Chapter 16
Abe came through the timber toward the noise of them the way water comes down off high ground, finding the low places and the soft places and the seams between the trees where a man’s weight could go down without a sound to mark it.
The noise the men and dogs were making helped him the whole way in, because men and dogs that loud heard nothing in the world but themselves.
He came up behind a deadfall some forty yards off the clearing and went down flat on his belly in the cool damp leaf mold and looked.
They’d kindled a fire, small and quick and careless, the kind a man makes for the light to work by and not for the warmth of it, and the light of it threw its jump and its shudder out across a patch of ground that hadn’t been a clearing this morning.
Somebody had dragged the brush back to open it up around the hole, and the hole itself stood gaping now, the false door flung off to one side with the sod and leaf hanging off it in clods, the months of careful work undone in a minute.
Five men stood about the place. The dogs were tied off short to a sapling at the clearing’s far edge, still keyed up and singing low in their throats, two of them pacing the length of their ropes back and forth and the other two lying down with their heads up off their paws and their ears swiveled forward at the men, waiting to be told they’d done well.
Samson Jennings knelt in the dirt at the edge of the firelight with his hands bound behind his back and his shaggy head hung down, and a sixth man stood over him.
Abe knew the build of him before the firelight gave up the face.
Broad and heavy through the chest and shoulders, that settled weight of a man who took it for granted the world would arrange itself around his standing in it.
The dark vest was gone and the white shirt was rolled to the elbow over thick forearms, but it was past doubting the same man who’d stood on the river bank that first gray morning directing the unloading of the raft with his short downward chops of one hand.
Mateo Flores walked a slow circle around the kneeling man and spoke down to him in Spanish, conversational, almost gentle, the easy unhurried tone a man uses on a green horse he means either to gentle or to break, depending on how the horse answers him.
Abe had Spanish enough to follow the shape of it if not every word. Where had Samson been hiding. Who had Samson talked to in his hiding. Whose hand had put the fire to the mayor’s stable.
Flores asked it from one side and then circled and asked it from another, patient as a man with all night, and each time around the kneeling man gave him back the same answer in a voice ground down to gravel, that he didn’t know, that he’d been alone in the woods, that he’d seen nothing and spoken to no one and knew not the first thing about any stable or any fire.
“Two months,” Flores said, switching to English, crouching to look into the hole as a man looks down a well.
“Two months you live in the ground like a thing without a soul, a worm, a grub the children dig for bait. And I am to believe you did it for nothing. For no reason. That a man buries himself alive in the dirt for no better cause than he enjoys the quiet of it.”
He straightened and turned back to the kneeling man.
“I had men walk over this ground this morning. Walk right over your roof, I’d wager, and never know it.
That’s good work, Samson. Patient work. A man doesn’t do patient work like that for nothing.
A man does it because he is waiting on something.
So tell me. What were you waiting on, down there in your grave, all this long while? ”
“Daylight,” Samson said, to the dirt. “I was waiting on daylight, same as anybody.”
Flores laughed, soft, almost fond. “You were always quick. Your grandfather was quick too, they tell me. A whole family of quick men, and look where the quickness has carried the lot of you.”
He crouched again, close, and took Samson’s chin in his thick hand and lifted the hung head so the firelight ran up into the wrecked face.
“I will tell you what I think, and you tell me if I have it wrong. I think a man came to your hole. I think the stable burned and a stranger has been in my town asking after the mayor with a face nobody knows, and I think that stranger found you, because a stranger who can find his way into my business can find his way to a hole in the ground. And I think you are protecting him. Which, after everything, after all I have given your family and all your family has cost me, I find I take as a kind of insult.”
He let go of the chin. “Who came to your hole, Samson?”
“Nobody came. There’s nobody in this world would come for me.”
Samson’s voice cracked on it, and Abe, flat in the leaf mold forty yards off, understood that the man believed it, that two months in the dark with only his own voice and a dead brother’s imagined answers had made it true to him, and that the believing of it was the only thing keeping the truth off his tongue.
