Chapter Twenty-Two
The Upstairs Hall, the Parlor, and the South Fence
Zoe’s palm stayed flat against the cold glass of the south window.
The frost on the outside of the pane had begun to flower at the corners in small grey ferns. Beyond it, past the white rail of the porch and the black line of the cottonwoods, the grey shape at the fourth post from the corner of the south fence had moved once and gone still. Her breath came short.
The whicker off the bay at the corral eased to a tail flick.
The lead cow’s bell along the creek path held silent at the second strike.
Below her, on the porch, Wade’s boot moved a quarter step. A second. The screen door pulled shut behind him with the smallest click his hand could give it, and then the porch board took his weight in the slow, even tread of a man walking out toward a thing he had little wish to wake the house over.
She set her lamp on the dresser. Her hand shook by a fraction she could not steady.
Lord, she said inside herself, the asking coming up uneven at the back of her teeth, there is a shape at the south fence and a man of mine walking out to it in the dark. Steady his hand. Steady my own. Keep the small girl asleep in the next room.
She took her shawl off the back of the chair, drew it close, and went down the back stair to the parlor, the boards cold under her stockinged feet and the smell of the banked kitchen fire coming up the hall to meet her.
***
Wade was in the chair by the south window with the Henry across his knees.
The brass lamp at the writing table had been turned down to a thread. His good coat hung on the peg by the hall. The collar of his shirt was open and he had his boots off in the kitchen.
He turned his face at the creak of the third step.
“You saw it, then,” Zoe said, quiet.
“I saw it. Patience saw it before me, the corner of her tail at the porch board went still at the third whicker off the corral, and she has small habit of going still at a tail flick.” He turned the Henry once across his knees. “Grey wool coat. Pale grey hat.”
The breath went out of her. She had little wish to set the next words down. She set them anyway.
“It is the man from Larkin’s.”
“I have no proof, Zoe.” His pale blue eyes stayed on her. “I have an eye, and the eye tells me a thing my proof has yet to catch up with.”
“I shall require a book.”
She crossed to the shelf at the south wall for the small black volume of George Herbert that Margaret had kept by her chair the winter of fifty-eight, and the top row sat four inches above her reach at the tips of her fingers.
Behind her, Wade set the Henry down across his knees.
“The kitchen has a stool.”
“The chair at the writing table will serve,” she returned, the dry edge coming up at the back of her tongue in spite of the shape at the fence and the ball at her chest and the late hour at the clock. “I have used it for the past fortnight without injury.”
“The third rung has been wedged with twine across forty years, and the twine has been giving the past two.”
“It will hold me one more time.”
“Zoe—”
“I am going to use the chair, Wade.”
The corner of his mouth pulled, in spite of the whole of the cold, dark night.
She carried the chair from the writing table to the shelf at the south wall, lifted her hem, and set her boot on the seat. She pushed up to the second rung. The chair gave a small creak under her boot. Her fingers found the spine of the Herbert at the top row.
The third rung gave under her right boot with a sound like a green stick breaking. She went with it.
The chair tipped hard to its left. The Herbert came with her. The floor came up at her faster than any prayer she had time to set down.
Wade was off his own chair before the rung had finished breaking. The Henry fell without ceremony.
He caught her.
His arm came under her ribs. His other hand came up to the back of her shoulder and took the rest of her weight. The chair tipped past them and hit the rag rug with a small thud.
Her hand was pressed flat at the front of his shirt. Her face was three inches from the side of his throat.
For the count of three, neither of them moved. The lamp threw its low thread of gold across the two of them. She could feel his heartbeat at the bone of his chest under her palm. His arm under her ribs stayed where it was, steady and warm and not in any hurry to set her back on her own feet.
“If you say I told you so,” she said at last, drawing a careful breath, “I shall strike you with George Herbert.”
He looked down at her. The pale blue of his eyes held the I told you so a beat, then let it go. The line of his mouth opened, warm breath brushing her temple. He drew her up by an inch, toward him, not away. His thumb, at the back of her shoulder, pressed once at the wool of her shawl.
At the top of the back stair, the third step creaked.
“Auntie Zoe? Uncle Wade?”
Sadie stood at the door in her nightgown with one stocking half on and Henrietta tucked under one arm, her yellow braids loose at her shoulders.
Zoe came back to her own feet, her hand still flat on the front of Wade’s shirt.
“I have had a small accident at the shelf, sweet girl,” she answered, still unsteady. “Your uncle was good enough to catch me.”
