Kneeling, the fingers of his hands wrapped over the pit’s edge as he listened to the horrible, fading but still audible screams of man and horse from deep within, he realized that the pit was moving away from him. He released it, backed up a few steps, and watched as it shrank. Soon, it was not much larger than the span of both his hands, and then it was gone altogether. He went back to his knees and felt for it, but the ground was solid. It was as if the pit had never existed at all.
By then, the rest of his party had rounded the last bend. The battlewagon’s lights washed over him, showing him that the canyon floor remained solid. Or seemingly so. It had first appeared out of nowhere, without warning. To hope that another one wouldn’t do the same seemed like a dangerous idea.
“Hurry up!” he called. “Canyon’s closing in ahead of us. And keep those lights pointed toward the ground. If you see something like a shadow, a big one with no obvious source, don’t go near it.”
“Where’s Taylor?” Delahunt asked. “He scouting up ahead?”
“He’s—” Tuck hesitated. He didn’t know how to answer. As far as he knew, Taylor was still falling into the earth, victim of a trap that couldn’t exist, but did. “He’s gone.”
“Gone?” Delahunt echoed.
“Don’t ask. Let’s just get that wagon through here. I don’t think there’s much canyon left, but I’d hate to be stuck in here when the walls come together.”
Delahunt eyed him with naked suspicion. Tuck couldn’t blame him. He and Taylor had been alone, and now Taylor was gone. The only argument in his favor was the fact that the world had turned strange and decidedly antagonistic since they’d crossed onto Broken M land. “I’ll explain later,” he said. “Let’s go.”
McKenna waved the group onward. Cuttrell outranked him in the army, but on this journey, they had all started looking to the lieutenant for leadership. Johnson pushed the wagon as fast as he could. The lights dimmed slightly, which Tuck figured meant he was devoting more of the steam’s energy to turning the wheels and less to other uses. He wasn’t sure how any of it worked, but that seemed a reasonable guess.
Soon, the canyon’s end was before them, with open country visible on the other side. Tuck was behind the wagon, along with Kuruk and Cale. The rest cleared the narrowing space, but as the wagon tried to squeeze through, the rocky walls came so close together that it scraped on both sides, shooting out sparks where metal rasped against rock. Tuck wondered what would happen if the wagon made it through. Would the walls slam together, crushing the last three riders?
As the wagon’s front burst free of the canyon’s brutal embrace, the walls closed more tightly on the back end. The armored sides groaned. Lights were crushed and torn from their moorings, and the end caved slightly. But then, with a final shriek of steel on stone, it broke away.
“Ride!” Tuck screamed. He didn’t wait around to see if Kuruk and Cale obeyed, but put his heels to his mount and flew toward the wan light on the far side. When he had cleared the gap, he wheeled around in time to see Cale bolt through. Kuruk came last. The scout’s muscular paint was more than a match for the roan Cale rode, but Tuck figured the scout had let the boy go first to make sure he got out. Kuruk inched through at the last possible moment, and Tuck wouldn’t have been surprised if some hairs from his paint’s tail were trapped between the walls when they finally came together.
Johnson climbed out of his cupola, dripping with sweat. While Tuck tried to explain to Delahunt what had happened to Taylor, Johnson and McKenna examined the damage to the battlewagon. The two hindmost lights were gone, and some of the armor plating had been scraped off. But the wheels appeared straight, and when Johnson got back in and tested his controls, all the systems seemed to function normally. Having determined that, they continued on their path.
As if the canyon were the last obstacle they had to brave, beyond it the road seemed to revert to what it should have been all along: a frequently traveled but muddy thoroughfare that sliced through the fields of native grasses where cattle grazed and horses huddled together, heads down, looking miserable in the rain. Where the grasslands blended with high desert scrub, the mesquites and creosote bush and beavertail and cholla behaved. The yuccas and agaves stabbed at the lowering clouds but didn’t detach from their bases and attack. The ground stayed whole and solid beneath their feet, and the trail toward Montclair’s ranch headquarters didn’t deviate from its usual course.
