Chapter 18
Morning found Nate at the kitchen table with his guns spread out before him on a square of oilcloth, cleaning them the slow way Josh had taught him because a man’s life ran out the barrel of a fouled gun.
They’d come home in the black hours before dawn, the wounded and the weary, and put Josh to bed in the back room with the wound packed clean and a fever held off so far by stubbornness alone.
Now the sun was up, golden over the foothills, and Nate worked the cleaning rod down the Winchester’s bore and thought about the night ahead.
His hands didn’t shake. That was the thing he kept coming back to. They didn’t shake. Fourteen years he’d dreamed of a reckoning and woke sweating from it, and now that it had come, he was empty of everything but a cold readiness, like the still air before a storm breaks.
He oiled the Colt, loaded it, and laid it down.
He filled the loops of his belt. He packed the saddlebags with what a man needed and nothing he didn’t: jerky and cartridges and a coil of rope.
He did it all with the quiet that had come over the house; the others moving softly around him because they all knew what the spread oilcloth meant.
A year ago in Boston, he’d been a dockhand with quick fists and a dead family and nothing ahead of him but the next shift and the next winter.
He hadn’t known one end of a rifle from the other.
He looked at his own hands now, sure and unhurried on the cold iron, and could scarcely credit they were the same hands.
Josh had built them. Josh and the long mornings in the dry creek bed and the patient, endless drilling, until the work that had felt like a stranger’s became as much his own as breathing. He owed the old man in the back room more than the man would ever let himself be thanked for.
He meant to pay it tonight in the only coin that would do, by coming home and by leaving Josh’s debt to Eldon finally fully settled in the dirt of the Chambers yard.
“You’re going tonight.” Lucy stood in the doorway with two cups of coffee. “After him. Alone.”
“Tonight.” He took the coffee. “While he’s still off-balance. Cooley’ll have ridden in to him before dawn, bleeding, with the news it’s all come apart. A rattled man does his worst thinking in the dark, and I mean to be there for it before he’s slept on it and got clever again.”
A floorboard creaked, and Josh came out of the back room.
He had no business being on his feet, and they all knew it.
He came, one hand on the wall, gray as ash, the bandage bulked under his shirt, but he came, and he lowered himself into a chair at the table with a grunt that he tried to swallow and couldn’t.
“You’re not riding out of here alone,” Josh said.
“I’ll come. Give me an hour to find my legs. ”
“You can’t sit a horse, and you know it.
” Nate said it gently because the old man’s pride was a tender thing this morning.
“You lost too much blood. You climb on a horse, you’ll faint off it inside a mile and bleed out in a ditch, and then I’ve lost you and gained nothing.
You did your part. You did more than any man could ask.
Now you rest and you live because I’ll have need of you after, to tell the marshal what you know. ”
Josh’s jaw worked. The argument was in him, and the truth of it was in him too, and the truth won, the way it does in a man too honest to fool himself for long.
He looked down at his own useless hands a moment.
Then he pushed up out of the chair and went back into the bedroom, slowly, and came back slower.
In his arms, he carried the long canvas case.
He laid it on the oilcloth and drew back the canvas, and there was the Sharps, the big single-shot buffalo gun, the tang sight folded down, the stock worn smooth by forty years of his hands.
“Then you’ll take her,” Josh said roughly. “She’ll reach out near half a mile and put a man down who never heard the shot. You’ve got the eye for her. Always did. Your daddy’s eye.” He pressed it into Nate’s hands and closed the boy’s fingers around the wood with both his scarred ones.
“I’ve carried this gun since before you were born. There’s not a thing I own I set more store by. You bring her back to me. You hear? You bring her back, and yourself behind her, both come home. That’s the only thanks I’ll take for the loan.”
Nate’s throat closed. He turned the rifle in his hands, the weight of it, the trust of it. “I’ll bring her home,” he said. “And me behind her.”
“Shoot straight,” Josh said. “And don’t be a fool with it.”
* * *
It was Lucy he had to settle with last, and she was the hardest of all.
He walked her out to the porch in the late morning, away from the others, and laid out what he needed of her, and it was as much as he’d asked of anyone.
“Two things, and they both matter more than what I’m doing,” he said.
“Ride to Denver, to the telegraph office, and wire the federal marshal at Colorado Springs. Tell him plain: murder, gold fraud, arson, attempted killing, a county sheriff bought and crooked. Tell him to come and bring men. How long, do you reckon?”