Wade let her go.
His arm drew to his side. His eyes had gone past her to the south window and the dark beyond it, and the laugh that had nearly escaped him had gone out of his face entirely.
Outside, at the back porch, both dogs went off at once.
Patience first, low and hard at the corner of the porch. Then Job, deeper, at the south end of the yard, the two of them taking up the dark between them.
Wade was already at the kitchen door.
“Up the stairs, Sadie. Take Auntie Zoe. Lock the door behind you. Both of you keep to the back wall until I come up. You don’t come down at any sound. Not at a shot. Not at a shout. Not at my own voice calling you, unless I call you by the word aster. Do you have the word, sweet girl?”
“Aster,” Sadie answered, the small grave concentrating manner gone white at the line of her mouth.
“Go.”
***
The figure at the cottonwoods saw Wade before he saw the figure.
A pistol shot came out of the dark at the willow at the bend. The muzzle flash flared white against the black trunks. The ball went into the fence post a foot above his head with a flat, dry crack and a spray of pine splinters that bit at the side of his cheek.
Wade put the Henry to his shoulder and fired once at the flash.
The report rolled across the south pasture and came back off the Bridgers a long count later.
A second figure broke out of the cottonwoods at the south end. Wade caught the grey of the coat in the lantern light, and the pale brim of the hat, and the polished give of the boots, and ran hard across the south pasture.
“Hold there!” Wade levered the Henry and fired again, low, ahead of the running shape.
The shape ran on.
From the cottonwood at the bend behind him came the lower hammer of George’s Sharps, then the steady working bark of Ben’s revolver, the three of them lighting the dark at the south pasture in white flares a half second apart.
A third pistol shot answered out of the willow, and a fourth, the balls going wide into the frost at Wade’s left.
The first grey shape went down into the creek with a hard splash.
“Ben—the willow!” Wade shouted across the dark. “There is a horse tied at the willow!”
A horse came up the far bank at a hard gallop, the rider low, the white forefoot flashing in the lantern’s light.
Ben fired twice more after the rider. The shape made the cottonwoods at the south side of the creek and went on into the black, the drum of the hooves fading south toward the Dawson line.
Wade stood at the fourth post with the Henry still up and his breath hard, and he held a long count before he let the barrel down.
***
Ben came up first, at a walking trot on the chestnut mare, the revolver still loose in his hand.
George came up behind him on the bay, the Sharps across the saddle bow, his hat lost.
“Wade.” Ben’s voice came low. “Are you hit?”
“Splinters.” Wade put the back of his hand to his face.
It came away with a dark smear. “Two of them, Ben. One at the cottonwoods with a pistol. One at the willow with a horse tied against the chance of a flight. The one at the cottonwoods took my second ball and went into the creek. The one at the willow made the far bank.”
George swung off the bay, his breath coming hard.
The three of them went down the slope of the south pasture to the creek where the first grey shape had gone in, the lantern throwing their three shadows long across the frost.
The shape was gone and the black water ran on at the bend.
A pale grey hat sat on the near bank, the brim up, dry. A piece of dark wool, ripped at the shoulder seam, lay on the gravel at the edge of the willow where the branch had caught it.
Wade crouched at the bank. He picked the wool up between his thumb and forefinger and held it at the lantern.
The thread at the seam was the thread he had seen at the elbow of a coat at Larkin’s hardware.
“Ben.” He turned the wool once at the lantern light.
“He went into the creek on the near side. He could have come up the near bank in the dark and run for the cottonwoods. Instead, he set his hat on the bank with the brim up. A man does not set a dry hat on a bank he has just crawled out of soaking.”
Ben crouched beside him at the gravel, the revolver back at his belt.
“He had a second hat.” Ben’s pale eyes went level at the bank in the lantern light.
“He set one here for us to find. The wool as well. He has put his own name down at your creek bank in his own hand, Wade, and he has done it clean enough that not a word of it would stand up at the Gallatin courthouse. He is telling you he was here. He is daring you to say so out loud where it can be heard.”
Wade folded the piece of wool into his palm and closed his hand around it.
Up the slope behind them, at the dark south window upstairs, a small lamp came up at the sash.
Two faces at the cold glass, Zoe and Sadie, waiting on the word from Wade.
He got to his feet at the bank.
He cupped his good hand at his mouth and sent the one word up the slope across the frost, the word that would bring them down the stair and through the kitchen and into the rest of whatever the night had left to give.
“Aster!”
The two lamps left the south window at once.