Most of them don't kill anybody. This one will. She was right. God help me. She was right before the sun was fully down.
Because at the last gray edge of evening, I went looking for Fitch to send one more message. And Fitch was gone. his chair pushed back, his key still warm, his coat gone off the hook, and on the pad under the reply he'd shown me, a second sheet, torn off, but the pencil had pressed through. I held it to the lamp and read the ghost of it. Message received. They are here, all five.
Tonight, the first fire arrow hit the hay barn while I was still holding the paper. Then the corral, then the roof of the station house. Old dry brush and mud on poles. And it went up like it had been waiting years for the chance. Horses screaming.
Gunfire from the dark on three sides. The windmill squealing over all of it like it was laughing. Down. Get down. Can was already at the window with the sharps firing at muzzle flashes.
Calm as a church. Dashka and Isha dragging saddles toward the back door. Tavana everywhere at once, pushing, pointing, her voice cutting through the smoke in their language and mine. Hap Merryweather went out the front with his shotgun. I heard both barrels.
Then a rifle answered him. Then nothing from Hap at all. I got to the back room through smoke so thick it had weight. Wesley was off the cot on his knees trying to crawl, his bandage black with soot and blood. Get up.
Can't you can leave me? They'll take you too. Get up, Wesley, or I'll carry you and I've got a bad back. He got up half. I got my shoulder under his good arm and we went through the back wall where the adobe had cracked open in the heat out into the yard.
The nightlit orange figures running, shapes on horseback circling the edge of the light. I saw one of them clear for half a second. Big man, scarred face, laughing, cle. Then a rider came at us out of the dark with a pistol raised and Tavana stepped in front of me with a fence pole and took him clean out of the saddle. Just like that one swing, he went down and didn't get up.
She turned. Fire light on her face. Now Marshal, now we leave. We went out through the drywash behind the corral. Six of us on two horses and one stolen Mount Isha caught out of the smoke.
Wesley slung over the sorrel like a sack. Behind us, Cutter's wells burned down to the ground. The windmill finally stopped squealing. Somewhere in that fire was Hap Merryweather, who'd never liked Apache and had died shooting at the men who came to kill them. Anyway, we rode until the fire was a red smudge behind us.
Then we stopped in a fold of the hills and let the horses blow. And then I remembered the second message in my coat. Not Fitches. One I'd grabbed off the spike by his key when I came through the door. The incoming wire copied out earlier that afternoon in his neat, guilty hand.
I hadn't read it. I read it now by Starlight with my hand shaking. All stations. Deputy S. Marshal Boon Halleran has turned renegade.
Now rides with Apache killers named in Pickering Warrant. Armed considered dangerous. Any citizen may act. Rock Sheriff. Any citizen may act.
Sent before the fire. Before anybody had seen me ride out with anybody, before anything written the moment I asked Tucson for help. So that was what it cost. One wire. my whole life on a copper thread cut by a man I'd never met and a man I'd trusted with it. I heard the hammer come back before I turned around.
Wesley Pickering stood by the sorrel with Ka's sharps, which she'd set down to tighten a cinch, swaying on his feet, pale as bone. The muzzle pointed straight at Tavana's heart from 6 ft away. Get out of the way, Marshal. No, she killed my brothers. She just saved your life.
Her sister saved your arm. You read that wire. You're a wanted man. You don't get to tell me anything now. I stepped in front of Tavana.
Put my chest where her heart was. Then shoot through me because I'm still the law out here until somebody with more right than you takes this badge off. And nobody dies tonight without a judge. His finger trembled on the trigger. Behind me, I felt Tavana's breath on the back of my neck. not moving, not running, trusting me with her life on a stranger's trigger.
And over Wesley's shoulder on the eastern rim of the world, the sky had started to go gray. And against that gray, small and pale and unmistakable, rose a long column of dust, riders, many of them coming fast toward us. Wesley saw the dust in my eyes before he saw it over his shoulder. I watched him understand, watched the fever and the grief and the rage all run into one narrow question. Which way?
That's Ror. That's Ror. Then he'll take them in. Proper. He sent a wire calling me a renegade before I'd done a thing, Wesley.
Before I'd even left the station. Think about what proper means to a man like that. The muzzle dipped an inch, then another. His arms were shaking with the weight of the sharps. Kane came around the horse like a shadow and took the rifle out of his hands.
Just took it, he let her. He sat down hard in the dirt and put his face in his good hand. I don't know what's true anymore. Then come find out. I'm not riding with them.
You're riding with me. They happen to be here. I pulled a picketing string off my saddle. And you're riding with your hands tied because you just pointed a rifle at a woman in my custody and that's the law, too. He held out his wrists.