Chapter 17
Lucy rode as if she meant to kill the horse. She came down out of the canyon on the gray mare with the gold against her ribs and the sketch buttoned in her shirt. The moment the trail opened onto level ground, she put her heels in and didn’t take them out.
The mare ran. Down the back benches, across the dry washes, through the river bottoms in a spray of black water, the wind tearing the tears off her cheeks before they fell.
Two men she loved were holding a hole in the rock against four guns.
Every stride that gray mare put behind her was a stride closer to the only thing that could save them, and a stride farther from the sound of the shooting she had left behind.
The way in had cost them a careful day of creeping the washes with the pack mule, doubling back on the benches, Nate watching their back-trail the whole.
Straight and reckless and alone, with the land marked in her now, she would give the same ground back in a hard handful of hours and trust the mare to keep her feet.
She didn’t let herself picture it. Picture it and you'll slow down. She fixed her eyes on the dark earth ahead and rode.
She had spent her whole life being told what a woman couldn’t do.
Couldn’t run a ranch. Couldn’t be trusted with the hard truths.
Couldn’t be of any use in a fight but to hide and wait and weep.
And here was the proof of every one of those men being wrong, drummed out under her in the gray mare’s pounding stride.
She was the only thing standing between two men and a lonely death in the rocks, and not one soul on earth could do this in her place. The knowledge burned in her, cold and bright as the first star.
She wasn’t running away from the fight. She was carrying the fight on her own back at a dead gallop through the dark, and she wouldn’t drop it, not if she rode the gallant mare into the ground and ran the last miles on her own two feet.
It was pitch dark, and the mare was lathered to a rag, blowing like bellows when the lamplit windows of home swam up at last out of the night.
Lucy hauled on the reins hard enough to set the mare back on its haunches and was out of the saddle before it stopped, screaming for her mother.
“Ma! Guns, Ma, all of them, and saddle Pete and the bay! Chambers’s men have got Nate and Josh pinned in the canyon?—”
The door banged. Celia came out into the lamplight in her nightdress with a shawl thrown over it, and one look at her daughter’s face was the whole of the conversation. She didn’t waste a breath on questions a body could answer on the ride.
“Rifles are by the door,” Celia said, already moving.
“Powder and shot in the blue tin. You catch your wind and get the fresh horses. I’ll rouse the Hallorans and send the boy on to the rest.” Her hands were quick and sure on the lamp, the shawl, the heavy old Spencer off its pegs.
Only at the door did she stop, one hard moment, and grip Lucy’s chin in her fingers. “Is he alive? When you left.”
“They were both alive. Holding.” Lucy’s voice cracked, and she hated it. “I left them, Ma. I left them and ran.”
“You did exactly right, and don’t you dare carry it otherwise.” Celia’s eyes were wet and fierce. “Running for help isn’t running. Now stop bleeding daylight and saddle the horses.”
* * *
They weren’t slow people, the ranchers of that hard country, and they didn’t need a thing explained twice. Within the hour, Lucy had six of them in the yard, mounted, armed, grim-faced in the starlight.
Old Sean Halloran on his plow horse with a shotgun across the bow and two years of swallowed rage in his jaw. His wife beside him, who had said, “We’re in, whatever it costs,” and meant it, held a rifle like a woman who’d used one on coyotes and worse.
A pair of lean cowhands from the spread north of theirs. A wiry widow named Pruett, who’d lost her husband to one of Chambers’s “accidents” and never proved a thing. And Celia, on the bay, the old Spencer across her lap, sitting her horse like a general.
Six guns and a girl. It wasn’t an army. Lucy had stopped expecting armies. Six people who’d finally found the bottom of their fear and come out the far side of it angry were worth more than forty who hadn’t.
“It’s a hard ride and a harder fight,” she told them, the gray mare swapped for a fresh-legged sorrel under her.
“I’ll not lie to a soul. Chambers’s men are killers, and we are not.
But there are two good men in that canyon who stood up so the rest of us wouldn’t have to, and I mean to get to them before the sun does.
Anybody wants to turn back, do it now and no shame. ”
Nobody turned back.
“Then ride,” Lucy said, and swung the sorrel west, leading them out under the stars at a pace that ate the miles.
She knew the way in now. Cooley had every gun watching the canyon trail. No one had thought to post a watch on the ridge. She brought them up the canyon, not by the trail Cooley’s men had climbed but by the back benches and the far slope, the route she’d fled down hours before.
They came over the height above the steeple boulder with the wind in their faces and the enemy below them and unaware.
The last of the day was long gone from the rim, and the canyon lay in full dark, but the burning cave mouth threw a red, leaping light up the stone walls.
