Chapter 18 #2
The two split apart as they approached — one angling toward David, the other drifting wide toward the wagon and Karen.
David registered the positioning and didn't like what it told him about how deliberately these two worked together.
Men traveling together out of convenience didn't usually split their approach without thinking about it first.
Smokey watched them without moving, low and steady.
"That dog bite?" one asked.
"If he needs to."
That cooled the approach for a moment, though not enough.
David shifted June a half step, closing the angle the dismounted approach had opened.
"Easy," the older one said, hands loose and visible, voice unbothered. "Ain't looking for trouble."
That was exactly the answer that kept David's hand off his pistol. Nothing the man had said or done crossed a line David could point to. He asked Curtis another idle question about the team, something about how they handled in harness, and Curtis half-turned to answer it.
The mistake was letting them come as close as David did, though neither man had done anything yet that justified drawing first. The older one had timed his questions to keep everybody talking instead of watching, and it had worked.
Then everything changed at once.
One rider's hand moved to his hip and came up with a pistol before David's own hand had cleared leather. The second followed a half-second behind, covering Curtis on the wagon seat.
"Hands where I can see them," the first said.
Curtis stopped the wagon rather than test two loaded guns with the reins in his hands. Waylon and Willie settled, ears back but steady. Smokey's growl rolled out low and deep.
"Call him off or I'll shoot him," the second rider said.
David gave Smokey a quiet command. The dog stayed close, tense, but didn't move against them. Control mattered more right now than instinct did.
One man stayed mounted, gun steady on David and Curtis. The other swung down and walked toward the wagon.
"You don't want to get near her," David said, reaching for the story before he'd fully thought through that Karen wasn't staged inside it, no blanket, no mask, nothing ready.
The man wasn't buying it regardless. He pulled the clothing cover back, dug through the first layer of shirts, and found the cartons beneath.
He opened one.
Medical supplies.
He opened another.
More of the same.
His whole posture changed. "Well." He looked back toward his partner. "They got medicine."
David understood immediately how much more dangerous the situation had become. Medicine was worth more than almost anything else they could be carrying, and both men now knew it.
The two talked between themselves like David's group wasn't close enough to matter, or didn't matter enough to bother lowering their voices for.
"Take the wagon and the horses, leave them," the mounted one said.
"They've seen us," the other said, standing near the open wagon.
"So?" the mounted man said.
"So, we don't leave them walking."
David understood the shape of what came next before either man said it outright.
"All three?" the mounted one asked.
"All three."
No speech, no relish in it. Just two men deciding three lives cost less than the trouble of leaving witnesses, which made it worse than if they'd enjoyed the idea.
"You take that wagon," Curtis said, from the driver's seat, voice even, "you're going to need somebody who knows that team. They don't drive for just anybody."
The mounted man's eyes flicked toward him. "We'll manage."
"You won't get ten miles."
Curtis wasn't bargaining. David understood that the moment he heard it — Curtis was talking to buy attention, not mercy, pulling both men's focus toward himself and the argument rather than the woman sitting quiet on the bay gelding a few yards off.
David searched for an opening and found none that didn't risk Curtis or Karen catching a round meant for him. Curtis was doing the same math from the wagon seat, David could tell from how quiet he'd gone between sentences.
Neither of them had accounted for Karen.
The mounted man's attention sat mostly on David and Curtis, the greater threats in his eyes. Karen's coat had kept her handgun out of sight the whole encounter, and nobody had thought to search a woman riding quietly on a bay gelding.
The dismounted attacker turned partly away, talking through the details of what they'd take and how. The mounted one glanced toward his partner for half a second.
Karen moved.
No warning, no hesitation. She drew and fired twice, fast, at the dismounted man standing nearest the wagon.
He went down before he'd finished turning back around.
The mounted attacker's head snapped toward the sound, gun already swinging to find a new target.
He fired as his partner fell, the shot going wide of David by enough that David never felt it pass.
David moved at the same instant, June shifting under him just enough to break the man's angle, and drew his own pistol in one practiced motion. He fired twice.
