Chapter 15
Nate didn’t answer the taunt. A man who answers from the dark only tells the shooter where to aim, and Josh had taught him that lesson along with all the rest.
He laid his cheek to the cold stock of the Winchester and waited, and the waiting stretched until the blood beat loudly in his ears, then Cooley gave the word, and the world came apart in fire and noise.
They emptied their guns into the cave mouth all at once, four men, and the muzzle flashes lit the brush like sheet lightning.
The bullets came screaming through the slot and struck the back and the side walls and went ricocheting around the stone box with a whine that climbed into Nate’s teeth.
Rock chips flew. Lead hammered and sang.
The noise in the enclosed space was a physical thing, a fist clapped over both ears, a pressure that drove the breath flat in his chest, and the smell of burned powder rolled back thick enough to choke on.
He pressed himself behind the shoulder of rock and felt it shudder under the strikes, and didn’t fire back, not yet, not into a wall of muzzle flash that told him nothing.
“Hold!” he shouted and barely heard himself.
“Let ‘em empty out! Wait for the reload!”
Beside him, Josh understood and held. Across the dark, the old man was a shape behind another tooth of rock, the Sharps up, patient as a stump.
They weathered it. They let the storm of it break over them and pour itself out against dead stone, and when the firing stuttered, when it broke into the ragged gaps of men thumbing fresh rounds into hot guns, Nate came up over his rock, picked a lingering muzzle glow, and put two fast shots into it.
A man cried out down the slope, a high, startled bark of pain, and boots scrabbled in the talus as he dragged himself out of the line. The shooting scattered.
“Back!” Cooley’s voice, hard now, no more honey in it. “Off the mouth! He’s got the angle!”
The pressure eased as the men pulled aside, out of the slot’s narrow line, and a sudden ringing quiet came down with powder smoke, drifting blue in the last gray light.
Nate thumbed fresh rounds into the Winchester by feel, his hands black, his ears screaming a high, thin note that swallowed the creek and his own breathing.
That was when Lucy found the crack. “Nate.” Her voice came out of the dark at the back of the chamber, where the cold air had pulled at them since the torch was first lit. “Here. There’s a way through. Feel the air.”
He went to her, crouched and quick, keeping the rock between himself and the mouth.
She’d dragged herself partway into a black seam at the rear of the cave, a fissure where the mountain had cracked and not closed, scarcely wider than a man’s shoulders, slanting up and away, and out of it poured the clean cold breath of the outside world.
He put his arm into it and felt the slope of it rising toward gray.
“It goes through,” she said. “Out the back of the rock. Onto the far slope, away from the trail. I can fit.”
The whole of it came clearly to him at once: the layout he’d marked coming up, the steeple boulder and the horses picketed on the far side, out of any climbing man’s sight. The fissure let out behind the boulder. Behind the horses. Out of Cooley’s line.
“Then you go,” he said. “Now. You take the sketch and the gold, and you go through. Get to the horses behind the boulder, and you ride for the Hallorans and every gun that’ll come. You don’t stop. You don’t come back. You bring the county.”
“And leave the two of you to?—”
“To hold a hole one man wide against four. We can do that a long while.” He gripped her shoulder hard and made her look at him in the dark.
“Lucy. The proof’s on you. If they take this cave, they take you and the sketch and the gold, and the whole case dies in here with us.
You’re not running from the fight. You are the fight.
You’re the only piece of it that must live. Go.”
For one held breath, she stared at him, and he couldn’t read her face in the black, only feel the tension in her under his hand. Then her jaw set, that thing he’d come to know, and she pushed the gold deeper into her coat and turned to wedge herself into the crack.
“You hold,” she said fiercely over her shoulder. “You hold till I’m back. Don’t you dare make me have ridden for nothing.”
“Ride,” he said.
And she was gone into the stone, the scrape and grunt of her climbing, then nothing, then the far faint sound of the wind taking her, and he turned back to the gray slot and the four men and the dying light with his heart wrenched half out of him and put it away where it couldn’t slow his hands.
He had sent her into the dark alone, the same as his father had once sent him east alone, because the dark was safer than the thing coming, and he understood his father now in a way fourteen years of grieving never had.
You didn’t keep the ones you loved by holding them close.
You kept them by putting them somewhere the killing couldn’t reach, and then you stood in the gap yourself and paid whatever it cost.
