They wanted something we carry. Once you know what it is, you can never ride back to your old life. They will hunt you the way they hunt us. What do you carry? She almost smiled again.
It almost lived this time. Not tonight. Isha's voice floated out of the dark. She likes you. She only keeps secrets from people she likes.
Isha, I'm just saying. The last man she liked, she kept secrets from for a whole winter. Isha quiet. A stifled laugh from somewhere near Yon. And for the first time since I'd cut them down, those five women sounded like what they were under all of it. sisters, tired, grieving, half dead sisters teasing each other in the dark because the alternative was weeping.
I sat back against my boulder. Two rifles across my knees now. One I had brought, one I had been given. I didn't know yet which one would matter more. Cutters wells sat at the crossing of the stage road and the telegraph line like a tick on a dog. a long adobe station house, a corral of mesquite poles, a windmill that squealled every time the breeze touched it, and one copper wire strung on crooked poles running east toward Tucson and west toward nothing much.
We rode in a little before noon on the second day. Every eye in the place came to the door, the hostler, a cook with flour on his forearms. Old Hap Merryweather, who'd kept that station since before the war, and looked it, standing on the porch with a shotgun and a face that said I'd seen Apache before and hadn't enjoyed it. Marshal Hap, you're keeping interesting company. They're in my custody.
He looked at the women at their wrists. No iron, then back at me. Custody looks different than it used to. Times change. I need the wire.
The telegraph man was a pale soft fellow named Orin Fitch with ink stains on his cuffs and a sleeve garter on his arm and a way of not quite looking at you. He sat at his key in a little room off the main house. I wrote out the message on his yellow pad in my plainest hand to a puit chief deputy US Marshal Tukong have five women named in Pickering Warrant. Evidence of frame due gang in area request two men in wagon. Halleran Fitch read it.
His lips moved. Then he tapped it out. His finger quick and light on the brass. I watched him the whole time. Tavana watched me watch him out on the porch.
She spoke low, not looking at me. You trust the wire. I trust Amos. Puit taught me most of what I know. And the man at the key.
I don't have to trust him. I just need his finger. A finger can lie, Marshal. Not in Morse. Everything lies in the right hand.
I let that go because I was tired and she might be right and I didn't want her to be. There was a man in the back room on a cot bandaged shoulder 30 or so red hair cut short freckled hands a face gone gaunt from fever. He sat up when we came in and when his eyes landed on the five women behind me every drop of color went out of what little he had left. That's them. Easy.
That's them, Marshal. That's them. You brought them here. Hab came up behind me. Wesley Pickering brought him in three weeks back off the freight road with a ball in his shoulder.
His brothers weren't so lucky. Wesley was trying to get off the cot trying to get to the rifle on the wall. Yet was across the room before I could move. Her hand flat on his good shoulder, pressing him down. Gentle, implacable.
You will tear it open. Get your hand off me. Your wound is hot. You need clean water and willow bark. Not a rifle.
You killed my brothers. No, I saw the arrows. You saw arrows. You did not see us. He stared at her.
Her hand stayed, and whatever he'd been about to do went out of him all at once, the way fever does, and he fell back on the cart, breathing hard with his eyes squeezed shut. Did you see faces, Wesley? I kept it quiet. That day, did you see who shot you? A long pause.
Dust riders. One of them had a saddle with silver on the horn caught the sun. He opened his eyes, and I heard a man laugh. A white man's laugh. I've been telling myself it was one of the Apache laughing like a white man because that's what the sheriff said happened.
Silver on the horn. I filed that away, too. The drawer was getting full. The answer came back on the wire just before 4:00. Fitch copied it out and brought it to me on the pad with his eyes on the floor.
Halleran, hold suspects at Cutters Wells. Do not move them. Sheriff Ror and deputies on route. Puit. I read it to them on the porch, and the change in those five women was like watching a creek freeze in the space of a breath.
Isha stopped midward. Kane's hand went to the sharps. Dashka took one step back off the porch toward the horses. Yona closed her eyes. And Tavana went absolutely still.
The way a deer goes still when it hears the hammer come back. Ror, he's the county sheriff. The warrant's his. I know whose warrant it is. Then what's wrong?
She turned to me and for the first time since the tree I saw it fear not of dying something older and colder than that we leave now to tight before dark the order says hold your order comes from a man who sent you to find us and now he sends the one man in Arizona who most wants us found do you not hear it Marshal listen I listened I heard the windmill squeal I heard my own blood I heard Amos Puit's voice in a Tucson office with his hand on my shoulder whoever they are. One night, Ror can't be here before tomorrow noon. We rest the horses, we feed you, we take Wesley's statement in writing, and we go at first light. You are making a mistake. I make one every day.