He sat again. The sun climbed. And the standoff, which had been an argument about paper, settled into something older and more dangerous β twenty armed men with nothing to do but wait, and a judgment coming too slowly for the man who had bought them.
Chapter 10
: The Shot from the Hillside
The shot came an hour into the judge's two hours, when the heat had risen and the waiting had thinned every man's temper to wire. Caleb heard it before he understood it β a flat crack from the rocks west of the basin β and he saw Judge Whitcomb jerk in his camp chair, the map sliding from his knees, one hand flying to his head. Blood came through the old man's gray hair above his ear. Not a kill. A graze, an inch from being the worst inch in the territory. But a judge shot at under a flag of parley could not be unhappened.
Then Odell bellowed something, a gunman near the buggy fired at the rocks, and the morning came apart like a dropped plate. Riders were hauling themselves into saddles, horses plunging, somebody's rifle going off into the sky, and through the uproar Caleb heard the second shot β closer, meaner β and saw Tasin stagger at the barrier beside him and catch himself against the rail with blood starting bright through the cotton of his shirt at the shoulder.
Caleb got an arm around the old chief and hauled him down behind the barrier as a third shot kicked dust off the rails above them. "How bad?" he said.
"It has kissed me," Tasin said, through his teeth, blood running down his arm, fury in his eyes rather than fear. "I have been kissed worse. Go. The man on the hill is the one who matters. If he lives to shoot again, this day becomes what Voss wants it to be."
That was the heart of it, and Caleb knew it: the shot had not been aimed at a man so much as at the peace β a dead judge, a massacred camp, a valley that could then be taken in the name of order. He whistled Flint in, caught the saddle as the gelding came through the dust at a run, and went up the west slope at a gallop with his father's compass banging against his ribs and no plan beyond the line of white smoke hanging over the rocks.
The shooter had chosen his ground well: a shelf of broken stone above the basin with a horse picketed in the draw behind it, and a second position scraped clear a little farther along the ridge, which told Caleb the man had meant to fire, move, and fire again. The plan had not reckoned on being chased inside the minute. Caleb heard gravel slide ahead of him, caught the flash of a shirt between the boulders, and put Flint at the slope so hard the gelding climbed in lunges.
The man broke cover at the draw, running for his horse β a long rifle in one hand, forty yards of open ground to cross. Caleb came down the draw's far side in a slide of scree, cut across his line, and Flint, who had cut cattle since he was four, read the play like print and pinned the running man against the draw wall before Caleb ever touched rein. The rifle came up. Caleb left the saddle in motion and hit the shooter low and sideways, and they went down together in a burst of dust with the rifle between them going off harmlessly into the sky.
They fought the way men fight in gravel: gracelessly, by inches, for the gun. The man was stronger than Caleb and older, and he got one hand free and used it, and Caleb saw the basin below tilt and brighten. But he had the man's rifle arm pinned under his knee and his whole weight on it, and he thought of his father under a barn beam, and of Tasin bleeding at a barrier over water that belonged to no man, and something in him that had been polite in Voss's office simply set its teeth. He wrenched the rifle free and threw it clattering down the draw, got his forearm across the man's throat, and put his weight down and kept it there.
"Yield," he said. "Yield, or stay here."
The fight went out of the man all at once, like a cut strap. He lay back in the gravel, chest heaving, hat gone, one eye already swelling, staring up at a sky he had tried to set on fire an hour before. Below them the basin was settling: the gunmen bunched around the buggy, somebody leading the wounded judge by the arm, Tasin's people coming down to their chief, and Voss on his black horse in the middle of it all, very still, watching the draw β watching, Caleb thought, for news of how his morning had gone.