"We can't hold both," she said.
"I know it."
"Then we hold the house," she said, "and we make them pay for every board of the rest."
From the corral came a new sound then, one Caleb could not at first place: a horse screaming, and men's voices raised in sudden confusion, and beneath it all a low, rolling noise like distant water coming down a dry creek bed. He turned toward the east fence with his rifle half-raised, not knowing whether he was looking at the end of the fight or the beginning of something worse.
Chapter 17
: Riders in the Dark
The noise resolved itself the way a trail resolves under a good tracker's eye โ all at once, and so plainly that Caleb wondered he had not read it from the first. Hoofbeats, twenty horses or more, coming fast up the Coyote Creek road from the east, and as they broke into the firelight at the edge of the yard he saw the foremost rider and forgot, for a breath, both the fire and the men who had set it.
Tasin rode with his wounded shoulder bound tight against his chest, his good hand on the reins, sitting his paint horse as straight as a man half his sixty-three years. Behind him came the riders of the San Rey band โ young men mostly, a few gray heads among them, rifles carried low and ready. They came the way weather comes over a ridge, in silence and in order, and the company men scattered before them like chickens before a hawk.
What Caleb remembered later was how little shooting there was after that first moment. One company man, braver or drunker than the rest, raised his rifle toward the riders and found six rifles raised in answer, and thought better of the mathematics and set his own down in the dirt with great care. Two more ran for their horses at the corral and were ridden down in the pasture lane, not shot, just herded โ turned and turned again by riders who handled them the way good cowhands handle steers, until the men sat down in the middle of the lane with their hands up. The rest simply vanished into the dark they had come from, and the sound of their going faded east and north until the night belonged again to the fire.
And the fire, Caleb realized, had turned from enemy to ally: it lit the whole yard so that no attacker could creep back unseen, and the Apache riders were already dismounting to fight it. Two of them took over the bucket line without a word. Others beat at the granary fire with wet blankets and saddle cloths. Tasin's nephew climbed to the kitchen roof in Tess's place and stamped out sparks with moccasined feet, quick and unhurried, while Tess below organized the sand buckets.
"The house will stand," Tasin said, reining up beside Caleb. He did not dismount, and Caleb saw why: the binding at his shoulder was dark with fresh blood where the ride had worked the wound open, and the old chief's face in the firelight was gray under its bronze. "The barn, I think, your father must forgive. A barn is boards. You are not."
"You shouldn't have come," Caleb said, and heard how foolish it sounded even as he said it. "That shoulderโ"
"Should not," Tasin agreed gravely. "And yet when my scouts saw your sky light up, six miles off, like a second sunset in the wrong place โ tell me, Caleb Wren, what would your father have done, in my place, with his friend's children burning?"
Caleb had no answer to that, because he knew the answer entire. Samuel would have ridden. Samuel, in fact, had ridden, more than once, in years Caleb was only now old enough to understand.
By the time the eastern sky thinned from black to iron, the granary fire was out and the barn had fallen in on itself, a low mound of coals and collapsed beams breathing heat. The house stood, scorched along one eave, its windows soot-filmed but whole. The stock was alive. Nobody on either side, so far as Caleb could learn, had been killed.
It was Tess who found the last of the attackers. She came around the smokehouse with her Winchester leveled and her voice bright with a fury that had not yet found anywhere to go. "Caleb. Come and see what the creek gave us."
The man lay half in the shallow water where he had fallen trying to cross in the dark, his leg bent wrong under him, either broken in the fall or thrown when his horse shied at the riders' coming. His hat was gone, his face was mud and ash and dawning, miserable comprehension.
Caleb knew the face. He had last seen it dragged into the dust at Ojo Azul, in the chaos after the shot that grazed a judge โ the shooter himself, Voss's right hand, the man who had fired from the hillside to start a massacre and been run down for his trouble. Escaped from somewhere, or never truly held; it hardly mattered now.