Every man in that ring with any sense would know it, too, by noon. But it wasn't noon. It was dawn, and the sky was splitting, and 14 rifles had just gone empty into nothing. And five women who were supposed to be dead had walked out of the powder smoke, smiling. The hired men stared at them like they'd seen a stained glass window step down out of its frame.
That was my moment. I was never going to get another. Sometime in the night, they'd taken my hands off the saddle horn and tied them in front of me so I'd hang straight. Careful men, careless men, both at once. I bent forward against the noose until the rope burned a line across my throat, reached down past my right knee with both tied hands, and drew the derringer out of my boot.
Two barrels, two shots. That's all a man gets from a gun nobody remembers he has. The first shot went into the picket rope behind Puit's stool where his spare horses and a pair of hired mounts stood tied nose totail. The rope parted like a cut fiddle string. Six horses exploded into the ring.
Men scattering, men falling, men grabbing for reins that weren't there. The second shot went into the forearm of the hired man who' spurred up beside me to grab my bridal. He howled. He let go and my horse went. I felt it lunge out from under me.
Felt the saddle leave. Felt the rope bite and then sand in my mouth, in my eyes, sand everywhere and air going into me like water into a dry well. I was on the ground with a short length of new hemp still around my neck and Isha standing over me with her skinning knife. The cut end of the hangman's rope swung from the limb above her head. Back and forth, back and forth.
You are welcome. I haven't said thank you yet. You were about to. She sliced the cord off my wrists with one flick. So you cut me down.
I cut you down. That makes us even. And now I never have to be nice to you again. That's a relief to everybody. The ring was coming apart.
Men everywhere. Some running, some shooting at anything that moved. Some just sitting their saddles with both hands up high like they'd all at once recollected they had wives in Tucson. Kane's sharps boomed from the creek bank and a rifleman by the tree dropped his gun and grabbed his hand and sat down. Lon Spivy was trying to get his long rifle up.
Yona came out of nowhere and put the butt of a carbine into the back of his knees and he folded like a camp chair and she knelt on his spine and took the rifle away from him the same quiet way she'd taken a fever from Wesley Pickering. A hired man lay groaning 10 ft from me where his own spooked horse had pitched him. My Winchester lay beside him in the sand. I knew the nick in the stock. I picked it up.
It came into my hands like it had been waiting. And across the clearing I watched Thaddeus Ror take it all in. The scattered men spy face down under a woman half his weight. The five sisters. Me on my feet with my own rifle and the rain finally coming.
Hard now slanting spotting the sand dark in patches the size of silver dollars. I watched him add it up. I watched him get the answer. Puit was struggling up out of the sand, his fine coat soaked, his gold watch swinging on its chain, pointing at me with his whole arm. Thaddius, there he is.
Take him. Take him, man. Ror turned the black, drew his pistol, leveled it. Not at me. He shot Amos Puit through the shoulder from 10 ft off.
Puit spun half around and sat down hard in the wet sand. He stared up at his partner with his mouth hanging open, more astonished than hurt, like a man handed a bill for a meal he hadn't ordered. Sorry, Amos. Partnerships dissolved. Ror was already wheeling his horse.
You keep the railroad. I'll take the gold. Thaddius, you fool. The canyon sealed. My boys had it dug out by noon yesterday.
You'd know that if you ever listen to anybody but yourself. He grinned down through the rain. There's enough in that hole to buy me half of Sonora. And with this storm coming down, there isn't a man alive fool enough to follow me into that canyon. He put the spurs to the black and went out of the grove at a dead run east toward the broken mountain 20 mi off under a sky gone the color of a gun barrel.
I was already running for a horse because he was wrong about that last part. Loose horses were running everywhere. I caught a hired man's buckskin by its dragging rain and swung up. Tavana was beside me before I'd found the off stirrup on a tall gray with a stranger's saddle. Dashka came up on a paint pony bear back a fistful of man, her knees clamped tight under its ribs.
Can yon Isha keep breathing. Get spivy in irons. Don't let either one of them talk you into a thing. Can already had the sharps laid on the wounded man in the sand. They will not talk.
They will listen for once. Wesley Pickering stepped up beside her. A hired man's carbine in his good hand. I'll stand here too, Marshal. I mean to watch his face when a judge reads out my brother's names.
We rode 20 m under a monsoon isn't riding. It's arguing with the sky and losing. The rain came in sheets. Then hail small and hard rattling off my hat. Brim like thrown gravel.
Then rain again, heavier. Lightning near enough to smell. thunder landing on top of it with no gap between. The desert was turning liquid under the hooves. Every dry wash we crossed carried a skin of brown water and each one ran deeper than the last. Ror's tracks filled almost as fast as we found them.