nothing but rain on water and the breathing of horses, and then Coulter's
voice came back, thinner across the river, with something in it she had never
heard from him in Alder Creek — not fear, she thought, but arithmetic, a
man doing sums he had not expected to be set. His orders, whatever they
were, had been written for a freight outfit and a schoolteacher. They had not
included a marshal of the United States standing in the Smoky Hill with his
hat running water, nor a federal agent, nor witnesses named and named again
for the record. "Marshal," Coulter called. "I've no quarrel with the United
States. There's a fugitive matter — a woman stole papers out of Alder Creek
—"
"There is a woman at this ford," Reinhardt said, "traveling under the
observation of the General Land Office, with the evidence you describe in
her lawful keeping, and if a hair of her is touched between this bank and
Hays City it will be answered for in a court that does not sit in this county.
Choose your next minute with care, Mr. Coulter. It will be remembered
exactly."
What happened next happened the way violence happens in bad weather —
not as a charge but as a confusion at the edges. One of Coulter's riders,
younger than the rest or drunker on orders, put his horse into the river at the
ford's mouth to come at the wagons from the flank while the talking held the
bank, and the current took the horse sideways and brought them both,
scrambling, into the shallows alongside the second wagon — her wagon —
where the horse's shoulder struck the bed and the rider came half out of the
saddle with his hand out. He was reaching for her. He had seen her climb
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down; the whole bank had seen her by then, and his hand closed on the
sleeve of her coat, on the oilskin bulk beneath it, and pulled. The world went
to rain and iron and the smell of a wet horse. She held the wagon's side with
both hands and thought, with a clarity that surprised her afterward, of nothing
but the notebook — not her safety, not the river, the notebook, and the coat
that held it, and how her father's handwriting must not go into the Smoky
Hill.
Rube got there first. She never saw him arrive; he was simply between her
and the rider, one hand at the man's bridle arm, and then the horse lunged
back against the current and the wagon iron rang and Rube went down along
the wagon's side into the mud of the bank with a sound she felt in her own
ribs. The rider's horse freed itself and went up the bank in a shower of gravel
and was gone into the timber with the lanterns scattering before it. The other
lanterns were moving now — back, sideways, away — riders dissolving into
the rain the way men do when the man they follow has stopped following his
own orders, and on the far bank Coulter sat his horse a moment longer,
visible entire for the first time in a wash of lightning, his face turned toward
the ford. She saw the arithmetic finish on it. He was not beaten and he was
not afraid of the water or the woman or the freighter bleeding in the mud; he
was counting the cost of a United States marshal, and the cost was more than
Edwin Harrow's money had ever been denominated in.
"Ward Coulter," Reinhardt said, and he had crossed the ford in the middle of
the confusion without her seeing that either, and was standing in the shallows
with the rain running off him, one hand resting — not raised, resting —
where his coat fell open. "You are under arrest for assault upon a party of
federal witnesses and attempted robbery of evidence in federal keeping. Your
men may ride home and tell Mr. Harrow how the evening went. You will
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ride with me."
Coulter looked at the river, and at the wagons, and at the woman standing in
the mud with her coat torn at the sleeve and both arms wrapped around
herself at the place where the oilskin rode, and he dismounted into the water
and gave up his reins like a man setting down something heavier than a
horse. "He pays by the job, Marshal," he said. "Not by the hanging." He said
it almost conversationally, as if he wanted the record clean too. "I aim to be a
poor purchase."
Whitaker had come down the bank during the arrest with his carpetbag in
both hands, and at some point in the worst of it he had taken the bag and held
it up over his head against the rain, where it shed the water in four neat
streams off its corners like a small roof, and he stood so now, soaked to the
skin from the elbows down, watching the deputies of circumstance sort
themselves out on the bank of the Smoky Hill. "I shall note in my report," he
said to no one in particular, "that the Kansas weather conspires with the
defense — but not, apparently, decisively." He lowered the carpetbag and
looked at Rube, who was sitting up in the mud with Oyler's arm behind him,
breathing the way a man sips air through a straw, each breath measured and
shallow and furiously controlled. "Mr. Halloran. Can you ride?"
"I can be freight," Rube said, through his teeth. "I've been in the business."
They crossed in the end with the river at the wagons' beds and the oxen
blowing and the rope strung bank to bank, and the far-side way station took
them in out of the storm with the unquestioning efficiency of a place that had
absorbed worse evenings than this one and expected worse again. Reinhardt
rode on into the wet dark with his prisoner for the county seat, where there
was a jail with a federal contract, and sent back word by the station keeper's
son that they were not to wait for him and were not to worry, two instructions
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