The first shot took the water barrel.
It made a sound like a struck bell and a bright fan of water jumped out sideways, and then the world came apart into noise. The team lunged. Gid went down behind the seat box by instinct older than thought, hauling the reins short, and the second shot took a splinter out of the footboard where his boot had been. From the high rim a rifle worked steadily — a professional's rhythm, no hurry in it — and Gid understood in his belly that the man up there had him measured and was simply walking the shots in, patient as weather. One more to finish the geometry of it.
He never fired.
The blanket behind him erupted. She came up out of the wagon bed in one motion, coat and hair and the short pistol, already aimed as she rose, and the pistol spoke twice — flat, close, enormous in the stone cut — and up on the rim the lean rifleman stood straight up out of his rocks as if astonished, looked down at them with an expression of pure surprise, and fell the way a cut tree falls, turning once on the scree and coming down the slope in a slide of red dust and loose stone, and did not stop until the track stopped him.
"Drive!" she said, and he was already driving.
The rest of the ambush — there were three, maybe four more rifles on the far rim — lost its stomach in the space of that fall. A shot went wild over the wagon; another chipped stone behind them; then the rim was emptying, men running bent along the skyline for their horses, because a probe that costs a rifleman in the first ten seconds is a probe nobody signed for. Gid stood up in the box with the reins high and the team at a dead run in a place no sane man ran mules, canvas slapping the wall, a crate corner grinding stone in a scream of wood — and then they were through, out into the open bowl beyond the cut, with the whole sky given back to them and the mules blowing like bellows.
Behind the seat the canvas had two clean holes in it, neat as moth-work, and a crate had splintered along one corner and wept straw onto the bed. The barrel was the real wound: it stood in its irons with a neat round hole weeping a bright, steady thread onto the dust, the whole desert ration sighing out of it a cup at a time. Gid looked at it a long moment. Water on this road was the one cargo that never reached its destination twice.
He hauled them down to a walk by degrees. His hands were steady. His heart was a fist trying to get out of his chest, but his hands were steady, and he was particular about that.
"You were told to stay under the blanket," he said.
"You were about to be killed in front of me in an interesting light." She was sitting up in the bed now, coat open, the pistol still in her hand and her eyes on the cut behind them, and her face was the color of old paper but her voice was not shaking. "Forgive the irregularity."
"He had me," Gid said. "One more shot. He was walking them in."
"I know. I counted." She lowered the pistol slowly, as a person sets down something hot. "I've been counting since the barrel. He needed three to find you. I only needed one of his."
Gid looked back down the track. The cut stood empty and innocent in the morning light, red rock and shadow, and at its mouth, half in the road where the slope had delivered him, lay a shape in dark clothes that had been a man with a profession and a name and a laugh, perhaps, about offices.
"The team's winded," Gid said. "We'll blow them here a quarter hour."
She nodded at the shape in the road. "And him?"
"Him," Gid said, "I'm going to go and look at. A man who nearly kills me gets looked at. It's a rule of the house."
He took his rifle off the footboard and walked back into the shadow of the cut with the sun climbing behind him, and the woman who was not Anna held the reins of his team and watched his back the whole way, pistol across her knee, until he reached the dead man and knelt down beside him in the road.
Chapter 13 — The Waybill
The dead man lay on his back with his hat two yards off and his rifle underneath him, bent at the barrel where the slope had finished what the fall began.
He was younger than his skill had promised — thirty at the outside, with a barbered mustache and boots that had cost real money, and his shirt was good cloth, and his hands were not a laborer's hands. Gid knelt in the red dust and went through the man the way you go through a wreck: thoroughly, without heat, accounting everything. A wallet with paper money, more than a freighter saw in a season. A silver watch. A plug of tobacco, a folding knife, a box of cartridges for a rifle that lay ruined under him. No letter. No name. Men in his trade traveled clean.