead on a wet chamber, and the man swore in Spanish loud enough to carry the length of the cut over the rain and spurred on around the bend.
And then Abe’s own next pull gave him the same gift in turn, the dull click of a dead chamber lost under the hammering water, and he holstered the pistol rather than trust it again and rode on with his hands empty, because a wet gun was a liar and he’d sooner close the distance than gamble his life on a charge the rain had got into.
The fight went ragged and broken on every side of it, shots that came and shots that died in the pan, men firing now less to kill than to keep the other man’s head down and ride another length, the storm having made fools and beggars of all their guns at once.
The canyon narrowed as it ran back into the mountain, the walls drawing in close on either hand, and the watercourse at the bottom of it ran faster and deeper as it narrowed, ankle-deep on the laboring horses now and climbing, the rain off the whole high face of the mountain finding its way down into this one low channel.
Abe pressed them through it, gaining on the rearmost rider down a long straight stretch where there was no bend for the man to hide behind, close enough now to see the dark of his soaked back through the rain, close enough to think of raising a hand to him—
And then they all heard it, in the same instant, hunter and hunted alike.
It came down the canyon from above, from deep back in the body of the mountain, and it came up over and under and through the steady hammering of the rain, and not a man who heard it had to be told its meaning. A low, building roar.
A grinding, rushing, gathering thunder that wasn’t thunder and didn’t roll and pass the way thunder rolled and passed but only grew, and grew, and kept on growing, coming on.
It was the sound of a great weight of water that had been collecting all this long while off the streaming face of the mountain, in a hundred dry side-cuts and seams—and was now arriving, all of it at once, in the single low channel that would carry it to the river.
The channel they were every one of them riding down the bottom of.
For one whole instant nobody in that canyon did anything at all.
The fight went out of the air between them in a single breath, every man’s quarrel with every other forgotten in the same heartbeat, the chase and the killing and the ruined hand and the burned town all of it gone meaningless together in the face of the sound.
And then, with no word passed between them and no truce called and none needed, the hunters and the hunted wheeled their horses as one animal and rode back down the canyon the way they had all come up it, away from the roar at their backs, riding now not one against the other but every man of them against the same thing.
The cut that a moment before had been a place of men laboring to kill one another became in the space of a breath a place of men all laboring, together and alike, only to live.
Abe rode. He gave the horse its head and laid himself low along its streaming neck and rode for the distant mouth of the canyon with the others strung out around him through the rain, friend and enemy made one.
Behind them all the roar built and built until it filled the entire stone throat of the place and pressed on the back of a man’s neck like a hand.
He risked one look back over his shoulder and wished after that he hadn’t.
A wall of it was coming down the cut behind them. Brown and boiling and shouldering whole uprooted trees along in front of itself, taller than a mounted man, taller than two, filling the canyon from wall to wall and gaining on them with every yard.
Abe understood in the cold clear way he understood the things that meant his death that no horse foaled was going to outrun that on the flat floor of the cut. The arithmetic of it was plain and it was quick and there was no quarreling with it.
The water was faster than the horse. The only thing in that canyon faster than the water was a man already off the floor of it and up the wall, and the only way up the wall was off the horse.
He flung himself out of the saddle.
It cost him hard, the landing, the bad leg taking it and folding and the breath driven out of him against the rock, and he left the good horse that had carried him across the swollen river to whatever the canyon meant to do with it, with no time left in the world to be sorry for the animal.
He went at the streaming wall of the canyon on his two hands and his one good leg and clawed.
Up the wet rock, fingers jammed into every crack and seam and rough hold the stone gave him, the ruined leg dragging up useless behind, the rain pouring down the face of the rock into his eyes and his mouth, climbing for the whole worth of his life with the roar coming on below and the water arriving.
He got up it. Higher and faster than he had any right to, the body in its terror finding holds the eye never picked and the mind would never have trusted, fear lending his arms a strength that wasn’t their own and would be paid for after if there was an after.
And as he climbed, and risked the one downward glance, he saw them.
Below him and behind, caught out on the floor of the cut, the men who hadn’t gotten clear of their horses in time, the three of them.
Mateo Flores was among the three, one-handed, a man who couldn’t have climbed had he flung himself from the saddle, who had ridden a brave hard mile already on grit alone holding a ruined arm to his chest and had no climbing left in him.
Abe saw the brown wall take them. Saw it come through and over them all at once, horse and man together, saw a horse turned clean over in it with its legs thrown up at the rain, saw a man’s arm flung up out of the muddy boil reaching for a hold that was not there and would never be there, and then they were gone, all of them, men and horses both, pulled under the churning brown surface and carried away down the canyon and not coming back up, the whole western hand of Nuestra Tierra unmade in the space of three breaths by a thing that cared no more for the men it took than for the trees it carried down alongside them.
Abe had made good ground up the wall. He had made more than a man should have been able to make on one leg in that rain.
He hadn’t made ground enough.
The water came up the face of the rock faster than he could climb it.
He felt it take the bad leg first, a tremendous yank at the dragging limb that tried to fold him backward off the wall, and he held against it, his fingers screaming in their cracks, every tendon in his hands and arms a separate fire.
Then it had him to the waist, the cold force of it shocking, and then it simply had him, plucked him off the streaming rock as easily and as carelessly as a hand plucks a burr from a sleeve, and the canyon wall and the rain and the lightning-lit sky all went over together in a single wheeling motion.
And Abe was in it.
It threw him. There was no swimming in such a thing and no holding any line in it and no up nor down to be found in it, only the brown roaring violence turning him over and over and over and slamming him without warning against things he never saw coming through the murk, rock and timber and, once, the rolling carcass of one of the dead men’s horses.
He felt the leg go first, a deep, wrenching torque and a snap that he felt come up through the bone more than he heard it over the roar, and then his shoulder met something hard coming the other way and that went too, with a duller heavier break, the collarbone giving under it.
The pain of the two breaks together flared white behind his eyes and the cold and the roaring water swallowed even that down quick.
He fought up once toward where his battered sense told him the air had to be and broke the surface for half an instant and got a half breath that was as much water as air and was hauled under again before he could use it.
The black canyon walls went by him on either side in the dark, close and then gone, and he thought, with the strange flat clarity that comes down over a man at such a time, with the fear long since burned off.
He thought of Marielle at the corral fence in the dark, and the front of his coat in her hand, and the thing she’d said was owed and only collected by the coming back, and he thought he was about to make a liar of the both of them.
Then something took him across the back of the head, hard, a rolling log or a shelf of rock, took him in the same place and near the same way a homemade club had taken him across the back of the head once in a street a whole world and twelve years gone, and the brown roaring of the canyon went out all at once into a deeper and a quieter dark, and Abe Auer knew no more of any of it.