"I've been called worse by better," he said, "and I'm still—"
The sound came out of the draw below the road grade, on the north side, and
it stopped them both the way a shot would have. Not a shot. A horse in pain
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— that high, sawing whinny that is half scream, and under it the scrabble of
hooves on loose rock, and then a man's voice, thin and wrong, calling out
without words in it. Wade had Roach's reins up before the second whinny.
Enola was already moving, off the road and down through the brush with her
bundle banging her back, faster over that broken ground in moccasins than
he could follow in boots, and he went after her with his heart slamming,
thinking ambush, thinking Deke Ransome.
It was not an ambush. It was a horse down on its side in the draw with one
foreleg folded wrong under it, and a man lying half out of the saddle's
wreckage in the gravel with his head against a stone. The horse saw them and
screamed again and tried to rise and could not. The man did not move at all,
except that his lips were moving around nothing, and even in the gray first
light Wade knew the cut of the coat, and the boy's face under the sweat and
dust of fever.
Jess Malone. Nineteen years old and looking nine. A B-Bar rider, Barlow's
by brand and by wages, Dr. Hart's secret patient — and one of the men who
had been in the rocks the morning the world split open. Wade went to his
knees in the gravel and got a hand under the boy's head. The skin was hot as
a stove lid. The bandage at his side, where Dr. Hart's careful work had been,
was dark through and dark again, fresh over old, and the smell coming off
him was the smell that had emptied more rooms in Wade's life than any
other: a wound gone bad in a body too young to know it was losing.
"He rode," Wade said, half to Enola. "Fever and all, the fool rode. He was
trying to get to town."
Enola had stopped three paces away. She was looking at Malone's face, and
Wade watched her own face change — not soften, not harden, but settle, the
way deep water settles when something heavy goes down through it. "I know
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this one," she said quietly. "At the rocks. When the shooting started, he was
on the left side, above the trail. I saw his face over a rifle. He is the one who
fired wide. Twice. I remember wondering why."
"Enola—"
"He is dying in a ditch, Wade." She was already kneeling. She pulled her
bundle down and got the water bag out of it — her own water, the water for
her walk to surrender — and she worked the stopper loose with her teeth
because her hands were full of the boy's head, which she had taken from
Wade's hands and settled against her own knee without hesitation. "Whatever
he was at the rocks, he is this now. Hold his shoulders. If he fights, he will
tear it open the rest of the way."
Malone's eyes came open while she was working. They did not focus the
way eyes should. They moved over Wade's face and did not keep it, and
moved over Enola's and stopped, and Wade felt the boy's whole body go
rigid under his hands.
"You," Malone whispered. "Oh God. Oh God, it's you. Don't—" His hand
came up, weak as a child's, and knocked against the water bag, and water ran
down his chin and into the gravel. "Don't let me— I was coming. I was
coming to say it. Ask the doctor. Ask Dr. Hart, I told her I'd— I was coming
to say it all, before—"
"Drink," Enola said. Not gently. The way you speak to a horse in a river
crossing. "You will say it after. Drink first."
He drank. Wade held his shoulders and felt the fight go out of him by
ounces, and the sun came up over the Capitanos while the three of them knelt
in a dry wash in the gray gravel, and neither Wade nor Enola said the thing
they were both thinking, which was that the arithmetic had just changed
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itself, without asking either of them.
They got him into the shade of the wash's bank with his head up on Wade's
folded coat, and Wade put the horse down himself because there was no
kindness in waiting. He did it from behind the ear with Malone's own pistol,
at the boy's whispered request — Malone had heard the scream and
understood it better than any of them — and the shot rolled down the draw
and out across the flats. Enola did not flinch at the shot. She was tearing a
strip from her own skirt hem to pad the bandage.
"Talk to me, Jess," Wade said. "You said you were coming to say it. Say it to
me first. Get it out where it can be heard."
It came the way water comes through a cracked dam, in pieces and then in a
rush and then in pieces again. Deke's name first. Deke Ransome had ridden
to the line camp six weeks before the ambush with a bottle and a list of
names, and the names were the men Barlow wanted for work that wasn't to
be spoken of at the ranch house table. The work was horses. Forty head of
Apache horses, good ones, grazing the agency's remuda pasture in the valley
below the rocks, and Amos Barlow's paper — some paper about grazing
fees, some judgment out of a court in Mesilla that no Apache had ever been
asked to read — said the horses were his by law, and the law was slow, and
the county was fast. So the horses would be taken the way such things had
always been taken. Only it had to look like the other thing. It had to look like
a raid in reverse — Apaches stealing, Apaches shooting — because a rancher
defending his stock was a story every jury in the territory already knew how