Chapter 8 #3
"They are letting us look at them," Stuart said.
"Why?"
"Because they want us to see that they have not got ladders and they have not got fire," Stuart said, "and in about a minute somebody is going to shout."
A man shouted.
His voice came across three hundred yards of frozen mud, unhurried, a man of fifty or sixty who used all of his words.
"The Crossing."
Nobody answered.
"There are a hundred and six of us and we will be here at daylight either way," the voice said. "Nobody has to be hurt tonight. Send out the man Redman and the boy off the Clearwater and the woman with the rifle, and there is not one other thing we want out of this valley."
Davey, from the wall, said nothing.
That was the plan and Davey held to it, and Stuart lay in the dark in the throat and was prouder of that young man in that moment than he had ever been of anybody.
"You have a book," the voice called. "You have two of them. We would like them back. We will trade for them and we will trade generously and nobody in that valley has to know what is in them."
Silence.
"Last thing," the voice said. "Then we start."
They waited.
"My name is Aubert," the man called.
Camille went rigid in the mud beside him and Stuart put his hand down on her forearm and held it there hard.
"Not now," he said.
"Stuart."
"Not now, Camille. Not one inch."
They came at twenty to five.
Not at the wall. They came at the throat, exactly the way Camille had said they would, twenty-two men up the little rise in the dark where the ground was good and the gap was wide enough for two abreast,
and they came fast and quiet and they came into four hundred sharpened stakes set on the reverse of a lip they could not see.
The first eleven went down in eleven feet.
The noise of it was terrible and Stuart had known it would be and had still not been ready, and the men behind checked and bunched the way men always do, and that was the moment and there was exactly one of it.
"Now," Stuart said.
Nineteen guns went off the wall at ninety yards.
After that it stopped being a plan.
It went to pieces the way everything does, and Stuart fired six rounds out of the Remington and put two men down and lost the sixth in the fog, and then there were men in the throat and over the crib and there was a thing on top of him with a hatchet and he got the shotgun barrel up crosswise and
took the haft on it and drove the muzzle into the man's face and the man went off him sideways.
Gil Pruitt was hit and screaming.
Camille had gone somewhere. Stuart could hear the Lebel working off to the left, slow and spaced, one every four seconds, which is what a person sounds like when they are choosing, and then it stopped and did not start again and Stuart's whole chest went out from under him.
Then the door broke.
Eight of them came through at once and over the crib and into the throat behind Stuart, and there was nothing behind the throat but forty yards of open lot and then the lane and then the houses with the children in them.
Stuart got up.
He had one round in the tube and a hip that would not hold him and no time at all, and he got up in the mud in front of eight men and put the shotgun up and that was the whole of what he had left.
"Behind me!" somebody screamed.
He did not go down. There was no time to go down and he did not even turn his head.
She came out of the dark on his right at a dead run and went past him three feet away and stopped square in the throat and put that little rifle up into her shoulder.
Nell Fairweather did not shout anything else.
The 10/22 started going and it did not sound like the rest of it at all. It did not boom. It cracked, flat and small and fast, and it kept cracking, and the twenty-five round magazine hung down under it and fed and fed and fed.
She did not fire fast.
That was the thing Stuart remembered about it forever. She was twenty years old with a rimfire in her hands against eight men at fifteen feet and she fired about one round a second, deliberate, like a person driving nails.
The first man went down at fourteen feet and did not get up.
The second one got to eight feet with a pistol coming up and she put four into him in a group you could have covered with a hand, and he sat down against the crib and stayed there.
The third one turned to run and she shot him at eleven feet and then again and he went into the stakes.
Then she moved.
She moved left three steps into Stuart's shadow and dropped down onto one knee and kept working, and the last five broke and went back through the door and out into the dark, and one of them was carried.
The rifle stopped.
"Out," Nell Fairweather said, in an entirely flat voice, and dropped the magazine into her palm and had another one in it in about two seconds.
Stuart stood in the mud with an empty shotgun.
"Ma'am," he said.
"Not now."
"No," he said. "Not now."
The rest of it took twenty minutes and it was ugly and Stuart did not remember much of it in order, and when it went quiet the fog had gone gray at the edges and there was light coming and the throat was full of things that a man does not want to look at.
They had lost four.
Gil Pruitt, and a man off the east side named Kleiss who was Bettine's husband, and Cobb Ferrar, who had walked nine miles with a warning and come back for this, and a boy of sixteen named Tam Arliss who had been on the wall and should not have been.
Camille was alive.
She came out of the north fir at twenty past five with the Lebel over her shoulder and her left arm hanging and blood down to the wrist, and she looked at Stuart and said, "I ran out at eleven rounds and went for the boxes," and then sat down in the mud.
Stuart went and put his forehead against hers and neither of them said anything.
Davey did the count at six.
He did it out loud, by name, off a sheet, in the middle of the lane, the way he had done it since the first year, and it took eleven minutes and nobody moved while he did it.
Then Sorenson came down off the platform.
"Mr. Redman."
Stuart turned around.
"There's one out there," Sorenson said. "Three hundred yards. On the rise. He's been standing there since it got light and he has not moved and he has not got a gun."
Stuart went up the ladder.
He took the long glass and put it on the rise and found him, a man standing alone in the gray morning in a good coat with his hands out from his sides, and behind him, sitting in a line in the frozen mud, were five dogs.
"That's the one from the brush," Stuart said.
"How do you know."
"The dogs."
He watched him a while.
The man did not move. He stood on that rise with his hands out and his dogs behind him, and after about four minutes he raised one arm, slowly, and held it up.
"What's that," Sorenson said.
"He wants to come in."
Stuart came down the ladder and walked out through the wreck of the throat and through the door and stood in the open ground with the sunrise starting to go gold along the eastern rim behind the fir.
He raised his own arm.
The man came down off the rise.
He came three hundred yards on his own feet with nothing in his hands and five dogs walking at his heel in a line, and at forty feet he stopped, and Stuart saw that he was seventy years old and gray to the skin and that he had been crying and had not bothered to do anything about it.
"You are Redman," he said.
"I am."
"I could not stop it," the old man said. "I have been trying for two years to stop it and last night I could not, and there are four of your people dead in that mud and I want to say that before I say anything else."
"Who are you."
The old man looked at him.
"My name is Pierre Aubert," he said, "and the man who shouted at your wall last night is my son."