Chapter 9 #2
"What about the dogs," Stuart said.
"The dogs are mine."
"Five trained dogs is not a man walking around warning people."
"No," Pierre Aubert agreed. "The dogs are the only thing I have done well. I had them from the second year. I have had six and I have got five. They are what has kept me alive in front of that place for two years and they are how I took your boy off your flat on the fourteenth without putting a
boot in the open where three men with a glass could see me."
"Why not walk in and knock on my gate?"
"Because I have walked into six towns with my hands out and told them the truth," the old man said, "and in two of them they put me in a shed, and in one of them a man pointed a gun at me for nine hours,
and in Winchester they beat me and took my coat and I walked eleven miles in shirtsleeves in November. I have got a very poor record of being believed, Mr. Redman, and after Winchester I stopped trying and started sitting on benches."
"And the collar."
Pierre Aubert's face changed.
"Ah," he said.
"There was a dog collar on the Hartung bench on the fourteenth of January," Stuart said, "sewn shut with crooked stitches a quarter inch long, and it had been cut open again with a knife on one knee, and it was under that boy when your dog put him down."
"Yes."
"Where did you get it."
"Off a dog," the old man said, "in the second winter, on a road north of Kamiah, that was dying in a ditch with its hind end crushed. And I sat with it until it was done because that is what a person does, and when it was done I found the stitching,
and I have carried what was in that collar for three and a half years."
"What was in it."
Pierre Aubert reached inside his coat.
Four people in the room moved and Stuart put his hand up flat and they stopped.
The old man took out a piece of paper folded to the size of two fingers and worn through at every crease and backed with a piece of oilcloth sewn to it, and he laid it on the table and did not unfold it.
"It says," he said, "that there is a woman behind a wall who has been asking for a very long time, and that there is nothing she can give anybody for it, and that she is asking anyway."
"Delphine," Stuart said.
"I did not have a name until this week."
"Then why in God's name did you never go."
"Because it was a hundred and forty miles in the wrong direction," Pierre Aubert said, "and my son was in the other one, and I made a choice on a road in the second winter that I have had three and a half years to think about,
and I would like this room to understand that I have never once been sure it was the right one."
He pushed the paper across the table.
"And then in January I came down off a bench," he said, "and I put it in the snow on a piece of leather, because I had learned from a boy on a horse that the man who walks this country carrying letters had come out of the Clearwater with six women in June,
and I wanted him to know before he ever saw my face that somebody else out here had been holding one of these too."
Nobody said anything for a while.
"That's a hell of a way to introduce yourself," Stuart said.
"It is how I introduce myself," the old man said. "I am not good at the other way."
They came back at four in the afternoon.
There was no warning and no shouting and no line at three hundred yards, and that was the thing Stuart never forgave himself for, because he had spent the whole morning assuming a thing about men who talk before they fight.
They came at the north end.
The north end was the old gate and the old gate was sound and had been sound for four years, and there were six people on it, and it was the furthest point in the valley from the throat where every single person in the Crossing had been working since daylight.
They came with a wagon.
They ran it down the north trace at a gallop with eleven men behind it and they put it into the gate at about fifteen miles an hour and the gate held and the wagon did not, and the whole business came apart in a heap and eleven men came over the top of it.
Stuart was six hundred feet away with a shovel in his hands.
He heard it start and he was moving before the first shot and he had covered about a hundred feet when he understood, with absolute clarity, that he had an empty shotgun on his back and twenty shells in a box in a house and that neither one of those facts could be changed in the next fourteen
seconds.
Nell Fairweather was forty feet ahead of him, running.
"Ma'am," Stuart shouted.
She did not stop.
"Nell!"
She stopped.
She stopped and turned around in the mud with the rifle in both hands and her face was a thing Stuart did not want to see on a twenty year old.
Stuart came up on her.
"Give me the rifle," he said.
"No."
"Give me the rifle. Look at my hands."
She looked at his hands. There was nothing in them.