Chapter Forty-nine
At one point, Johnson stopped the wagon and climbed out, complaining that his limbs were painfully cramped. “I know how to work it,” McKenna offered. “I’ll take a shift inside. You can use my horse.”
“Thanks, Lieutenant,” Johnson said. “I’ll spell you again in a bit.”
While they were making the switch, Cale ambled over to where Tuck and Cuttrell stood, watching the men move around the wagon with grace born of familiarity. “Mr. Bringloe,” Cale said. “Is it always like this?”
“Is what, Cale?”
“The world. Seems like those who already got, get more. Folks like Mr. and Mrs. Tibbetts, honest people who work hard but don’t have much, get stepped on every which way, till finally they can’t take no more steppin’. But somebody like Montclair, he’s already got more money than Croesus, and everything he does makes him more. I don’t think he cares who gets hurt, long as he gets what he wants. It don’t hardly seem fair.”
“If it’s fair you’re looking for, son, you were born into the wrong world,” Tuck said.
“You’re right about Montclair,” Cuttrell added. “I’m ashamed to say that I helped him amass some of his holdings, consolidate his wealth and power. Now he’s got the mayor and council dancing like puppets on strings. The army, too, until now. But no longer. However this ends up tonight, the CSA is out of the Broken M business.”
Tuck must have been wearing a surprised expression, because Cuttrell gave him a smile. “What? A man can change his mind. Even a starchy, washed-up old soldier. Changing my mind on this might be one of the best things I’ve ever done.”
Kuruk interrupted the conversation. “Rider coming,” he said. He pointed toward the south, and Tuck saw the rider, still some distance off. He was hunched over his horse, which in a drier season would have been raising a thick cloud of dust. Instead, it was kicking up a spray of mud clots, but despite the poor road conditions, it was making good time. Soon enough, man and horse were hurtling toward them. Tuck was moving to the side of the road, as were the others, to let the rider pass, when he realized it was Kanouse.
“Pull your irons, boys,” he warned, jerking his borrowed pistol from its holster. “That man’s likely teamed up with Montclair, and he doesn’t mean us well.”
The other men did the same, except Johnson. But his cupola swiveled a little to the right, adjusting as Kanouse drew nearer to keep him in its sights.
Kanouse surprised Tuck, though. He barely seemed to notice the procession until he was right on top of it. When he lifted his gaze from the road and saw several mounted men and a strange wagon twenty yards ahead, his expression turned to one of terror. He started, and yanked back on the reins, and his right hand dropped to his rifle scabbard. He tugged out that sawed-off, which was the only part that Tuck was expecting.
* * *
When Kanouse noticed figures in the road, his first thought was that they were more of those Montclair mirages. He kept his head down and jabbed his spurs against the horse’s flanks. The animal was already running all-out, but Kanouse didn’t want it to let up.
Then he glanced up again and saw that crazy wagon he’d spotted in town. That prompted him to look again. This wasn’t Montclair, and probably no mirage. He tugged back on the reins and slowed the confused horse. Remembering who had been with the wagon in town, he took another look at the men standing around it.
Bringloe. Colonel Cuttrell, and some others he recognized as soldiers from the fort. Some kid he didn’t know. And that Apache who was always with the white girl.
They all had guns in their hands, and something that looked like a Gatling gun was pointed at him from the wagon.
Kanouse came to a stop and yanked his scattergun. Montclair had filled him with doubt, made him question everything he knew about himself and the world he lived in. Would the man he had thought he was have turned tail and run from pictures in the air, with no physical substance? How could they hurt him? He had showed Montclair a side of himself he had long tried to bury: the fearful side. Once, a man had told him he was a moral and physical coward, because he had refused to intercede in a fight between a husband and wife down at the Palladium. The husband broke her nose and blackened her eye, but they had left together, seemingly at peace. Kanouse had caught up with the other man, the one who had called him a coward, on his way home from the saloon. He’d gutted the man with a Bowie knife and left him to die in the dirt, then gone home and slept like a baby.
