CHAPTER SIX Ask Me Again
They found the horse before they found the dead town.
The black gelding stood beneath a lightning-split juniper three miles beyond the hidden spring, its reins wound through the branches and one stirrup caught high against the trunk.
Dried foam marked the bit. The animal’s eyes rolled when Gideon approached, but Jude spoke to it from several paces away, his voice low and patient.
“That’s one of theirs,” Gideon said.
“Then Harrow has finally given me something useful.”
“It may have thrown its rider.”
“May we send our sympathies.”
Jude extended his free hand. The gelding stretched its neck, nostrils working, and eventually allowed him to touch the white mark between its eyes.
Gideon watched the horse settle beneath Jude’s palm.
Jude had approached Bishop the same way after Salt Knife Canyon: no sudden movement, no presumption that fear surrendered merely because a man needed it to. He seemed to understand animals through the same rules he had established for human touch.
Ask.
Wait.
Accept the answer given.
The horse wore a tracker’s saddle, a bedroll, two full canteens, and a pair of saddlebags containing dried beans, jerky, ammunition, and a clean shirt far too narrow for either man. A dark stain marked one stirrup leather, but there was no blood on the saddle.
“Rider may still be close,” Gideon said.
Jude examined the ground. “Horse came from the north.”
“You can read that?”
“I can read horses.”
“I asked about tracks.”
“And received a better answer.”
Jude freed the reins and led the gelding away from the juniper. Their cuffed wrists remained connected by the short chain, but Gideon no longer kept the links wrapped around his fist. They hung in a loose curve between them, moving only when the distance grew too wide.
The horse noticed the chain.
It lowered its head and sniffed the steel.
Jude smiled. “He thinks you’ve haltered us badly.”
“He would not be wrong.”
Gideon inspected the animal’s legs. No swelling. No heat. A shallow scrape marked one foreleg, but the horse remained sound enough to carry them.
One horse.
Two wounded men.
Thirty miles to Dry Mercy and more than twice that to Santa Reina.
“We alternate,” Gideon said.
“Alternate what?”
“Riding.”
Jude looked at the gelding, then at the chain.
“We could both fit.”
Gideon remembered Jude seated in front of him on Bishop. His back against Gideon’s chest. Gideon’s palm spread over his stomach. Thighs crowded together along the horse’s flanks.
The memory carried its own heat.
“We alternate,” he repeated.
Jude’s expression suggested he knew exactly where Gideon’s thoughts had traveled.
“Coward,” he said.
“Outlaw.”
“Marshal.”
The titles had changed since Red Mesa.
Gideon could not have explained how. They still named the same men, but the words no longer created reliable distance. Outlaw had become Jude’s answer to Gideon’s caution. Marshal had become a private challenge shaped by Jude’s mouth.
Gideon helped him mount.
He asked first.
Jude answered yes.
Gideon placed both hands around Jude’s waist and lifted. The contact lasted only a moment, but Jude’s fingers rested against Gideon’s shoulders after he had settled into the saddle.
Neither man pretended the touch had been necessary for that long.
They traveled north beneath a sky scrubbed clean by the storm.
Rain had transformed the desert. Water shone in hollows that had been dust the day before. Creosote filled the air with its sharp green scent. Tiny yellow flowers, dormant beneath the earth for months, had begun opening between stones.
The land looked reborn.
Dry Mercy did not.
They reached it late in the afternoon.
The settlement appeared first as a black line against the foothills. As they drew closer, individual shapes emerged: the stone chimney of a house that no longer existed, half a windmill, fence posts burned down to crooked teeth, and the charred skeleton of a church.
Nothing moved.
No smoke.
No livestock.
No laundry lifting in the wind.
Only the remains of a place from which life had been deliberately removed.
Jude stopped the gelding.
His hand tightened around the reins.
Gideon stood beside the horse, close enough that the chain between their wrists hung vertically.
“We can wait,” he said.
Jude looked toward the ruins. “For what?”
“Until you’re ready.”
“I’ve had eight months.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
Jude glanced down at him.
A shadow of his familiar smile appeared, then vanished.
“No,” he said. “I’m not ready.”
Gideon waited.
Jude looked back at Dry Mercy.
“Go anyway.”
They entered the settlement together.
Gideon walked while Jude rode at first. After the remains of the first house, Jude dismounted without help. He seemed unable to approach the center of town from above the ground, as though the dead might mistake riding for indifference.
He gave Gideon the reins.
Their chain swung between them.
The main street had become a strip of weeds and windblown ash. Rainwater filled wheel ruts left by wagons that had departed before the fire or arrived afterward to strip the dead town of anything worth carrying.
