Chapter 19
Nate left the gelding tied in the timber a quarter mile out and went the rest of the way on his belly. The nearly thirty men in the yard never knew a thing.
That was the gift of it, and he understood now why Josh had drilled it into him morning after morning when Nate had thought it a small skill in shooting.
Every gun in that yard faced the roads, waiting for an army to ride up the front way.
He hadn’t posted a single man to watch for one man alone, afoot, creeping through the dark, patient as a thing that hunts.
Nate got close.
He lay in the sage at the edge of the firelight and read the yard as he’d read sign in the dry washes, slow and whole, missing nothing, and found the gaps between the moving men, the dark seams the torchlight didn’t reach.
A guard at the gate, facing outwards. Two at the bunkhouse, watching the road.
The press of them gathered around the front of the big house, rifles across their arms, waiting on an attack from without.
Nobody watched the darkness behind the house, where the ground fell away to a dry kitchen garden, a cellar door, and a row of black windows.
He went that way, low, between the held breaths of the sentries, the Sharps slung tightly across his back and the Winchester cradled in his arms, and it took him the better part of an hour to cross ground a man could walk in two minutes. He didn’t hurry. Hurrying was how a man died here.
He moved when the torches swung away and froze when they swung back, becoming a rock, a shadow, nothing, and at the end of the slow hour, he crouched under a dark rear window with his heart beating slowly and evenly and his hands dry.
Once a man passed within ten feet of him, a young hand with a rifle and a quid of tobacco, and stopped, spat, and stood there in the dark scratching at his neck while Nate lay flat in the cold sage, not daring to fill his lungs.
The smell of the boy’s sweat and his chewing tobacco came plainly on the night air.
A cricket sang somewhere between them. If the hand looked down, if the torchlight caught one button or the gleam of the Winchester, it ended here in the dirt with thirty guns to answer it. Nate didn’t move. He held still.
Josh had drilled it into him: the man who can wait the longest wins. He held it until the young man hitched his belt and wandered on toward the front of the house, and the night closed again behind him.
It struck Nate, crouched there in the dark with his pulse as slow as a sleeping man’s, how far he’d come from the boy who’d hidden frozen in a trunk and been able to do nothing but watch. He was hidden in the dark again. But he hadn’t come to hide. He had come to finish it.
The window was unlatched against the warm night. Of course it was. A king in his own castle, ringed by his own guns, didn’t fear an open window.
Nate eased it up and went through into the darkness of the house.
He knew the room by the light under its door and the smell of cigar smoke and whiskey leaking out beneath it, and he came down the black hall on the sides of his boots without a board so much as sighing.
He put his hand to the door and opened it on the man who had murdered his mother and father.
Cisco Chambers stood at his desk with his back half turned and a glass of whiskey in his hand. The mask was off. His florid face had gone gray and furious, the silver hair disordered where he’d dragged his hand through it, and he was talking savagely to the empty room, or to himself.
It was the talk of a man whose ordered world had cracked under him in the space of a night. Cooley must have reached him in the night. Whatever he’d told him had stripped the smooth right off.
“Evening, Mr. Chambers,” Nate said.
Chambers spun, the whiskey slopping over his hand, and he stared at the soot-streaked young man standing in his study with a Winchester leveled at his chest, and for the first time since Nate had known him, the broad face showed plain naked fear.
“You.” His voice came out cracked. “How did you get past—I’ve got thirty men in that yard.”
“They’re watching the road for an army.” Nate stepped into the lamplight, the rifle steady, the muzzle on the third button of the man’s expensive vest. “I came alone. Sit down. Hands on the desk where I can see them. We’re going to talk, you and I, about the fall of 1861.”
Chambers didn’t sit. But he set the glass down slowly and put his soft hands flat on the desk blotter.
Nate watched the cunning come back up into the cold blue eyes even through the fear, the habit of a man who’d always found a way through.
“Now, son.” The voice reached for its old, easy charm and didn’t quite find it. “Whatever Cooley’s told you, he’s a liar and a killer, you can’t credit a word?—”
“My father found gold in Clear Creek Canyon.” Nate’s voice was flat and quiet, and it cut the bluster off cleanly.
