The gate stood between the house and the world, and Elias did not move from it, and his rifle stayed low. But his heart was slamming, because Donner's face had gone the color of old ash, and a cornered man's reason is the first thing to leave him β and Donner's right hand had not yet decided what it meant to do.
Chapter 25
One Shot
Afterward, when people in San Tomas told the story β and they told it often that winter β they always made the moment last longer than it had. In truth it was very short. Donner looked at the ridge and the law laid out along it like a second fence. He looked at the gate, and at Elias standing at it unarmed in every way that mattered, since a rifle carried low might as well be in another county when a man close by decides to be quick. He looked at the cabin windows, where neither rifle had wavered. Something in him that had run other men's lives by fear arrived at the end of its arithmetic and found the sum intolerable β that he should be the one, at last, who had to be afraid.
His hand moved. Not toward the dirt, where Reyes had told him to put his weapon. Toward his hip.
"Donner β" Reyes said, sharply.
The shot was one shot, flat and ugly in the evening air, and it came before any other. Elias saw the flash and felt the tug at the same instant, a hard pull across his left side as Donner's bullet tore through the skirt of his coat and out again, carrying a burst of wool and worn lining into the dust. He felt no blow to his body. He felt the coat swing, suddenly lighter on that side. He did not fall. He did not even step back, and some clear part of his mind, ten years older than the part that had run into the dark at Red Willow Crossing, registered that his hands had not gone for his Colt β because going for it now would start the very slaughter everyone else was working to prevent.
So he stood, with his coat torn and the gate at his back, and he looked at Rafe Donner, and he waited.
The stillness that followed was enormous. Brandt's rifle had come up. Whitlock's carbine had not moved, because it had never needed to. But Reyes held one hand raised, fist closed β hold, hold β and his posse held, because Donner, incredibly, had not fired again. The revolver hung in his grip as if he himself were surprised to find it there, surprised at the smallness of what it had accomplished. One shot, and the man it was meant to clear away stood breathing in front of him, coat flapping, expression almost gentle.
"That's the end of it, Rafe," Reyes said, quieter now. "You've shot at a man in front of the United States Marshal and hit his coat. Put it down and it's attempted murder you'll answer for, which a man can live through prison and out the other side of. Fire again and you won't be answering for anything. Choose while choosing's yours."
Donner's riders chose first. It began with the young one whose hand had crept from his scabbard earlier β his rifle went into the dust, then his pistol, dropped like something hot. Another followed, and another, in the ragged order of men whose loyalty had always been to wages, not to the scarred face at their center. Hooves shifted, leather creaked; weapons made their small, final sounds in the dirt. Brandt rode in gathering them, moving slow, talking low to the surrendering men the way he'd talk to spooked stock, and Whitlock covered him without seeming to aim at all.
Donner was last. He sat his horse a long moment with the revolver still in his hand, staring at Elias as though Elias were a door he could not understand being closed.
"You ain't worth it," he said at last, and there was real bewilderment in it. "This whole valley ain't worth β Pruitt said you'd run. Harlan Pruitt swore to me on money that two girls and a tramp would run at a good scare, that the paper was as good as signed β"
"Keep talking, Rafe," Reyes said pleasantly, riding in at last through the gate Elias stepped aside to open for him. "Loud as you like. My deputies have excellent memories, and Mr. Pruitt's name is one we've been wanting spoken by the right mouth."
The name, once out, could not be called back, and Donner knew it; the rage that rose in him then was not for Elias at all. He threw the revolver down as if it had bitten him and had to be hauled from his saddle by Brandt and a sworn man together, cursing Pruitt, cursing the valley, cursing the shot that had hit nothing but good wool. Willa, at her window, began to cry β from relief, she said later, and from the smell of the hay, all that winter feed gone up in one afternoon β and Maren came out onto the porch with her rifle lowered and the look on her face of a woman who has held a line and found it held.