“Nobody comes. You made sure of that. You took everyone who’d ever come. ”
Something passed over Flores’s face at that, too quick to read at the distance, and was gone.
“No,” he agreed, almost kindly. “No, perhaps you are right. Perhaps nobody came.”
He came up out of his crouch, unhurried.
“Which is its own difficulty for you, friend, and a worse one than the other. Because if no one came, and you know nothing, and you saw nothing, then you are no use to me at all. Two years I have kept you because you were of use. A deputy’s badge, a man inside the town.
And now the town is finished and the badge with it, and you have been of no use to me for some weeks, sitting in your hole, and now you tell me you cannot even give me the name of the man who burned my stable. ”
He drew a pistol from his belt, and worked the action of it once with a small oiled sound, and laid the muzzle of it against the crown of Samson’s bowed head. “A Jennings who is of no use to me,” he said, “is only a Jennings. And I have spent a great deal of my life cleaning up after Jenningses.”
Abe had the Winchester up and laid steady across the rotten trunk of the deadfall before Flores reached the end of the sentence.
He drew a breath and let the half of it go back out, slow, the way his father had taught him to do it on a cold hillside in a country not one man in this clearing had ever heard the name of, his father’s broad hand light and warm on his small shoulder and his father’s low voice in his ear telling him a day was surely coming when the family would need protecting and that he, the father, would not always be there in the world to do the protecting of them.
Abe buried the memory in the same half second it surfaced in him, shoved it back down under, the way he had long since taught himself to do with all of them, because a man who is remembering is a man who is not seeing what is in front of him.
He set the front blade of the sight on the back of Flores’s gun hand where it held the pistol to the bowed head, and let the rest of the breath go, and squeezed.
The shot rolled flat and hard through the timber and Flores’s hand came apart at the wrist, the fingers and the pistol both gone off into the dark together as though some unseen thing had snatched them, and the man screamed high and went down to his knees clutching the spouting ruin of it against his own chest.
And then it was loud, and it was all at once.
The five came up off their heels firing into the dark at a muzzle flash that was already nothing, throwing their lead blind into the trees at the place where the shot had been a half second before, and Abe was no longer in that place.
He’d rolled hard left along the length of the deadfall the instant the rifle spoke and come up on a knee behind a standing oak eight feet on, and from there he put the second man down across the fire, a clean shot in under the lifted arm and through the chest that folded the man and dropped him bodily into the flames and sent a great gout of sparks roaring up into the dark, and the others flinched from the roar of it and lost another half second to it.
The third spun toward the new angle of the sparks and the sound, bringing his rifle around, and Abe took him through the meat of the shoulder and the man’s gun went off into the ground and he sat down hard in the dirt with the arm gone useless and dragging.
The two still on their feet had the sense left to break for cover and the bad luck between them to break for the very same tree, fetching up against the one trunk shoulder to shoulder, each fouling the other’s gun arm.
Abe put a round into the bark of it square between their two heads to settle their nerves and let them feel how thin the tree was, and worked the lever clean, the spent brass spinning gold through the firelight, and held, and waited on them to do something foolish.
Somebody had gotten to the dogs and cut them loose.
They came across the open clearing low and fast and silent, four of them strung out and gaining. Abe shot the lead dog and it went down end over end in a tangle and lay kicking, and the second checked and shied at the first one falling across its path, but the third came on through without a hitch.
Abe hadn’t the half second it took to lever the rifle and bring it round, so he turned the gun in his two hands and met the animal with the steel-shod butt of it across the skull as it left the ground for his throat.
The shock of it ran up his arms to the shoulders.
It dropped stunned in the dirt at his feet, legs paddling at nothing.
The fourth had its teeth set in his calf before he’d recovered the swing, the jaws clamping shut through the leather of his boot and into the meat of the leg under it, and he felt the grind of them working for the bone, felt the heat and the wrongness of it go up through him.