Chapter 11
The fence post burst a hand’s width from Lucy’s head, and Nate was already off the porch. He cleared the rail without touching it and crossed the yard at a dead run, and the second shot kicked a gout of dirt up between his boots that he didn’t slow for.
Lucy stood rooted, with her boot still caught in the stirrup, the gray mare screaming and wheeling around her, and he hit her at the waist and tore her free of the horse, bearing her down with him behind the iron stock trough as a third round struck the rim and whined off across the morning.
“Down,” he said into her ear. “Stay down. I’ve got you. ”
She was shaking against him, her breath coming quickly and shallowly, but she didn’t fight him, and she didn’t scream. Some cold corner of him marked that even now, even pinned in the dirt with a rifle hunting her, she had the sense to make herself small.
Water leaked from a fresh hole in the trough and was cold across his wrist. The smell of churned earth and horses, and powder smoke filled his nose.
A splinter had laid a thin red line across her cheek, and a thread of blood crept down toward her jaw, the sight of which lit a slow fire in him hotter than fear.
Then the Sharps spoke from the barn. Once, a flat heavy boom rolled off the foothills, and a moment later a second, and Nate lifted his head an inch above the iron. Powder smoke drifted blue out of the dark barn mouth where Josh kneeled with the long rifle across a rail.
Out at the east tree line, two hundred yards off, a branch jumped, and a man’s hat sailed loose before a horse came crashing back through the timber. Josh worked the breech and laid in another round a yard left of the first, herding, and that was enough.
The brush thrashed, and a single rider broke away up the draw, low over his horse’s neck, and was gone into the pines. The morning went quiet but for the gray mare’s snorting and the steady trickle of water out of the holed trough.
Nate kept Lucy down a full minute after the last hoofbeat faded. Only when Josh stepped out of the barn into the open, the Sharps lowered, scanning the timber, did he ease back and let her sit up against the trough.
“He’s run,” Josh called. “One man. Lit out west. He’ll not come back at us across open ground, not with this.” He patted the rifle stock. But he stayed where he could watch the trees, and he didn’t set the gun down.
Lucy pressed the back of her hand to her cheek and looked at the blood on it. Her color had gone milk-pale under the freckles, and her hands wouldn’t quite stop their tremor. She stared at them as though they belonged to someone else.
“My legs wouldn’t work,” she said. Her voice was thin and furious. “I’ve faced down Chambers’s men at my own gate. I’ve never once frozen. And I stood there like a fence rail and let it—” She stopped and shut her teeth on it.
“You stood in the open with a man shooting at your head, and you didn’t run into the next bullet,” Nate said. “That’s not freezing. That’s the only thing that kept you alive. A body that bolts in the open is a body in the ground.”
He took her by the elbow and helped her up, keeping the trough between them and the trees out of habit now. “Can you walk?”
“I can walk.” She found her feet, her chin came up, and the color started back into her face along with the temper. “He meant it for me. Clean through the skull, he meant it. That wasn’t a warning shot gone wide.”
“No,” Nate said. “It wasn’t.”
That was what sat coldest in him as he walked her up to the house with Josh covering the timber behind them. The snake on the door, the beating in the cottonwoods, those had been meant to scare.
This had been meant to kill, and meant for Lucy, who’d done nothing but ride out at dawn to put a name to his enemy. Chambers’s patience had run out, and the price of standing near Nate had just come due on somebody else.
* * *
He wouldn’t let her ride home. She argued about it. But the shooter had run west, toward the Chambers range and the Denver road she would have to take. A man who’d put a rifle on her in Nate’s own yard wouldn’t think twice about doing it from a ditch with no Josh and no Sharps within ten miles.
“You ride out today and you’re riding into him,” Nate said. “Stay. Josh’ll go tell your mother where you are and that you’re safe, and he’ll bring back word she’s all right. You go home tomorrow in daylight with the both of us alongside you.”
“And give the county something to wag its tongue about? A girl staying the night at a bachelor’s ranch?”
“You’ll have the spare room and a bolt on the door and a sixty-year-old chaperone snoring across the hall,” Josh said dryly, coming up onto the porch. “Folks want to talk, let ‘em. Better talked about than buried, Miss Thornhill. Your mama’d say the same, and you know it.”
Lucy looked from one of them to the other, and whatever fight was left in her went out of her on a long breath. “She would,” she admitted. “She’d skin me for arguing.” She touched the dried blood at her cheek again. “All right. One night. And I earn my keep. I’m no parlor guest.”
Josh saddled the bay and rode east for the Thornhill place, coming back near dark with a bundle of Lucy’s things, a covered dish of cold chicken, and the news that Celia had taken it grimly but steadily and sent her love and a loaded shotgun’s worth of instructions.
The three of them ate at the kitchen table by lamplight, and Lucy earned her keep, scrubbing the skillet after and setting the room to rights it hadn’t known since Nate’s mother kept it.
Twice he caught himself watching her move about the kitchen as though she had a claim on it. He pulled his eyes away both times, and the second time they went right back before he was done pulling. There was a man out in the dark who wanted her dead. No night for his mind to wander.
