She is no runaway. She is here on her own say-so and mine both. And any man who wants to dispute that can put his paper down on the ground and we'll see what it's worth in front of a territorial judge. " The bounty hunter with the paper said, "That's not how this works. " Wesley said he knew exactly how it worked because he'd watched men like them operate in this territory for going on 10 years. And there was a right way and a wrong way to go about any business. And a man who won't let another man read the document he's citing is using the wrong way.
The two bounty hunters looked at each other. Men like that do their work when there is no one to argue. Arguments are expensive. What happened next was fast and happened mostly in the dark. One of the bounty hunters went for his gun.
Wesley had been expecting it and already had his hand on his revolver, but he was a fraction behind. The sound of the shot came from his left, close enough to feel in his chest. He spun and looked. Sonsee stood at the corner of the house. She had his spare rifle.
The one he kept loaded on pegs just inside the back door. She had put the shot into the dirt between the horses' feet, not to miss, he understood later, but to make the horses move. They scattered and in the scramble the bounty hunters lost the clean moment they'd been waiting for. Wesley fired once into the darkness above Duclura's head, not to hit him, to make the choice clear. Duclura looked at Sonsee for a long count.
Then he turned his horse and rode south. The bounty hunters, faced now with two guns and no easy advantage, followed. They didn't come back. Wesley stood in the dark yard for a moment, his heart going at the inside of his ribs like it intended to leave. He looked at Sonsee.
She still had the rifle up, watching the road, making sure they were actually gone. When she lowered it, the steadiness in her hands was the steadiness of someone who had made a decision and at peace with having made it. He said, in the best Chiricahua he had, "You didn't have to. " She said, in clean, careful English that she had apparently been holding in reserve for exactly this kind of moment, "Yes, I did. " He laughed. The kind of laugh that comes out when the thing you feel is too large for any other shape. She looked at him for a second with something cautious in her face, and then, very briefly, the corner of her mouth moved.
They went back inside. He made coffee. She set the rifle back on its pegs. Word got back to the camp in the Dragoons. It moves quickly in that country, and a Chiricahua woman with a rifle standing beside a white rancher against Duclura was the kind of story that travels fast.