Good people, most of them, but frozen because sometimes the crowd just needs someone to move first. The angle of the road to the chapel. The gap between the wagon and the gate. The weight of the ring in his pocket. Then the man near the wagon looked up toward the ridge.
The man's name was Felix Guard. He was 43 years old, born in Sonora, and he had spent the better part of his adult life as what the newspapers called a hired hard case, which was a polite way of saying he did whatever unpleasant things needed doing for whoever was paying. He was not a cruel man, exactly. He had lines he would not cross, though the lines had shifted over the years in the way lines do when you spend enough time around people who don't have them. He had ended up in Voss's employ 6 months earlier, which was a step down from some of his earlier work, and a step up from others.
Three years ago, Felix had been part of a crew hired to pressure a group of homesteaders near the Canadian River in the Northeast Territory. The job had gone bad in the way those jobs sometimes went. One of the other men on the crew had decided to escalate past what had been agreed. And by the time it was over, three people were injured, and the local marshal was 2 hours away, and the entire crew was in the middle of a situation that was going to end in either a shooting or a hanging. Felix had been positioned near a water tank on the north side of the homestead when the man in the flat-brimmed hat stepped out of a barn and looked at him.
The man had had a clear angle. It was not a complicated shot. Felix had known it, and the man had known it. Instead, the man had said, "You don't have to die for someone else's money. Walk away from this job, walk away from these people, and don't draw for hire again." And Felix had made the calculation of a man who has been offered a clean exit from a situation that has no clean exits.
And he had walked. He had not stopped thinking about it. He looked at the flat-brimmed hat on the ridge and the face under it, and he felt two things in sequence. The first was the cold recognition of a man who has been found by something he thought he had left behind. The second was the particular sensation, unfamiliar, uncomfortable, undeniable, of a debt come due in a way that also happened to be an opportunity.
Down in the yard, the situation had the particular stillness of something that has not yet decided which way it will go. Pickett had stopped reading from the document and was watching the ridge. One of the men near the chapel steps had moved slightly. Not a draw. Not yet, but a repositioning of weight that said his hands were thinking about it.
The other three were watching Pickett for a signal, and Pickett was watching the man on the ridge, and none of them were moving because none of them had been told to move. The crowd in the road was still, 20 people or thereabouts, in their Sunday clothes, and not one of them was speaking. Hector Beaumont had his hat in both hands, turning it. Two women near the mercantile side of the road had drawn close together. A boy of maybe 10, there with his father, had worked his way slightly behind the nearest adult in a manner he probably did not notice he was doing.