“Two days.” Her mouth was a hard line. “If the wire finds him quick and he rides hard. Two days at the soonest, and that’s if God’s paying attention.”
“Two days.” Nate nodded. “Then the second thing. On your way, rouse the others. Halloran, Pruett, every gun that stood with us last night and any new ones their courage has bought since. Tell them to ride for the Chambers place tonight and come up on it quiet and wait at the tree line. If this goes the way I mean it to, I’ll have Chambers held for the law by the time they get there.
If it goes wrong…” He held her eyes for a long beat.
“Then they’re the law until the marshal comes.
Either road, I want honest guns on that ground by morning. ”
She took it in, all of it, the cold sense of it, and hated it but accepted it in the same breath because she was too clear-eyed to pretend there was a softer way. Then she stepped closer and put her hand flat on his chest, over the heart, and her voice when it came wasn’t sharp at all.
“Promise me a thing first.” Her green eyes held him and wouldn’t let go.
“You’re not riding out there to murder him.
I know what’s in you. Fourteen years of it.
And he’s earned killing ten times over, I’ll not say he hasn’t.
But you go out there for revenge, and you’ll either die getting it or you’ll get it and find it didn’t fill the hole.
It never does, and either way, Chambers wins because he’ll have made you into a thing like him. ”
Her hand pressed harder. “Give him to the law. Make him face it. You give him the chance to throw down and hang proper-like, and if he won’t take it, that’s his choosing, not yours.
Promise me you’ll go for justice and not for blood.
I can’t lose you to a grave or to the gallows.
Not now. Not when I’ve only just—” She stopped.
She didn’t finish it. She didn’t have to.
“I promise,” Nate said quietly and meant it down to the floor of himself.
“I’ll give him to the law. I want him to live long enough to lose everything in front of the whole county.
That’s worse for a man like him than a bullet, and it’s the justice my mother and father have got coming.
Not just his death. His ruin, done lawfully, where it can’t be undone.
” He put his hand over hers on his chest. “I’ll come back.
I’ve got too much here now to do otherwise. That’s your doing, Lucy.”
Her mouth tipped and steadied, wet at the edges. “It had better be,” she said, and leaned forward with a tender kiss on his cheek.
For a moment, neither of them moved, her hand still on his chest and his over it, the busy house behind them and the long night ahead, and the whole of the thing between them sitting unspoken in the small space and needing no speaking.
He had come to Colorado with one purpose burning out everything else: to find a killer and settle a debt of blood. Understanding now, standing on this porch with her hand warm under his, that somewhere along the road, the purpose had grown a second half he’d never planned on.
He no longer wanted only to end a thing.
He wanted to begin one afterward, when it was done.
A life of his own, here, with her in it.
The wanting frightened him more than Chambers did because Chambers could only take his life, and this could take his heart, but he found he will risk them both.
“After,” he said. “We’ll talk of after when there is one. ”
“After,” she agreed, stepped back, and let him go.
* * *
He rode out at dusk under a thin, rising moon, the Sharps in the saddle scabbard and the Winchester across the bow, and his father’s memory riding quietly in his chest.
He’d looked in on Josh before he left, the old man sunk in a fevered doze with his gray brows knit even in sleep, and he hadn’t woken him.
The land went blue and then black around him, the foothills cutting their hard line against the last green of the sky.
He held the gelding to a steady walk to keep it fresh and didn’t let himself think past the next hill.
He thought instead of his father, who’d been brave because he was scared and did the thing, anyway.
Of his mother running to the man she loved across a dark yard with no thought for the gun.
Of the boy in the trunk who’d hidden and watched and lived, and grown up, and come three thousand miles to stand where that boy could never stand.
Not hiding. Out in the open at last, riding toward the thing instead of away.
The moon climbed. The miles fell behind. And eventually, he came up the long grade to the top of the rise that overlooked the Chambers ranch, drawing rein in the black timber, and looked down.
The big house blazed with light. And in the yard below, moving and massing in the dark, were torches, a dozen of them. Nearly thirty men on foot and on horseback gathered in the firelight with rifles in their hands.
Cooley had reached him. Chambers knew. And the murderer of Eldon and Vallie Ralston had called in every gun he owned and was marshaling them in his yard. Every rifle faced the road, watching for riders to come up the front way.