He set the pace himself after that, and it was not kind to horses or men. They rode through a cold dusk with dust in their teeth, past dark homesteads where dogs announced them and fell silent, watered once at midnight where ice had to be broken with a rifle butt, and rode on. Whitlock rode point, eyes on a trail now hours old and fading. Brandt rode drag and said nothing more about rest. Reyes thought of two young women alone at the end of a valley with a gang bending toward them like weather, and pushed his tired horse into a lope and kept it there.
Chapter 23
The Gang Rides In
They came in the late afternoon, when the light lay long and gold across the creek pasture and the shadows of the new south fence stood striped on the grass like something a child had drawn to show how safe a place could look. Elias saw the dust first, from the barn loft β a low, slow plume beyond the north pass road, too deliberate for a herd, too wide for a wagon.
He came down the ladder without haste and found his hands were steady and his thoughts very clear, the way they got when there was no more use for anything but the next true thing to be done.
"Barrels are full," Maren said, when he reached the yard. She had seen it too. "Stock's in the near corral. Willa's filling every bucket in the house."
"Windows, then," Elias said. "Like we planned. Maren, the front. Willa, the side by the kitchen, and you do not fire unless I fire or they come through the gate bent on it. This is a frightening visit first. Let's learn how much more it means to be."
Willa came out of the cabin with their father's spare powder flask and set it by the door, then surprised them both by laughing, a short startled sound. "My hands are shaking and my head isn't," she said. "Is that how it's supposed to be?"
"That's exactly how it's supposed to be," Elias told her. "Go on in now."
He took his place on the porch, in the open, his rifle standing against the post beside him and his Colt at his hip, and he waited where he could be seen, because a man hidden invites a search and a man plainly waiting invites talk first. Cinder stood saddled in the barn shadow, as agreed, in case a rider had to go for help that would, they all understood, likely come too late to matter.
Nine riders came down the pass road and spread across the mouth of the ranch track as if they owned the view.
Rafe Donner rode in the middle, and even at a distance the scar showed, a pale seam drawn down through his left cheek that pulled his mouth a fraction sideways when he smiled, which he was doing. He was not a big man, but he sat a horse the way a fence sits a line β as if the country had been arranged around his being there. Eight men fanned behind him: young ones and old ones, hired ones and true believers in nothing but pay, their rifles still in their scabbards, because this, yet, was theater.
The theater began at the haystack.
Two riders peeled off without a word from Donner, cantered along the fence line β outside it, careful β and the second of them trailed a burning brand of knotted rags behind his saddle for three strides before he tossed it, almost lazy, into the sisters' winter hay. The stack caught with a soft, terrible whoomph, and in seconds the good smell of stored summer was gone under black smoke and a roar of orange that sent sparks up into the still afternoon like a swarm of bright, ruinous bees.
Willa made a sound at the window that Maren reached across and stilled with one hand, never taking her eyes off the riders.
The rest of the gang milled at the gate, letting their horses crowd and stamp, letting girths creak and bits ring, a noise designed to fill a yard and get inside a person's chest. Donner raised one gloved hand and the milling stopped as if a string had been cut.
"Evening," he called, pleasant as a neighbor. "I hope you folks are seeing reason better than you were. Mister Pruitt's been patient past what a business man owes anybody. He's got the paper with him β no, don't fret, he ain't here to be shot at by young ladies." His ruined smile widened. "He's in town, keeping his hands clean the way he likes. But the offer's the same, and today's the last day it comes with money attached."
No one answered him. The haystack burned. A horse in the corral screamed once at the smell of it and was quieted by Willa's voice through the window, low and steady, talking to it the way she talked to everything frightened.
"Sign his paper," Donner said, and the pleasantness thinned. "Take his price. Ride out clean tomorrow with your goods and your lives and nobody hurt. Or stay, and winter comes, and fences burn that can't be rebuilt in a day, and accidents happen to girls alone in a valley where help's half a day off." He let his horse shift under him. "You've had your warning shots and your fence and your hired man. It was a good show. It's done now."