She looked down into the great bowl, it all lying below her like a thing on a table.
And in that light, on the talus slope below the boulder, two dark figures crouched behind a fallen slab, one of them slumped and still, the other up on one knee with a rifle, turning, hunted.
Nate. And above and around him, working down the rocks from two sides, slow and sure, closing in to shut the trap, came the dark shapes of Cooley’s guns.
Three of them, maybe four. Moving in on a wounded man and a near-dead one with all the time in the world.
Lucy’s chest went cold, and very clear. “There,” she breathed and pointed, and the six of them saw it too. She heard old Halloran’s breath go out in a low Gaelic curse. “The ones climbing down. Not the men by the slab, those are ours. You fire on the climbers. You fire when I do.”
She brought the sorrel to the lip of the ridge and laid her father’s rifle across a rock as he’d taught her on a hundred Saturday mornings.
No lady’s flinch, cheek down to the wood, and she found the nearest of Cooley’s men in her sights where he picked his way down toward Nate.
She let her breath out halfway and fired.
The canyon came apart in their crossfire. Seven guns spoke at once from the height, raining down into the bowl where Cooley’s men had thought themselves the only hunters in the dark. The lead climber pitched off his rock and rolled.
A second spun and dropped his rifle and went down clutching his leg.
The last broke all at once, the trap sprung backward on him, scrambling for the cover of the boulders and firing wildly up at muzzle flashes he couldn’t find.
Above him, the ranchers worked their levers and pumped lead down into the dark with the cold fury of people who had waited years for one clean shot at the thing that ruined them.
“Nate!” Lucy screamed it down into the noise, firing, levering, firing. “Nate, we’re here! Hold on, we’re here!”
It broke fast after that. With the count turned against them, Chambers’s men ran.
She saw Cooley. Even at that distance, even in the dark, she knew the long coat, the rangy, unhurried shape of him, suddenly not unhurried at all, scrambling back through the rocks toward where the horses must be picketed below.
One of the cowhands’ shots caught him as he ran.
He lurched, clapped a hand to his shoulder, and didn’t fall.
He got to a horse and dragged himself up onto it one-armed and laid himself low along its neck, crashing away down the canyon into the dark, leaving his dead behind him and his wounded crying on the rocks.
“Let him go,” Lucy said, catching the cowhand’s arm before he could spur after him .
“Let him go. We’ve got what matters.” She was already off the ridge and scrambling down the talus toward the slab, her boots sliding, her heart in her mouth, all the cold soldier in her gone the instant the shooting stopped and only the girl left, terrified of what she’d find behind that rock.
Nate rose up to meet her, soot-black, bare to the waist, a wild thing in the firelight, and she ran the last yards and fetched up hard against him, both her hands fisting in the grime of his arms to know he was solid and breathing and real.
“Josh,” he said, before anything else, as she’d known he would. “He’s alive. He’s bad but he’s alive. The bleeding’s slowed.” He held her off to look at her, his hands hard on her shoulders, his eyes going over her face in the firelight. “You came back. You said you’d come back.”
“I told you to hold till I did.” Her voice wouldn’t work right, and she gave up trying to make it.
“You held. You stubborn, impossible man, you held.” She hadn’t meant to put her face against his sooty shoulder.
She did it anyway, just for a breath, and felt him go still under her, not the hunting stillness this time but another kind.
His hand came up and pressed between her shoulder blades, once, and that was all, and it was more than enough.
Neither of them said a word about it. There would be time for words, or there wouldn’t be.
Out here in the smoke and the dying, a body learned to take what the moment gave and let the rest be.
The others were coming down now, the Hallorans, her mother, sliding down to where Josh lay, and there was water going to his lips and a blanket over him and the quick, low talk of competent people in a crisis.
For one moment, Lucy let herself stand inside the circle of Nate’s hands and simply breathe, his pulse slamming under her palm, the canyon stinking of smoke and powder, both of them alive.
She tilted her head back. He was already looking at her. The watchfulness had gone out of his face. She held his gaze in the firelight and didn’t look away. Then she felt him go still under her hands. That stillness she knew.
He was looking off down the dark canyon where Cooley had fled. And she caught the understanding rising in his face like cold water, knew it the same instant he did, and the joy of being alive drained out of the night.
“Cooley’s hit but he’s horsed,” Nate said, low.
“And he’s riding straight for Chambers. By morning, Chambers knows all of it.
The cave. The gold. That we found it.” His hands tightened on her.
“We’ve kicked the nest, Lucy. He knows the gold’s real and found and that I can lead the law to it.
From tonight, he’s got no reason left on earth not to kill us all and burn the proof. The waiting’s over.”