Open ground. You bring her. I bring him. Nobody brings anybody else. You think I'm a fool.
I think you're a politician. Elections in the fall. That's worse. A long pause. Down the street.
A dog woke up and barked once and went back to sleep. 3:00. I got Spivey up on the sorrel in front of me and rode out the way I'd come. walking, not hurrying. Every step of it with my back to that porch and my skin crawling like there were ants under it behind the sheriff's office while every eye in Saguaro Wells was on Main Street. Two women in calico skirts had walked in through the back door. That part I didn't see.
I heard about it later. Kane at the window with a knife. Isha going through the desk like she was looking for a lost thimble, a locked drawer, a knife blade, a ledger bound in green cloth, fat and greasy at the corners, and out the back again and gone into the mesquite before Ror even turned around to go back inside. Isha told it to me afterward like it was the funniest thing that had ever happened to her. He had a picture on his wall of himself, very large, painted.
I almost took it to sell. Why didn't you? too heavy and too ugly. 3:00 on the flat, you could see 5 mi in every direction from that ground, which was why I'd picked it. Creassote and hard pan and heat shimmer. The ruined mission behind us on its little rise. And coming out of the shimmer from the east, small then larger, three riders, Ror in the middle, a deputy on his right, and on his left on a gray mare with a lead rope running back to his saddle horn, Yona.
They stopped a hundred yards out. So did we. Me with Spivey, Tavana at my stirrup on foot with the Winchester, the others in the rocks behind us where I couldn't see them, and neither could he. Send her across. Send him first together on the count.
We walked them across at the same time. Spivy shuffling in irons toward his boss. Yona on the gray mare, leading it, her face swollen on one side, her lips split, a cut on her temple crusted black. She walked straight. She did not look at Ror as she passed Spivey.
She did not look at anybody. She kept her eyes on Tavana and walked like a woman crossing a river on stones. Halfway they passed each other. Nobody fired. Then Yon was among us and Tavana had her arms around her.
Both of them very still, foreheads pressed together. Neither one crying. Something quieter than crying. Ror wheeled his horse, called back over his shoulder, almost cheerful. It isn't over, son.
You know that. I know. He rode off east with Spivey up behind his deputy. I watched them all the way to the shimmer. We walked Yona and the grey mare back up to the mission ruins.
Yona didn't speak until we were inside the chapel walls and Dashka had water at her lips and Kane had her hands. Then she looked up at me. There was another man at the ranch where they kept me. Not Ror's man. Ror's master.
Old gay beard, gold watched on a chain. Her eyes widened a fraction. You know him? I know him. He did not ask me about the gold.
Not once. He asked only about the hides, where the water was. He asked very politely. She touched her split lip. Ror asked less politely.
Isha set the green ledger in my lap. I opened it. Ror wrote a neat hand. Columns dates sums ap $2,000 received. April dupri 500.
Paid J. Pickering matter. Fitch $40. Wire survey company a name I didn't know. land options on 12 sections along the proposed line. E, every one of them sitting on a blue sign on the maps.
I closed it carefully like it might bite. That's enough to hang them both. In your court, Tavana was watching me. If your court ever sees it, Dashka was standing by the gray mare, running her hand down its foreleg. She lifted the hoof and looked at it and frowned.
Marshal, this shoe I came over on the iron shoe of the left fore cut deep and fresh with a file, a little notch, a slanted cross, plain as a signature, the kind of mark that would print itself in every soft patch of ground between here and anywhere. Ah, no. I turned and looked east, toward the flat, toward the shimmer where Ror had disappeared, and north of it, close closer than they had any right to be, a line of riders coming at a hard trot. 10 12 more riding in good order following the grey mare's track straight up the hill toward us into the walls now they were already moving can to the gap in the cloister dashka and Isha to the chapel doorway y limping to the altar steps with Wesley Tavana to the foot of the bell tower where that morning she had climbed up and wedged the deer skin bundle into a crack under the old bellbeam because it was the highest driest place in the ruins. I went up after her. From the top of that crack tower, I counted them as they spread around the rise. 14 riding in good order, well-mounted, rifles out, not county deputies.
Hired men in long coats, the kind who come with references. They surrounded the ruins in a wide r and stopped just out of pistol range. Professionals. Nobody wasted a shot. Then two more rode up behind them.
Ror on his tall black silver on the horn of his saddle catching the low sun. I heard Wesley make a sound below me down in the chapel. A man recognizing a thing he'd seen once in a cloud of dust and never forgotten. And beside Ror on a fine boned bay, sitting straight as a church pew in a dark coat with a gold chain across his vest and his gray beard trimmed short, Amos Puit, my teacher. The man who taught me to read a trail and write a report and hold my temper in a courtroom.