“Fourteen years ago. He wouldn’t sell it to you, and he wouldn’t tell you where it lay.
So, you rode out to our ranch one night, and you shot him dead on his own front steps, and when my mother ran to him, you shot her too.
Then you tore the house apart looking for the map and you never found it because it was already in Boston.
And you’ve hunted that gold for fourteen years and never laid a hand on it. ”
He let it sit. “I know all of it. I’ve known the man who did it since the day you jabbed your finger in my yard, the same as you jabbed it at my father while he died. I was there. I was seven years old, I was in the trunk by the door, and I saw you.”
The blood went out of Chambers’s face entirely. Nate watched it take him, the years of half-buried fear surfacing at last, and watched the last of the deacon die behind the cold blue eyes. For the first time in fourteen years, the man who’d made a county afraid was afraid himself.
“There was a boy,” Chambers whispered. “I always—there was the boy. They said no son. The file said no son.”
“You bought that file.” Nate’s finger lay alongside the trigger and didn’t tighten, though every cell of him for fourteen years had pointed at this.
“Here’s the rest. There’s a federal marshal riding from Colorado Springs right now, and he’ll be here inside two days.
There’s honest men and a written account and a piece of the gold and a girl who heard you brag about the killing, all waiting on him.
It’s over, Chambers. Not tonight by me. By the law.
You’re going to hang in front of the whole county that feared you, and they’re going to watch. ”
Chambers wet his lips. And the cunning made its last move.
“Half.” The word came fast and low. “The gold. Half of it, son, and it’s more than your daddy ever dreamed, more than that ranch could make in ten lifetimes.
You put up the rifle and ride out, and we both forget tonight.
Half the cave. Just say it.” His eyes had gone bright and desperate.
“Every man’s got a price. What’s yours?”
“My mother and father aren’t for sale.” Nate didn’t raise his voice.
“And I made a promise to a better person than you that I’d give you to the law and not the grave.
So, you’re going to come out of here ahead of this rifle, slow-like, and you’re going to wait on the marshal in your own jail. Move.”
It would have been so easy. That was the thing Lucy had understood about him before he’d fully understood it himself. His finger lay along the trigger and the man who’d orphaned him stood three feet away begging.
Fourteen years of grief and a thousand black nights all leaned on that one ounce of pressure and whispered that no court could give him what the trigger could give him now.
His father on the steps. His mother in the doorway.
The cedar smell of the trunk. He had only to let his hand finish the thought it had been thinking since he was seven years old.
He did not. Because Lucy was right, and because a bullet here made him Chambers’s kind of man and made his parents’ deaths just one more killing in the dark.
The worse punishment, the just one, was to drag this proud man out in front of the law and the county and let them break him slowly and lawfully where it would stick.
Killing him here was easy. Dragging him out in front of the county and the law was harder, and it was what his folks were owed, and he would pay it even though it cost him the satisfaction his whole body screamed for.
And there it was, in the cold blue eyes.
Nate had stood in this man’s yard and learned the small, unconscious tells of him, the smile that hardened, the finger that jabbed, the hand that strayed to the vest over the heart like a man touching a rosary.
He saw the eyes drop now, quick and sly, down and to the side, to the swell of the vest below the gold watch chain, where a small hard shape pressed out the fine cloth.
The derringer. Right where Chambers’s hand had gone once before without his knowing, Nate marked it.
“Don’t,” Nate said softly, and there was no anger in it now, only a kind of weariness and a warning meant to be heeded.
“Don’t you do it. The rope’s a worse way to go, but it’s a slower one, and a man can make his peace on the walk up the steps.
You reach for that gun, and you throw the last of your time away on nothing.
I’d rather the rope did it than me. Don’t make me break a promise to a good woman tonight. ”
For one held breath, the two of them stood frozen in the lamplight, fourteen years and two graves and a cave full of gold balanced on the point of it. The old man’s hand trembling an inch from his own vest and the young man’s finger an ounce from the trigger.
Then Chambers’s nerve broke, and his hand grabbed for the hidden gun.