Chapter 19 — The East Mouth
The light came up the color of iron, and with it the snow — not falling hard yet, but steady now, a fine dry sifting that made the whole coulee look smoked.
Erik sat his horse in the brush at the east mouth with two of Gray Elk's men beside him, and counted his heartbeats, and tried not to count anything else. Down in the bottom the herd had begun to stir with the dawn, heads coming up, the mass of them shifting and settling. At the far end, tiny with distance, the guard camp's fire showed as one orange eye. Between Erik and that fire lay several hundred horses and five rifles — six or seven, if the lean-to had been keeping a secret.
Then, from the west, the world made a noise.
It began with a horn — some farmer's dinner horn, blown long and joyful as if calling men to a table — and then the hallooing started, fifty throats of it, and a wagon came rattling down the west track at a pace no sane man drives in the dark, and somebody's rifle cracked into the air, and somebody else's answered it, and the whole west end of Hay Coulee stood up and shouted at once.
Erik did not watch it. He was watching the herd.
The heads all went west. The mass leaned west, toward the noise, the way horses will, toward the excitement and away from the quiet — for three breaths Erik's heart stopped entirely — and then the leaders near the east mouth caught the scent of open air behind them where Gray Elk's men had already dropped the pole gate and were standing in the gap on foot, waving their blankets slow and low, not driving, inviting, and the nearest horses did what horses have done since the world began: they followed the ones in front of them toward the way out.
It started as a walk. It became a trot in the length of the coulee. By the time the main body reached the narrows it was a river of horses pouring through the brushy mouth, mane and tail and blowing breath and the drum of it going up through the frozen ground into Erik's teeth, and he was in it, at the point, riding half blind in the snow with the herd streaming past him on both sides and the east plain opening white and wide ahead — and it was working, it was working, the whole stolen wealth of the Red Willow band was running home under its own power, and for a moment there was nothing in Erik Halvorsen but a wild, unchristian gratitude.
Then the shots came from behind — two, three — not at the herd. Behind and to the north. Erik twisted in the saddle.
Kramer had not gone west with his camp's fear. Or he had gone, and read the thing faster than his men, and cut back along the north rim to try to head the herd and turn it — and he had run straight into Mato's riders coming down off that rim like the snow itself arriving. His horse went out from under him in the frozen grass — shot or stumbled, Erik never knew and never asked — and Kramer was up and running on foot with the herd's edge thundering past him and the riders closing, and Erik saw Mato come off his horse in a long dive of a dismount at a dead run and take the rustler around the waist and down into the snow and the flying dirt, both of them rolling, Kramer's hands going — not for his pistol. For his face. For the snow. Anything to stop the rolling.
It took four men to make him still, and they did it with hands and rope and weight, the way you settle a horse, and nobody struck him after he was down, though Mato had cause enough written on his sister's arm. Erik, riding up through the drag of the herd with the snow in his eyes, saw Kramer lifted, bound across his own saddle, alive and cursing and with the scar through his left eyebrow standing out white in his dirt-streaked face — alive, and whole enough to talk, which was the whole of the order and the whole of the mercy both.
One man was not in the count. On the south edge, where the herd had broken out of the coulee's mouth, a single rider was already a half mile gone and going hard — low over his horse's neck, heading not south with the herd nor west to the camp but east and south, on the long diagonal toward Prairie Center.
"Sikes," the Swede said at Erik's shoulder, breathing hard. "That's Kramer's man Sikes. He's lit out for town."
"Let him go," Erik said.
Nils stared at him. "Erik — he'll get there first. He'll tell it his way."
"Yes," Erik said, watching the rider dwindle into the sifting snow. "He will tell it his way. And then the whole town will turn and look south, and see this coming." He lifted his chin at the herd — a dark river a quarter mile wide now on the white plain, band riders on its flanks, militia men — Alcott's own, come up from the west mouth when the noise had done its work — riding drag and point with them, indistinguishable in the snow, all of them bringing the Red Willow horses home in open daylight. "A lie can run fast, Nils. But it cannot outrun several hundred horses. Let him get there first. Let him have the first word. It will make the second one plainer."
They gathered Kramer, and the captured men from the camp who had thrown down their rifles when the herd went over them, and they turned south in the snow with the herd going home ahead of them like the answer to a question the whole valley had been asking since the dry autumn began.