I held the bundle until it scorched my fingers, then dropped it on the stone floor of the tower and watched every river in that country turned to ash. Down below, I heard Amos Puit make a sound like a man who has just been shot. You fool. You damned fool. Do you know what you've done?
I know exactly. There's nothing left to hang them for. His face changed then. I had never seen it look like that. All the kindly uncle gone.
Something underneath it I'd never looked at because I'd never wanted to. Oh, there's plenty left, son. Those women still know the country. And they'll come back for you. Every one of them.
You just made yourself the bait. They came up the tower stairs. I didn't fight. took my colt, my Winchester, my knife. One of them patted me down with his mind somewhere else, the way tired men do at the end of a long day, and slapped my coat pockets and missed my boots completely. I felt the little derringer against my ankle the whole way down those stairs.
We rode through the night, my hands tied to the horn, a man on each side ahead, roar behind me, humming a hymn through his nose. west across the flats down into the dry creek bed. I knew the cottonwood was waiting. Same grove, same crooked limb, same sand. They'd been there before us. A new rope hung from that limb now, a good one, stiff and new, with a hangman's knot tied by somebody who' tied a few.
They put my horse under it, put the noose over my head, and pulled it snug under my left ear, and left me sitting there on a nervous horse with my hands tied, looking east, where the sky would turn gray in 2 hours. Puit rode up close enough that I could smell his cigar. At first light, unless they come, they'll come. He leaned in. You've been the law your whole life, Boon.
Always the law. Well, look around you. You're out of law, son. And somewhere far off in the dark to the north, very faint, a nighthawk called once, then again from a different direction. The nighthawks kept it up for two hours.
Never twice from the same spot. North first, then east, then down in the creek cuts below the grove. Then so near the trunk of the cottonwood that a hired man wheeled his horse with his rifle up and found nothing there but leaves and dark. Nobody slept. Nobody spoke above a mutter. 14 men sat their horses in a ragged ring around the tree, and Lon Spivy sat among them with a bandage on his cheek and his long rifle across his pommel, staring at me like I was a debt he meant to collect.
Puit had a folding camp stool somebody had packed for him. He sat on it with his gold watch open in his palm and checked it every few minutes. A man waiting on a train he'd paid good money to ride, and the storm kept coming. That black bruise I'd watched since the first afternoon had finally come down off the far ranges. It filled the whole north now.
Lightning crawled around inside it with no thunder at all. The air had a taste like a struck match and wet rock, and still not a single drop had fallen. My horse hated it. Every flicker it shifted its feet. Every time it shifted, the knot under my left ear pulled snug and then let go.
Snug. Let go. A man learns arithmetic that way. How many inches between a horse's back and the end of everything? Not many.
Then the east went the color of ash, and out of the creek bed came a voice. Uncle. Every head in that ring turned toward it. Ror rose in his stirrups. Tavana that you girl come in out of the dark.
Nobody wants this ugly. Somebody does. Another voice. Canise from the far bank. Opposite direction entirely.
You showed us how. Uncle in June. Half the ring swung the other way. You drank coffee at our fire. Yona.
Soft as smoke upstream somewhere up in the rocks. You ate from our mother's pot. You held our father's hand with your blood in it. Who's that? Where is she?
Spivey, where is she? Here. Isha laughing. Behind them. And here.
Over here. Uncle. No. Here. Fire.
Fire on the voices. Damn you all. They fired. Lord, how they fired? 14 rifles emptying into the half light at rocks, at brush, at echoes coming back off the creek banks. Muzzle flashes popping like a string of firecrackers at a county fair.
Bark leaping off the cottonwood. My horse dancing under me and the rope going to slack to. me with my knees locked around that animal so hard I felt it breathe. Then the shooting ran out because rifles run out. Smoke lay flat across the sand. The stink of powder and one fat drop of rain smacked the brim of my hat like a knuckle on a door.
Dashka's voice came next from right behind Puit's stool. Close enough that he could have reached back and touched her. We died the day you sold us. What you see now is what came back. Puit went over backward off that stool like he'd been kicked.
Ror's black reared. Two of the hired men simply turned their horses south and rode. No orders, no looking back, and nobody tried to call them in. Then the sisters were just there. Five women standing out in the open.
A wide ring around the ring right at the edge of the cottonwood shade. Five different directions, rifles in their hands, not a mark on one of them, like the bullets had gone through fog. It was a trick. I knew it was a trick. They'd been lying flat in the creek, cuts the whole while, throwing their voices off the banks and shifting between calls.