He had lost that knife in a card game. It was too bad; he’d always liked the heft of it.
Now he had acted like the coward that man had said he was. Only Montclair had witnessed it—if, in fact, he could see with the eyes of those mirages. But Kanouse knew, to the depths of his soul, that he had been terrified, and that he had run away at the first opportunity. If that wasn’t cowardice, what was it?
Here, he had a chance to redeem himself. He faced six men with guns in their fists. A coward wouldn’t wade right into that, would he? For a moment—less than, just the briefest instant—he thought about showing his hands, talking to the men. They didn’t have any reason to shoot him, after all. If he did that, though, and they let him pass, then he would return to town only to have to live with the absolute certainty of his cowardice. He couldn’t ask for anyone’s respect if he didn’t believe he deserved it.
Instead, he yanked his scattergun. He would show what he was made of, or go down trying.
* * *
“Kanouse!” Tuck called. “Don’t be a fool!”
Kanouse swung the gun toward him. His hand was tight on it. White-knuckled and trembling. He was scared, or had been recently. That could explain the way he’d been riding, like something bad was hot on his trail.
“You got six guns pointed at you,” McKenna said. “You can’t win this.”
It was as if McKenna’s words had cut a tether holding Kanouse fast to the earth. He gigged his horse and bolted toward them. As he charged, he tugged on one trigger, then the other. Both barrels spat fire. He broke the weapon open, reloaded, and fired again, and McKenna fell. Somebody opened fire—Tuck thought it was Delahunt and Cuttrell—but Kanouse was riding fast, shifting this way and that, and their rounds went wide. Johnson probably hesitated to fire the Gatling because Tuck and the others were between Kanouse and the wagon.
Tuck leveled his pistol at the man. Kanouse was bringing the sawed-off around toward him, but time seemed to slow down as he did. Tuck saw his arm swinging the gun, his finger tightening on the front trigger, his eyes narrowing as if anticipating the sound and impact of the shot, his mouth going slack. All of it happened at the same instant, but to Tuck’s eyes, each was a separate moment, distinct from the rest.
He hadn’t killed a man—a real man—since the war. He had spilled as much blood as he could stomach. Even during the war, every time he’d had to take a life, he had seen his father’s face and heard his mother’s voice. He’d been good at killing, and that talent sickened him.
But Kanouse left him no choice. McKenna was already down, and Tuck was next. He didn’t want to kill. But he didn’t want to die, either.
He squeezed the trigger, twice, in rapid succession. The gun bucked in his hand and he almost thought his eye could follow the path of each bullet as it hurtled toward its target. The first hit Kanouse in the chest, and the man made a surprised noise. The second caught him in the throat. Kanouse’s head snapped back and he tumbled off the horse.
As soon as he hit the damp earth, everything sped up again. Kanouse bounced a little, but the mud sucked him back down. His right hand twitched a few times. The shotgun landed near him, bounced, and wound up entangled in a nearby mesquite. Tuck spun around toward McKenna. Delahunt already knelt beside him.
“He’s all right!” Delahunt announced. He stood up, helping McKenna to his feet. The lieutenant’s left sleeve was ragged, and there was blood running down his arm. He looked pale, but he tossed off a grin.
“I took some buckshot,” he said. “Hurts, but I’ll live.”
“The marshal won’t,” Kuruk said. He had rushed to Kanouse’s side. Kanouse’s fingers clawed at the ground, but they slowed even as Tuck watched. Kuruk snatched the star from his chest. “He don’t deserve that title, anyhow. Or the badge.”
He carried it over to Tuck. Behind him, Kanouse’s chest fell once, then stopped, and his hands went still. Kuruk handed the badge up to Tuck, still mounted. Tuck took it. There were drops of blood on it, glistening in unexpected moonlight.
Tuck looked over to see a full moon rising in the east, below the clouds, just emerging from behind the Mule Mountains. It was orange and enormous, looking like it could swallow the mountains and be hungry for more.
“Thunder Moon,” Kuruk said. “First moon of the monsoon.”
