"I hear from everybody," Weaver said. "It's the great burden of the job." He put his hat back on. "It's the talking back I ration."
And Pruitt folded — not dramatically, the way a tent folds when the pole is pulled, his genial face going slack and old, and he sat down without permission on a freight crate and looked at his hands as if they had been lent to him by a stranger. The yard let its breath out all together.
It was Gid, watching the pens, who saw the gap where Tobe Riggs had been standing.
Chapter 27 — Riggs's Run
"Riggs," Gid said, not loud, and Weaver's head came around. "He's making for the pens."
Riggs had read the yard the way Gid had — better, maybe; running was his trade. While the deputies were busy with Pruitt and the clerk and the oilcloth of counted money, he had gone sideways through the crowd a step at a time, the way smoke goes through a slat fence, and now he was past the freight sheds and running flat-out for the horse pens, where half a dozen saddled mounts stood hitched and his own long-legged bay was already stamping, kept ready the way men of his kind always keep a horse ready.
A deputy fired — high, a warning or a miss, it hardly mattered — and the yard went to shouting. Riggs vaulted the pen rail without breaking stride and was up on the bay with the reins in his teeth and his pistol out, and he did not shoot at the crowd. He shot the hitch-rail through, twice, so the other horses tore loose and went every way at once, a rolling brown confusion between him and the law, which was the cleverest thing Gid ever saw him do and the last.
The alley was the only way out. The Cerro Blanco freight yard had one throat: the lane between the freight shed and the assay office, wide enough for one wagon, that ran down past the ore bins to open desert. Every man in the territory who had hauled into Cerro Blanco knew it, and Gid knew Riggs knew it, and Gid was already moving.
A six-mule team stood hitched to a loaded ore wagon at the shed door, driver gone to his breakfast, lines tied off to the brake. Gid took those lines the way he would take his own — they were not his mules, but a team is a team, and his hands knew the language before his mind had finished the sentence. He spoke once, low. The wheelers leaned, the leaders came around smart as a swung gate, and twenty feet of wagon and three tons of silver ore began to move at a pace that would have shamed better men than Tobe Riggs.
He did not try to run the bay down. You cannot outrun a horse with an ore wagon, and a freighter does not think in straight lines; he thinks in ground. Gid came down the yard at a hard trot, standing in the box with the lines in both fists, and at the alley mouth he hauled the leaders left and let the wagon's own weight do the rest. The team swung, the wagon slewed broadside with a scream of hub against adobe and a fountain of dust, and the throat of Cerro Blanco was plugged from wall to wall with mule and wagon and Gid Mercer standing on top of it like the cork in a bottle.
Riggs came around the bins at a dead run and saw it, and for one stride Gid watched him think about jumping it — six feet of wagon bed, a thrashing team, a man up there waiting — and watched the bay refuse before Riggs did. The horse checked, reared, came down sideways in the narrow lane with nowhere to put its feet, and Riggs went out of the saddle over its shoulder into the dust at the wagon's tail.
He came up shooting. The ball took a chunk out of the wagon's sideboard an inch from Gid's boot. Gid went over the side the way he'd gone off a wagon a thousand times — one hand on the board, drop and land rolling — and got to Riggs before the pistol came up twice, and put a shoulder into him low and drove him back against the assay office wall, and pinned the gun arm with both scarred hands and held it there while Riggs hammered at his ribs with the other fist and cursed him in two languages with real feeling.
Teamsters poured in then, and deputies over the wagon bed, and it took four men to finish what Gid had started, because Riggs fought the way a trapped animal fights — without hope and without economy. But they finished it with him breathing, which is what Weaver had asked for, and they dragged him out of the alley and laid his pockets out a second time on the tailgate of the very wagon he had tried to jump, and there was the rest of the marked money, folded in his shirt, next to his heart, where he had kept it warm all morning.
"Alive," Weaver said, coming up and looking down at him with professional appreciation. "In one working piece. Gideon, the territory thanks you."
"Wasn't me," Gid said. He was looking at the strange team, which had stood through all of it with the patience of churchgoers, one leader cropping at a tuft of dry grass growing out of the assay office wall. "It was the wagon. A wagon across an alley is a hard argument to answer."
"You should know," Riggs said from the dust, with blood in his teeth and something like respect underneath the hate. "You're the only man on this line I never could get around."