The Well Belonged to the Thirsty: A Widowed Cowboy, Twenty-Five Women at His Gate, and the Promise His Dead Wife Left Behind

Goyan, fed and somewhat restored, sat on the well curb beside his sister and looked about him with a slow, considering gaze, taking in the house, the cottonwood, the two graves beyond the fence. Something in his expression changed, softened and sharpened at once, and he put a hand inside his shirt, where a man keeps what he cannot afford to lose. "Sister," he said, in a voice meant for later. "There is something this man must see. When the yard is quiet. Something I have carried a very long way."

Chapter 18

The Shot

It might have ended cleanly, and for the span of one bright hour Amos allowed himself to believe it would. The gunmen's weapons lay stacked on the porch under a trooper's eye. The overseers sat in the barn shade with their bound hands in their laps. Ferris stood between his two guards near the gate, hatless in the sun, working his jaw like a man chewing on the one argument that might still save him. Aldous had sent a rider to Fortuna for the magistrate and was writing his report at Amos's kitchen table, in no hurry, the way the law moves when it is finally sure of its ground.

The trouble, when it came, came from the smallest thing. A trooper, young and trying to be kind, led Ferris toward the well to let him drink before the ride to town. It brought the marshal within six paces of Nascha, who stood at the well curb with a dipper in her hand, giving water — as she had given it all morning — to anyone who asked. She looked up and met Ferris's eyes without flinching, and something in that calm, unafraid regard broke the last of his discipline like a dry stick.

"You," he said. "You and your kind and this sanctimonious widower — you've cost me everything. Hollis will hang me out to dry and you'll be drinking his well-water—"

"Marshal, that's enough," the young trooper said, and reached for his arm.

Ferris moved faster than a man of his bulk should have moved. Whether the pistol was hidden at his back or taken in that instant from the trooper's own holster, Amos never afterward could say with certainty. He saw only the shape of it swinging up, saw Nascha in its line with the dipper still raised, saw her understand — a fraction too late to run, and too proud, perhaps, to duck.

Amos did not decide. His body decided, the way it had decided things all his life on this ranch — stepping into the path of a falling beam, a spooked horse, a summer flood at the creek crossing. He crossed the two strides between them and put himself squarely where Nascha had been standing, shoving her hard aside toward the well house as the shot cracked the morning open.

The world narrowed to a single point of fire high in his left shoulder, and then widened strangely, the yard tilting, the sky very blue and very far. He heard Nascha scream his name — the first time she had ever raised her voice at the ranch. He heard hooves, shouting, the sergeant's bellow. He felt the dust come up to meet him, warm against his cheek, and thought with distant surprise that the ground of his own yard, which he had walked ten thousand times, felt softer than he had ever noticed.

It was over in seconds, though he learned the shape of it later, in pieces, the way wounded men do. Ferris had fired once and only once. Two troopers were on him before the echo died, driving him down into the dust he had threatened to make of other men's lives, and Aldous himself had come off the porch at a run, revolver drawn, voice cold enough to stop the gunmen's half-hearted stir toward their stacked rifles before it began. Ferris, face in the dirt, spitting dust, was shouting about Hollis, about money, about how nobody understood what he'd been promised — and no one in that yard, not even his own men, moved to answer him.

"Don't you dare die in my yard, Amos Delaney," Nascha said, and he realized she was kneeling beside him, her hands pressed hard over the wound, her shawl already folded beneath his head. Her face was fierce and wet. "Not for me. Not like this. You hold on. That is an order from a woman who does not give them lightly."

"Didn't — plan to," Amos managed. The pain was arriving now in earnest, a deep, grinding burn, but her hands were steady, and steadiness was a thing a man could hold on to. "You hurt?"

"I am entirely unhurt, which is exactly the problem we will discuss when you are well." She turned her head and began giving directions in two languages at once — water boiled, clean cloth, the door taken off the smokehouse hinges for a litter, someone to run for the captain's surgeon. Women were already moving. Goyan appeared on his other side, his freedman's hands, still marked by rope, sliding under Amos's shoulder with infinite care.

"Carry him gently," Goyan said to the others gathering round. "This man stepped in front of a bullet meant for my sister. We carry him the way we would carry our own father. Slowly. All together. Now."