"You have got four magazines in that coat and you have got four hours of light and there is going to be a second one of these tonight," Stuart said, very fast, "and I am a fifty-one year old man with a bad hip who cannot run to that gate. You can. Get to the north platform. Get up it.
You will have the whole of that yard from up there and nobody can reach you."
"Then what do you want it for."
"Because they are already inside," Stuart said, "and I am going to be standing in the lane in about nine seconds and I have got nothing."
Nell Fairweather looked at him for exactly one second.
Then she pulled the cord over her head and put the 10/22 into his hands and took three magazines out of her right coat pocket and pushed them into his.
"It shoots a hand's width high at a hundred," she said. "It does not like dirt in the well. If it stops, roll it over and shake it and it will go."
"Where's your other?"
"I have got the fourth."
"Then go."
She went.
Stuart Redman stood in the mud in the middle of the lane of his own town with a twenty-two caliber rifle in his hands and eleven men coming over a wagon a hundred and forty yards away, and he did the only useful thing he had done all day, which was to stop moving.
He went down on one knee behind the corner of the cellar house.
He had not fired a rimfire since he was nineteen years old.
He put the cord over his shoulder anyway out of habit, brought the stock up into the pocket, put his cheek on the wire wrapped wrist, and found the front sight sitting where it was supposed to sit, and thought, clearly and without any emotion at all, a hand's width high at a hundred.
The first one came around the corner of the shed at sixty feet.
He was a big man with a rifle across his body and he was looking down the lane at the Hall and not at the cellar house, and Stuart put the front sight on the middle of his chest and came down the width of a hand and squeezed.
The crack was nothing. A stick breaking.
The man stopped walking and looked down at himself.
Stuart fired twice more, a second apart, the way he had watched her do it in the throat, driving nails, and the third one took him in the base of the throat and he sat down in the mud against the shed and went over sideways.
The second one came out into the open at ninety feet.
He had seen the first go down and he did not know from where, and he did the thing that men do, which was to swing the muzzle in a wide arc looking for a muzzle flash that a twenty-two does not really give you in daylight.
Stuart tracked him three feet and let him settle.
Hand's width high at a hundred. This was ninety. He came down a little less.
Four rounds, one a second, and the man went to his knees at the second one and was still trying to get the rifle up at the fourth, and then he was not.
Somebody screamed a warning from the wagon.
Stuart did not stay. He came up off his knee and went eleven feet to the water barrel behind the Sorenson house, which he had been looking at the entire time, and put himself behind it and came up again, and that was when the north platform opened up over his head.
Nell Fairweather had gotten up the ladder.
He could hear her working, flat and fast and spaced, and he could hear men in the yard deciding, and then he could hear them going back over the wagon.
He fired four more into the gap at the gate and did not think he hit anybody.
Then the magazine went dry.
Stuart Redman did a thing in that moment which he did not decide to do and could not have explained afterward, which was that his left hand came off the forestock and hit the release and his right hand was already coming out of his coat pocket with the next one,
and the empty went into the mud and the full one went up into the well and he rolled it over and rocked it back and heard it click, and the whole of it took about two seconds and he did not look down once.
He had never done it before in his life.
He thought about that for a long time afterward, and the closest he ever came to explaining it was that he had watched a twenty year old girl do it once, in a throat full of dead men, in an entirely flat voice, and had apparently learned it the way you learn a thing you only need once.
He came up over the barrel.
There was nobody left in the yard.
It lasted eleven minutes.
They had four wounded and nobody dead at the north gate, which was a piece of luck so large that Maddie said out loud in the Hall that she did not trust it and was waiting for the bill.
Stuart found Nell at the bottom of the platform ladder.
He held the rifle out and she took it and looked at the bolt and at the mud on the receiver and then at him.
"You reloaded it," she said.
"I did."
"You have never shot one of these."
"Not since I was nineteen."
She turned it over in her hands.
"Two?"
"Two," Stuart said.
"Then you did better than nought for four," Nell Fairweather said, and that was all either of them ever said about it.
Pierre Aubert had not moved from the Hall table.