The kind of men who wore their guns low and kept their expressions flat and did not arrive in small towns by accident. Ashcom's men, the kind you hire quietly over years for situations exactly like this one. Anel did not slow down. The first man swung his rifle up. Anel took it away from him.
It took perhaps one second. The man sat down very hard on the platform boards and looked up at the sky with the expression of someone reassessing fundamental assumptions about the world. The second man fired. The shot went past Anel's ear close enough that he felt the air move, which meant the man's hands were shaking, which meant he had made the critical error of holding still long enough to get a good look at what was coming at him across the platform. Anel kept coming.
The second man fired again and missed again and then ran, which Anel did not have time to be glad about because the third man had stepped behind the freight car door and Anel went left instead of straight and the third man's shot hit the platform post where Anel's head had just been. And then Anel was on the train. First passenger car. He went through the door hard enough to bend the latch. Dark interior, faces staring up from seats.
A woman pulled her child against her. A man in a checked coat went very still. He looked down the length of the car. No Odessa. Second car.
He wrenched the connecting door. Cold air and the clatter of wheels on iron went through. Also no Odessa. A conductor flattened himself against the wall with his ticket punch held out in front of him like it might help. The freight car.
He reached for the connecting door handle. A hand closed on his wrist from behind. Strong gloved. surprisingly strong for a 55-year-old banker who wore a gold watch chain and rode a fine horse and had never, as far as anyone knew, done a day of physical labor in his life, Ashcom. He had come through the side door of the second car, the one Anel had not come through, and he had crossed the car fast and quiet in the way of a man who has been underestimated his entire career and has learned to use it.
He yanked. Anel was off balance for one half of one second. The latch was in his hand and his weight was forward and the pull was unexpected and that was enough. Ashcom shoved him hard into the wall of the car. Anel's shoulder hit the wood.
Ashcom was already moving past him toward the freight car door. Fast and certain, the movements of a man executing a plan he had thought through in advance. Anel followed. The freight car was dark. Canvas covered crates stacked to the ceiling.
The smell of cold dust and machine oil and the cold iron smell of the rails coming up through the floor. The train was moving now slowly but moving the platform sliding past the slatboard walls. At the far end of the car in the shadows between two large crates, something moved. A shape small. And then the shape turned and he saw her eyes in the dark.
And they were exactly what they had always been from the first moment on a rainy platform when she looked up at him and the whole world changed. bright, dark, alive, unafraid. Her hands were bound behind her, a rope around her waist tied to a bolt on the crate, a gag in her mouth. Her black hair had come half down from its pins. There was a bruise coming up on her temple that he was going to think about later when there was time, and the thought of it was going to make his hands want to do things his mother would not have liked.
But her eyes, her eyes were on his, and they were steady, and they said, "I knew you would come. I knew it. I wrote Ren wrong because I knew you would read it and I knew you would come. Ashcom stepped between them. He had a pistol.
Of course, he had a pistol. He had probably always had a pistol in the same way he had always had a plan. Quietly without making a thing of it, kept out of sight until the moment it was needed. Don't, he said. Anel stopped.
The train was picking up speed. The depot sliding away behind them. The town of Copper Hollow moving past the slats. the bank, the church steeple, the gallows still on its side in the street, all of it going away. Ashcom's gun hand was steady.
That was the thing after everything. After the gallows fell and the crowd turned and the plan came apart, his hand was still steady. Because Leland Ashcom had spent 25 years being the calmst man in every room, and he was not going to stop now. "You can't win this," Ashcom said. Not on a moving train, not unarmed, not with her tied to that bolt.
I've been winning things I shouldn't be able to win all morning. Anel said, "I'm starting to think it's a habit. It ends here. It already ended. Back in the street, you just haven't admitted it yet." Asham's jaw tightened.
The deed is real. The deed is fraud. Your ex is on it. My ex from a 21-year-old boy who trusted the one man his dying mother left to look after him. Anel took one slow step forward.
How much of that deed did you read to me, Leland, when you sat me down and said just a formality? Just sign here. How many of those words did you skip? All of the important ones, Ashcom said, and something in his voice changed. Not remorse.
Something harder than that. Something that had been packed down for a long time under the smooth surface of the banker's smile. Because you would never have signed it if I'd read them. And I needed that land. I needed that pass.
Do you have any idea what that railroad contract is worth? Do you have any idea what 25 years of waiting for those copper strikes to pan out is worth? More than my mother's life. The freight car was very quiet. Only the wheels, the iron on the iron, the wind finding gaps in the slat walls.