Eli had the Springfield up before the pistol cleared leather. He had moved, without deciding to, off the line and into the crouch Sela had drilled into him on the creek bank all winter β down, aside, no longer a fence post β and his first shot went where he had decided in November it would go if this hour ever came: into the dirt at the hooves of Calloway's horse, an arm's length from the animal's chest, close enough to be a sentence and far enough to be grammar rather than war.
The horse shied hard. Calloway, hauling at the reins with one hand, got the pistol up with the other β up and leveling, not at Eli. At Sela. At the voice. There are men for whom a thing that answers back must be answered in kind or the world is broken, and Ward Calloway, with the dirt still falling from his horse's hooves and thirty years of ownership draining out of the morning, pointed his pistol at a woman standing in a yard with her rifle lowered, in front of nine witnesses, and began to take up the slack in the trigger.
Eli's second shot took the pistol out of his hand.
It was not a shot he could have made on the creek bank in October. It was a shot made possible by a winter of a woman's teaching β distance made honest, a man no longer standing tall to be aimed at or to aim in pride. The Springfield's ball struck the pistol at the frame and tore it spinning out of Calloway's grip, breaking two of his fingers with the man's own gun on its way past, and the pistol went flashing end over end into the frozen dirt of the yard, where it lay smoking faintly, like the last coal of something.
Calloway screamed. He screamed with pain and with a fury so total it had no words at first, holding his bleeding hand up against his chest β and then found the words, the ones he had been spending all winter, and flung them at the line of his own men like a man throwing money into a fire to keep it lit.
"Shoot! God damn you, shoot! The both of them β I pay you β shoot!"
Nobody shot.
Hoss set his shotgun down β actually set it down, muzzle in the dirt, with the care of a man returning a borrowed tool β and took his hands away from it and held them where the light could see them. Drexel's rifle was already pointing at the sky. Marr had gone the color of old paper and was shaking his head in a small, continuous motion, like a man declining something in a language below words. Kitt, the oldest, said, clearly, into the ringing quiet: "Not for this wage, Ward. Not in this yard." One of the livery men turned his horse β just turned it, unhurried, and rode back up the north road a little way and stopped, as if the morning had become something he was willing to watch but no longer willing to be in.
Rhee was weeping. It surprised everyone, Rhee most of all; he stood with his rifle in both hands like a shovel he'd forgotten how to use and wept without covering his face, a weak man finally facing the invoice for a winter of lying, presented all at once.
"That's enough now," Eli said. His voice came out level and strange to him, as if it belonged to the man he had been practicing all winter to become. He lowered the Springfield β not all the way. "Mr. Calloway, you're bleeding on my yard and your business here is finished. Somebody bind that hand beforeβ"
The sound came then, from the south road, that changed the morning from a standoff into a history: hooves, many, and the iron rattle of a wagon coming fast, and a voice β a woman's voice, elderly, at full volume, in the accents of two countries β calling out ahead of the dust like a herald in an old story: "Ya viene la ley! The law is coming up the road, and half the town behind it, so keep your hands where the Lord can see them!"
Sela, beside him, lowered her carbine all the way down, and let out one breath, and said, very quietly: "Ines."
Chapter 24
They came up the south road the way weather comes β all at once and in every form at the same time. Sheriff Amos Tully at the front on his slow bay, riding it at a pace the animal had plainly never been asked for; the deputies Brandt and Reyes flanking him, young and grim; Ines Aguilar on the wagon seat with her reins in one hand and her other raised like a general's, having commandeered both the wagon and, apparently, the morning; and behind them San Tomas itself, afoot and ahorse β the Delgados, father and son, the schoolteacher, the miller's own wife, a dozen more β drawn up the nine miles by news that had ridden out of town before dawn on three different horses: that Calloway had gone at last to do in person what his paper had failed to do, and that this time nobody intended to be told about it afterward.