Not really a question. I am alone. Looks that way. Harmon laughed again from the wagon bed. Short, ugly.
Well, it's your funeral, stranger. Literally, probably. He turned to the crowd like Ezra had already left. Now, anybody here actually got real business? Or are we all just going to stand around admiring this fool's death wish?
The crowd began to break apart just like that. Like the whole conversation had been a show and the show was over. Nobody offered to ride with him. Nobody offered a spare rifle, a bag of feed, a word of luck. Ezra stood there a second longer.
Let it land. The particular loneliness of being surrounded by people and understood by none of them. Then he turned back toward Ash toward the road west. Whitfield caught his arm before he mounted. Old fingers surprising strength.
Listen to me, Whitfield said low just for him now. That brand circle broken line. I've heard whispers it belongs to a man called Silus Crane runs with raiders through the territory. Sells stolen stock down south. Nobody's ever caught him.
Nobody's ever tried hard enough. Crane. Ezra said the name like he was testing whether it would burn going down. It did. You know him?
I will. He swung up into the saddle. Ash shifted under him, restless like the horse could feel something had changed in the man on his back. Which trail? Ezra said.
Whitfield pointed west past the dry riverbed toward a smear of red rock on the horizon that looked from this distance almost gentle almost soft. Ezra knew better. Distance lies about everything. Mountains most of all. God with you son.
He didn't last time. Ezra said no reason to expect different now. He rode. The town fell away behind him fast. buildings first, then fences, then the last stubborn fingers of cultivated land giving way to open scrub. By the time the sun climbed to its highest point, redstone was just a smudge behind him.
Small the way everything gets small once you stop needing it. The desert stretched out ahead, endless, indifferent. He thought about turning back exactly once, not because he was afraid. Fear he could work with. Fear had a shape you could aim a rifle at.
This was different. This was the old ache climbing up his spine again, whispering that he already knew how this story ended. Man rides out for revenge. Man doesn't ride back. He'd heard that story a dozen times in a dozen saloons.
Never once heard the version where the man wins. Except Except his father used to say something right before the end came for him, too. something Ezra had tried for 11 years to forget and had never managed once. A man isn't measured by what he has. He's measured by what he does when nobody else is willing to do it. Ezra spurred Ash forward, faster now, like outrunning the thought would make it quieter.
Didn't. Nothing ever did. The land changed as the day wore on. Scrub gave way to cracked earth. Cracked earth gave way to the first low ridges of redstone that gave the town its borrowed name.
The mountains weren't gentle up close. They were teeth, old, patient teeth, waiting for something foolish enough to ride between them. He made camp that night in a shallow wash, sheltered from wind by a leaning slab of rock. Small fire, no more light than he needed. A man traveling alone into raider country didn't advertise.
He sat with his back against the stone and let himself remember just for a minute, just long enough to remind himself why his legs hadn't turned to stone this time. His mother's hands cracked from work, smoothing his hair back the night before the fire. His father's laugh low and rare, the kind you had to earn. The smell of bread on Sunday mornings. Small things, the smallest things are always what survive.
Then the fire. Then the silence after. Then 18 years old and alone in a house too big and too quiet. Learning how to be a ghost in his own life because feeling anything at all seemed like more than he could carry. He didn't cry.
Hadn't in years just sat there letting the memory pass through him like weather. Storm's end. That was the only mercy grief ever offered. It ended. It just always came back.
He was reaching for more firewood when he heard it. A sound that didn't belong. Not wind, not coyote. Something with intention behind it. Ezra's hand found his revolver before his mind had finished the thought.
I know you're there, he said into the dark, voice steady. He'd learned long ago that fear sounds like shaking, and shaking gets you killed. Come where I can see you. nothing, then everything all at once. An arrow split the air an inch from his shoulder and buried itself in the rock behind him with a crack like a gunshot. Ezra dropped, rolled, came up with the revolver raised, aimed at nothing.
A shadow at a shape he could barely make out at the top of the ridge. Bow already drawn again. Another arrow knocked. Next one won't miss, a voice said. A woman's voice.
Low certain not the voice of someone bluffing. I'm not your enemy, Ezra said. You're a stranger riding toward Red Mountain 3 days after 200 horses went missing. That makes you exactly my enemy until you prove different. I'm trying to get those horses back.
So says every scout Crane's men ever send ahead to check the ground before an attack. Ezra's stomach dropped. You know Crane's name. I know a lot of things, white man. I know your fire is too big for someone who understands what's hunting these hills at night.
I know you ride alone, which means either you're a fool or your bait. I know I have exactly one more arrow before I need to decide which. He raised his free hand slow. Let the revolver hang loose at his side, pointed at the ground. Ezra Colton, he said, "Redstone.