He breathed the powder smoke and listened to the empty crack behind him and made himself believe she would clear the slope, reach the horses, ride. She had to. Everything they’d built was riding out of the mountain on her gray mare, knotted into the corner of a kerchief against her ribs.
* * *
They came again at full dark.
Cooley sent two wide along the cliff base to try the flanks while he and the fourth man kept the mouth busy, and for a hard quarter hour, the fight was a thing of flashes and shouts and the scream of lead off stone.
Nate moved between the two best rocks, never firing twice from the same place, doing what Josh had drilled into him, making three guns’ worth of noise out of one.
A man showed himself at the left edge of the brush, and Nate swung and fired, the Winchester bucking against his shoulder. The man went down and didn’t get up.
It was the first life Nate had ever taken, and he had braced all his life, without knowing it, for the taking to be a great thing. It wasn’t. It was a flinch of motion, a squeeze, a man shape folding in the dark, and then it was gone, and there was another corner to watch.
The horror of it was that there was no horror in it, not then, only the small, grim arithmetic.
Four to three. He would feel the rest of it later, in the long nights, as Josh had warned him a man always did.
Here in the dark with the powder stinging his eyes, he felt only that the line had held one gun longer, and that Lucy was that gun farther from being run down on a dark road, so he turned and looked for the next muzzle flash with hands that didn’t shake.
Then Josh grunted, a short, ugly sound, and sat down against his rock.
“Josh.” Nate was across the dark to him on his knees. “Where?”
“Ribs.” The old man’s voice came out tight. “Just a lick. Burned a furrow is all. Plowed me, didn’t plant me.” But his hand came away from his side wet and black in the dark, and his breath had a catch in it that hadn’t been there before.
Nate pressed his own palm to the wound and felt the hot slick of it well up between his fingers, more blood than a graze ought to give, and his gut clenched on a fear that had nothing to do with the men outside.
Eldon’s friend. The one man left alive who’d loved his father.
He’d be alone again the day Josh Bodine bled out on a cave floor. “Hold still. Let me bind it.”
“You’ll bind nothing.” Josh shoved Nate back toward the mouth with surprising strength. “Tend the door, boy, not me. A man bleeds slow lets another man waste his last shells fussing over him. I can still shoot sitting as good as standing. Go on. The door.”
Nate went because the old man was right and because a wounded gun that could still aim was worth more at the slot than two men weeping over a furrow.
He took up the fight, and Josh took it up beside him, lower now, slower, but the Sharps still spoke its great flat word into the dark, and a man down the slope yelped. The rush broke and fell back once more.
A silence came. A long one. In it, Nate counted his cartridges by touch and didn’t like the sum, heard Josh counting his own in muttered curses, and knew without saying it that they couldn’t do this all night. Powder and lead ran out. Courage didn’t refill an empty magazine.
“Ralston.” Cooley’s voice floated up from the dark below, easy again, a man who’d done his sums too and liked the answer.
“You shoot fine for a dock rat. But I count your guns. Two. And I’ve got all night and a wagonload of shells, and that little gal of yours can’t have got far.
” A pause, slow and cruel. “Tell you what, I’m a reasonable man. I’ll not waste another bullet on you.”
Nate said nothing. Beside him, Josh breathed wetly in the dark.
“No,” Cooley went on, and there was a smile in it now, the worst sound yet. “I believe we’ll just smoke you out, like badgers. Boys. Gather up that dead brush. All of it. Pile it in the mouth.”
Nate heard it then, under the creek, under the ring still fading in his ears: the crack and snap of dry wood being broken over a knee, an armful, another, dragged crackling toward the slot of the cave where the cold clean air came in.
He understood the whole of it in a breath. A fire in the mouth, and the same cold draft that had led Lucy to the back fissure would turn against them, pulling the smoke down into the chamber and through the mountain, filling every black corner of the place there was to breathe.
No bullet need be spent. They’d choke in the dark like vermin and crawl out blind and coughing into Cooley’s waiting guns, or they’d stay and not crawl out at all. Beside him, Josh had gone quiet, and the quiet of a bleeding man was its own kind of clock.
They were building a fire to fill the mountain with smoke, and there was nothing on God’s earth Nate could do to stop them but watch the first flame catch in the brush at the mouth and throw its red light up the walls where the gold gleamed, indifferent, the thing his family had died for and might yet die in.