He almost made it. The shot came from the front of the tunnel. One shot, Tull's rifle, and it echoed and echoed and echoed. Ostrander pitched forward into the dirt and did not get up. No.
Anel was beside him in four strides, turned him over, held his head. Ostrander looked up at him, blinked once, twice, and was gone. Just gone. The only man in the world who could prove Anel didn't kill Jubel Varnum. The only man who could prove Odessa didn't kill Lucius.
Dead in his arms in the dirt in the dark. Shot him trying to escape. Tull's voice carrying loud for the posse. The devil was holding him hostage. You all saw it.
Anel looked down at the dead man. then up at the gray light of the air shaft. Then back toward the voices at the mouth of the tunnel. Getting closer, he laid Ostrander's head down gently in the dirt and ran for the light. The shaft was narrow, too narrow, he got his shoulders in and stuck rock grinding into his ribs.
Above him, a patch of gray sky. Below him, boots in the tunnel. Coming. Come on. Come on.
Breathe out. Make yourself small. You've been making yourself small your whole life. You can do it one more time. One more.
He breathed out every bit of air in his body and scraped through. It tore half the shirt off his back, took skin with it. He came out onto the mountain side on his hands and knees in the snow. Bleeding from the arm, bleeding from the ribs, bleeding from a dozen places he couldn't feel behind him, shouting, echoing up the shaft. He got up.
He ran downhill toward the ridge, toward home, toward her. He smelled it before he saw it. smoke. Not wood smoke, not chimney smoke. Thick black wrong.
He came over the last rise and stopped. The house on the ridge was gone. Just gone. Where it had stood, there was a black skeleton of timbers, smoking, collapsed in on itself like a dead thing. The great hearth he'd built stood alone in the middle of it all.
A stone tower in a field of ashes. The roof was gone. The walls were gone. The high ceilings he'd built so he would never have to stoop. The wide doors, the kitchen, the settle, the little room at the end of the hall.
All of it. Ash. Odessa. His voice cracked across the valley. Odessa.
Nothing. Just the wind and the hiss of snow falling on hot ash. He ran into the wreckage, stumbling over burnt beams, kicking aside charred boards. Burning his hands on timbers still too hot to touch. Odessa.
Odessa, answer me, please. Nothing. Nothing. the little room at the end of the hall where it had been just a heap of black. And in the middle of it, half buried, something iron, the bolt, the iron bolt from the inside of her door, the one he'd put on that very first morning, black now, twisted by the heat, still attached to a scrap of charred wood.
And nailed to that wood, fluttering in the wind, was a piece of paper, scorched at the edges, but whole, he pulled it free with shaking fingers. He could read now. She had taught him. All winter long beside the fire one word at a time. And he wished, "God forgive him." He wished he couldn't because it was her handwriting.
He knew her handwriting. He had stared at it every night for 2 months. Every curve, every loop, I'm sorry, Anel. Like the others, there was more below that, a line or two. He didn't read it.
He couldn't. His eyes would not go any further. Like the others, she was gone. She had left him. Just like the other seven, he sank to his knees in the ashes.
Of course. Of course she left. Why wouldn't she? Look at him. Look at what he is.
A condemned man. An escaped convict. A devil with blood on his hands. Every man in the territory hunting him. No house, no land, no future.
Nothing to offer. Nothing. Of course she left. Any woman with sense would leave. She was the smartest woman he'd ever met.
Of course she left. He'd always known she would. Deep down, under all the hoping, under the cake and the wooden ren and the proposal in the mud, he had always known. Seven brides and now eight. He knelt there in the ruins of his life, and his hand resting in the ash, closed around something small and hard and hot.
He looked down, a little tin box, dented, black with soot. The old crust of rust and pitch burned clean off by the fire. His mother's tea tin. He picked it up, held it. The only thing left, the only thing in his whole life that had never left him.
He put it in his pocket. He did not look at the lid. He did not look at anything. When the posse came over the ridge an hour later, he was still kneeling there. 20 men, rifles, tull out in front on his big horse.
They fanned out around the ashes. Slow, careful, guns trained on the giant, kneeling in the black snow. Anel didn't look up. Get up, Branick. Tol said, "Hands where I can see them." Anel got up.
He held out his hands, wrists together, bloody, burned, empty. "I'm done," he said. Tol stared at him, suspicious. "That's it? No fight?
No fight? Why not?" Ants looked out at the valley, at the White Mountains, at the long road down to the depot where a small woman had once stepped off a train in the rain and did not flinch. "Nothing left to fight for," he said. They put the chains on him right there in the ashes. He let them.
Saturday came cold and clear. The gallows stood in the middle of the main street. New lumber, freshly cut. The carpenter had worked all night. You could still smell the pine.
The whole town came. They stood in the snow in their coats and scarves and bonnets. Silent. Hundreds of them, every soul in Copper Hollow. Some of them had come to see the devil finally get what was coming.