“I’m not the marshal anymore,” Tuck said, still holding the badge in his hand.
“Should be,” Kuruk said. “You’re better than him, anyhow.”
Tuck shoved the star into a pocket. He didn’t want the thing. But he didn’t want to leave it out here, sinking into the mud with Kanouse’s corpse. When he got back to town, he would deliver it to the mayor.
If he got back to town.
He had a feeling the night’s trouble was just beginning.
Chapter Fifty
Soto’s was as busy as Missy had ever seen it. Sometimes rainy evenings brought people in, and other times it kept them away. Tonight the rain had been on and off, but it seemed like everybody who came into the place stayed. The tables were full, the bar was packed, and the girls were busy, Missy included. She was taking a break, for the moment, though Senora Soto glared at her when she ignored a trooper who was holding cash money in his hand and waving her down.
Most of the people in the place were soldiers, she noticed. It wasn’t unusual to see troopers from the fort in the place, even filling a table or two. But never this many, not all at once. She did a quick count, and came up with fifty-three men who she was certain were with the army. There were a handful more she thought might have been, but she couldn’t say for sure.
Who she didn’t see was Tuck. She thought about their conversation earlier, the way he had treated her, and a wave of sorrow washed over her. She had seen him when he was a drunk. Sober, he was an entirely different man. A better man. One she wanted to know.
Sally Jo had told her that after she’d gone upstairs, a couple of hours earlier, there had been a disturbance of some sort outside, and he had left, abandoning an untouched but paid-for glass of whiskey. Nobody seemed to know the exact nature of the commotion, although there were rumors that it had to do with Little Wing. Nobody had seen Tuck since, or Little Wing, or the Apache scout.
She liked Little Wing, and she liked Tuck. Maybe it was nothing; maybe he had gone to one of the town’s other saloons, or had enough to drink and was sleeping it off in a rain-drenched alley somewhere. But she didn’t think so. She thought there was a steel core to the man that wouldn’t let him slide back as far as he had before. He might think he would—he probably thought it would be easy. But she had known a lot of men, good, bad, and indifferent. She believed Tuck was one of those who, having seen what he could be, would in the end settle for nothing less.
If he, Little Wing, and the Apache were all missing, after some sort of trouble, it wasn’t because he had gone back to drinking. If he’d wanted to do that, he’d have come back inside where there was a glass waiting.
No, it wasn’t that. A cold finger of worry traced her spine. Something had happened, and it wasn’t good. According to Tuck, the
killings of Daisie, and Calhoun, and the men behind Soto’s, and maybe others, were all connected.
She could look for them, but she didn’t know where to even begin. Then she remembered what Tuck had told her earlier, about Montclair—that he was “in the middle of it.” She had an uneasy feeling that the commotion, and the fact that Tuck had never come back for his drink, might be connected, too.
He had come to Carmichael and sobered up and tried to do something to help the town when it was most in need. Now he might be in trouble, and somebody had to stand up for him.
She doubted that she could do anything about it, though. Not by herself, anyway. Even Tuck had seemed disturbed by whatever was up, and he had demonstrated a certain fluency with trouble. But there were plenty of men in the saloon tonight who were more conversant than she with the kind of thing that might set Tuck to worrying. And though she didn’t have much to offer them in return, she could talk to the other girls, and maybe threaten to hold back on what she knew the men wanted.
She fixed one with a steady gaze, a sergeant she had been with before, a man with graying hair and an enormous jaw. He worked it constantly, which made him look as if he had a half a muskrat in his mouth and was chewing on it slowly. As she crossed the room toward him, his smile brightened. He put his hand on her behind when she reached him, and kept it there until she lowered herself onto his lap. “It’s good to see you, Missy,” he said. “But I ain’t got the price of a ride.”
“It’s not money I’m after,” she said.
“That don’t sound like the Missy I know.”
“Well, it’s so. Today I don’t need money, Frank. But I might have need of some soldiers. You think you could rustle me up some?”
Frank barked out a laugh. “Joint’s full of ’em,” he said. “How many you want?”
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