He took the first watch on the porch with the Winchester. Josh took the second one. The night passed, cold and empty, the stars wheeling over the black foothills, and nothing moved but a hunting owl and the wind in the cottonwoods.
Morning came with no word from town and no sign that the shooter had been found.
The Denver road ran straight west through Chambers’s range, and there was no clean way around it.
Lucy didn’t mention leaving, and Nate didn’t raise it.
They got through the day quietly and watchfully, and when dark came, he took the first watch again without either of them putting it into words.
It was the smell that woke him on the second night.
He came up out of sleep with smoke in his throat and a red light flapping on the ceiling of his room, and he was on his feet and into his boots before he was fully awake, the Winchester off the wall and in his hands by the door.
The window glowed orange. Out in the yard, the night was full of moving light and the high, terrified scream of horses, and under it the greedy crackle and roar of dry timber going up all at once.
The barn.
The whole east side of it stood sheeted in flame, the old wood burning as if it had been waiting fourteen years for the match, and black smoke boiled up into the stars.
Three riders circled the yard at a gallop, and he picked out the nearest one: a gray horse with both eyes showing white, the rider hatless, coat billowing out behind him like smoke.
That man flung a bottle trailing rag-fire that burst against the corral and ran blue flame along the rails.
Josh was already out, firing from the cover of the well housing, the muzzle flash of his old revolver stuttering in the dark.
Nate went off the porch and down on one knee and got the Winchester up and put two rounds at the nearest rider, the recoil slamming familiarly into his shoulder, the lever working under his hand as Josh had drilled into him morning after morning until it was no more thought than breathing.
The horse swerved. He led it and fired again, and the rider pitched sideways out of the saddle and hit the dirt, rolling.
“The horses!” Lucy was on the porch, the spare shotgun up, her hair loose around a face gone hard and bright in the firelight. “Nate, the stock’s still in the barn!”
The stock. His gelding, Josh’s bay, her gray mare. And the Circle C horse, his one held card, penned in a burning building.
He ran for the barn through the heat and the smoke, and when the thrown rider came up out of the dirt right in front of him with a knife half drawn, Nate didn’t break stride.
He drove into the man shoulder-first the way he’d put down dock toughs twice this one’s size.
They went down together in the churned mud.
The man clawed at his eyes, and Nate got a fist into the soft of his belly and another against his ear. The man bucked and wrenched and tore loose and was up and running for a companion’s outstretched arm.
He swung up double behind the saddle, and the horse lunged away into the dark with him. There was no shooting after, not with the stock still to save. But the bandana had come away in Nate’s fist.
He shoved it in his shirt without a look and got to the barn doors and threw the bar.
The heat rolled out at him like an open oven.
The horses flung themselves against the stalls, eyes white, and he went in low under the smoke with his shirt up over his mouth to throw the latches one by one and slap the horses out into the night.
His own gelding, the bay, the gray mare, and last the Circle C horse, half-mad with terror, that he had to blindfold with his own shirttail and drag bodily through the doors with the roof timbers already groaning fire overhead.
He came out coughing, his lungs raw, his eyebrows singed, leading the branded horse into the clean, cold air as the barn’s spine cracked and the whole east wall came down in a roaring fountain of sparks behind him.
The riders were gone. There was no one left to shoot.
* * *
Dawn came up gray and bitter over the smoldering heap that had been his father’s barn. Nate stood in the ruin of it with his hands aching from clenching, his face streaked black, watching a last beam settle into the ash with a sigh of sparks.
The four horses stood huddled and trembling in the corral that hadn’t burned. The thrown man’s tracks led off west, the only direction that ever mattered.
He drew the bandana out of his shirt and turned it in the gray light.
A common cotton kerchief, sweat-stiff, smelling of smoke.
And there in the corner, worked into the weave in coarse thread, the kind of mark a thrifty outfit stitches into its gear against pilfering, the Circle C.
A C closed inside a ring. The same iron that stood on the horse he’d just dragged out of the fire.
Josh came up beside him, soot in the creases of his face, his old eyes red and streaming. “Saved the stock,” he said. “That’s the main thing. Barn’s lumber. We’ll raise another.”
“He came to my home in the night and burned it with the horses screaming inside.” Nate’s voice came out low and level and didn’t sound like his own.
“He shot at Lucy in my yard. He’s done waiting for me to scare.
” Nate folded the kerchief and put it away with the snake note, in the pocket over his heart, a second piece of the same man’s signature.
“I’ve spent a month asking questions, Josh. Reading files. Buying old men beers. Being careful.” He turned and looked at the old man, and whatever was in his face made Josh go still. “We’re done asking. From here, we fight back.”
Josh held his eye a moment, then nodded slowly, and there was no folk wisdom in it, no warning about poor crops. Just a hard old man agreeing with a younger one. “Reckon we are,” he said. “Reckon it’s past time.”
It was Josh who found the note. He’d gone to swing the corral gate wide for the horses, and he stopped with his hand on the rail and pulled a square of paper loose from the nail driven through it. He brought it back without a word. Fixed dead center, where the first man through would find it.
The hand was the same heavy pencil as the snake note. The words were fewer.
Next time it’s the house, with you in it.