The man got one more round off before the second of David's shots took him, and he folded sideways out of the saddle, hitting the ground hard.
The whole exchange had lasted seconds, not long enough for David to remember deciding anything. His body had simply done what the situation required.
Somewhere in the middle of it, one of the attacker's stray rounds found Whiskey.
He jumped hard enough that Karen nearly lost her seat, a line of blood already showing high on his shoulder where the bullet had grazed him.
For one bad second Karen thought he'd been hit center, and her voice cracked calling his name. "Whiskey."
She got down fast, reaching for him. David kept his pistol up, covering both fallen men in case either moved again.
Curtis fought to hold Waylon and Willie steady, the gunfire close enough to spook even two horses that had already proven themselves calm under real pressure.
Smokey stayed tight to David until David gave the word to ease off.
David didn't assume either man was finished.
He approached carefully, weapon ready. The one Karen had shot lay motionless, clearly dead. The one David had hit had gone down hard but stirred, one hand moving toward the pistol he'd dropped a few feet away.
David fired once more before the man's fingers closed on it.
He checked both weapons from a careful distance before touching anything, then turned his full attention to Karen and Whiskey, because the dead didn't need him and the living did.
Whiskey's wound turned out shallower than the blood made it look — hair gone, skin torn along a narrow line high on the outer shoulder, nothing that had touched muscle deep enough to matter or come anywhere near the joint below it.
Blood ran down his foreleg in a thin line by the time Curtis reached him, enough that Karen's face had gone the color of chalk.
"Don't move him yet," Curtis said, already tracing the blood back to its source with his eyes before he touched anything.
He found where it started, high on the shoulder, and worked his fingers around the edges of the wound with the same care he gave everything involving the horses.
"Creased him," Curtis said.
"You're sure?" Karen asked.
"I'm sure."
Only then did Karen let out the breath she'd been holding, and the moment she did, David watched her shift completely — fear folding away behind the work in front of her, hands already moving toward the wound with the same steadiness she'd shown treating every injury and illness back at the Hollow these past eight months.
Curtis checked his movement before letting anybody relax, walking him a few careful steps, watching his gait for any hitch that would mean something worse than it looked.
Nothing showed. Karen irrigated the wound thoroughly, using only what she needed from their medical supplies, then pressed clean gauze against it until the bleeding stopped.
Whiskey stood through the whole examination better than David expected, head low, occasionally shifting his weight but never pulling away from Karen's hands. Curtis ran a palm down the leg beneath the wound, checking for any other injury, and found nothing.
"He's going to be sore," Karen said.
"So am I," Curtis said.
Karen looked at him. "Were you shot?"
"No," Curtis said.
"Then I'm less worried about you."
David ran a hand along Whiskey's neck, and something about the horse getting hurt over this bothered him more than he expected, given how much worse the day could have gone.
Once Whiskey was settled, Karen looked toward the man she'd shot, and David watched whatever had carried her through the last minute start to drain out of her all at once.
"He was going to kill us," she said.
"Yes."
"I know that."
David understood what she meant well enough not to argue the point.
"I didn't even think," Karen said.
"Good."
She looked at him. "That's supposed to make me feel better?"
"No." David held her eyes a moment. "It kept us alive."
He left it there, because there wasn't a better answer waiting behind it.
Curtis argued against lingering, and David agreed, though the search came first.
David went through both men's pockets and saddlebags quickly and methodically, the same way he'd learned to do it during his trip home last summer.
Two rifles worth carrying. Ammunition that fit weapons they already owned.
A little food, wrapped and dry — more than enough for another day or two, David noticed, not the meager scraps of somebody who'd gone hungry into robbery out of necessity.
A good knife on the one who'd searched the wagon.
Canteens. A small amount of salt wrapped in cloth, worth more than its weight suggested.
Nothing bulky enough to threaten the wagon's balance, and nothing David felt any guilt taking off two men who'd planned on leaving three bodies behind for less.