She tilted her head slightly. She'd heard something at the window side. He understood and moved. He went fast and low to the left, sweeping the lamp off the table as he went so it wouldn't give away his position, and the window shutter came in hard a second later. A man was halfway through it, blinking in the dark, and Mattis had him by the collar before his eyes adjusted and pulled him the rest of the way through face down onto the floor.
The man hit the boards hard and yelled. Quillen started shouting from outside. Mattis put his knee between the man's shoulders and called out clearly, "I've got one of yours, Quillen. Talk to me about what this discussion is going to look like. " A silence outside that had a calculating quality. "Then, take him.
Call it even. We'll go. " "No. " He looked at Sadie. She had moved while he was at the floor. She was in the back corner now, very low, attention fixed on the back door. He understood they hadn't all come from the front.
The back door moved on its hinges. Just a test pressure, a man feeling whether the latch would hold. Sadie waited. The door came open fast, and the man behind it was already moving inward, and Sadie was there. She didn't fire.
She put her shoulder down and drove into him with all her weight, using his own momentum to steer, and they went sideways hard into the kitchen table together. The revolver pressed under his chin stopped everything very completely. The room was entirely still. Outside, Quillen had gone quiet with the particular quiet of a man who is doing arithmetic about his options. Mattis had two of the gang's men on the floor of his house.
The leader was still outside, and the leader was the problem. He looked across the dark room at Sadie and she tilted her head toward the open back door, toward the north. Toward the ridge. Toward the alkali seep. He thought of what she'd said six days ago at the end of an ordinary evening.
Alkali seeps stay warm into winter. Men camping in this valley in autumn will water there. If the Quillens are still working the stretch, they'll be at the seep. She'd said it with a flat certainty of an observation she'd already verified and she'd said it six days ago. And the marshal's office was a half-day ride east and there was a well-traveled road in that direction.