Jude identified each ruin without being asked.
“Mercantile,” he said, looking at a collapsed stone foundation. “Widow Pearce kept peppermint in a glass jar for children whose mothers couldn’t afford candy.”
They passed a circle of blackened stones.
“Vega house. Rafael built the hearth himself. Leaned two inches to the east, but he’d fight any man who said so.”
Farther along stood a melted iron frame.
“Bell’s smithy. Isaac could shoe a horse without tying it. Matthew wanted to build locomotives.”
The names matched the four men Jude had given Gideon in the cave.
Isaac Bell.
Matthew Bell.
Rafael Vega.
Thomas Quinn.
The official file reduced them to witnesses one through four.
Jude restored them one ruin at a time.
At the center of Dry Mercy stood a stone well. The wooden roof had burned away, but the iron crank remained. Gideon lowered the bucket and found water twelve feet below.
He refilled both canteens.
Jude did not drink.
He was staring past the well.
The schoolhouse stood at the northern end of the settlement.
Or what remained of it.
Three walls had collapsed. The fourth rose black against the sky, with a square opening where a window had been. Charred roof beams lay across the foundation. Desert grass grew through the floorboards.
Jude stopped at the edge of the yard.
The chain tightened.
Gideon opened his hand reflexively, though he was not holding it.
Jude could go no farther without pulling him.
Gideon stepped back.
The chain slackened.
“Is this where you found him?” he asked.
Jude nodded.
No words followed.
Gideon tied the gelding beneath the surviving cottonwood near the well. He removed the rifle from the saddle and carried it in his right hand.
Jude remained facing the schoolhouse.
When Gideon returned, he stood beside him rather than ahead.
“May I touch you?” Gideon asked.
Jude’s throat moved.
“Where?”
“Your back.”
“Yes.”
Gideon placed his palm between Jude’s shoulder blades.
Not pushing.
Only there.
Jude inhaled.
Then he entered the yard.
The rain had darkened every burned surface and released the smell of charcoal from eight months of silence. Gideon stepped over a collapsed beam. Jude followed, moving carefully among the ruins.
Near the rear wall, a section of floor remained intact.
Jude stopped beside it.
“Noah was there,” he said.
His eyes fixed on a place where weeds now pushed through the boards.
“Against the wall.”
Gideon looked but saw only damage.
Jude saw the past.
The change in him was visible. His shoulders became rigid. His fingers curled. The humor with which he faced bullets, chains, and pain vanished without leaving even its outline.
Gideon’s hand remained against his back.
Jude did not ask him to remove it.
“There’s something beneath us,” Gideon said.
Jude glanced down.
The rain had washed soil away from the edge of the foundation. Beneath the surviving floor, five parallel rises disturbed the earth.
Too regular for nature.
Gideon crouched.
The chain pulled Jude down beside him.
He moved a charred board and uncovered a flat stone half buried in mud.
Two letters had been scratched across it.
N.C.
Jude made a sound Gideon had never heard from him.
Not a word.
Not quite a breath.
Gideon cleared the earth beside the stone.
A second marker emerged.
I.B.
Then M.B.
R.V.
T.Q.
Five graves.
Jude touched the first marker.
His hand trembled.
“That’s Noah.”
Gideon examined the disturbed ground. The graves had been dug within the schoolhouse foundation after the fire. Whoever buried the men had used the surviving walls to conceal the site.
The official report stated that Gideon had—after murdering the five men—removed their bodies to Coyote Sink, an unmarked ravine nine miles east. Sheriff Rusk claimed the bodies had been recovered there three days later and buried at county expense.
There had been no examination.
No photographs.
No relatives permitted to identify them.
Only five sealed coffins and Rusk’s signed statement.
If Noah Calder and the four homesteaders lay beneath the schoolhouse, the coffins in Red Mesa contained nothing.
Or someone else.
Gideon removed a narrow field notebook from inside his coat. The paper remained wrinkled from the storm but usable.
He sketched the grave positions, copied the initials, and recorded the date and location.
Jude watched him.
“What does that do?” he asked.
“It creates a federal record contradicting Rusk’s report.”
“You are the only witness.”
“So are you.”
“The accused murderer.”
“And a deputy marshal sent to die before reaching court.”
Jude looked toward the graves. “Cutter will destroy your notebook.”
“Then I’ll make copies.”
“With what?”
“Time.”
A sound almost like laughter escaped Jude, but there was no amusement in it.
“You believe me now?”
Gideon closed the notebook.
“I believe five men are buried where the official report says they were not.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“It is what I can prove.”
Jude’s jaw tightened.
Gideon did not apologize.