Outlawed(73)
As any good outlaw knows, the size of a sheriff’s posse changes from one day to the next. It depends on the number of able-bodied men with working pistols and ready horses who can spare the time away from their farms, ranches, or stores, and on the popularity of the sheriff with said men. Perhaps most importantly, it depends on the nature of the crime the posse is gathered to punish. The theft of a cow might raise one or two men; the theft of a prize stud bull three or four. The murder of a derelict or a woman of questionable character might bring out one generous man, or none at all, while the killing of a mother or a pillar of the community might inspire half a dozen.
Behind my friends on the Hole in the Wall Road, pouring over the hill rank upon rank, tall on their horses, pistols drawn, was a posse some two dozen strong. Among them I recognized not only the sheriffs of Fiddleback and Casper, but also Sheriff Branch, wearing his white hat and riding the horse I’d fed as a little girl. To see him alongside these others, after fearing our meeting for so long, gave me a kind of unstable feeling, as though the very ground were buckling and folding beneath me, and distances that had once seemed vast were now so small that my enemies could cross them in an instant. How these men had joined together I did not know, how they had tracked us here I could not guess, but their combined influence had raised a force that outnumbered us three to one, whose horses galloped at our horses’ heels and whose gunshots startled flights of meadowlarks into the morning air of our valley.
Elzy rode past Faith, and with her good arm scooped Texas off her back and onto Temperance’s. From behind them, Cassie shouted, “Scatter!”
I took Amity off the road and into the tall grass. She bounded, sure-footed as a pronghorn, across the valley floor. Red dust came up in clouds around us, coating my throat and making me choke, but I kept my eyes fixed on the wall. I knew that Cassie, Elzy, News, Agnes Rose, and Texas were all doing the same. If we could get to the hole, we’d have a vantage from which to dig in and defend ourselves, with a clear view of everything in the valley below.
Amity leapt over the creek and in the distance to the east I saw the cowboy shack, the morning sun glinting off its windows. I hoped the Kid would know to stay inside, and that the posse would not think to look there. I remembered how when she was sick, my mama had let a rat crawl all the way up the bedpost and gnaw a hole in the quilt at her feet; I was afraid that if the posse burst into the shack, the Kid would simply let them shoot.
When we reached the stand of alders in the middle of the valley, I let myself look behind me once again. Far in the distance I heard gunshots, but I saw no one. I let Amity slow to a trot, and caressed her gray neck. She was so fast and sure. The sun was already hot, and I wiped my forehead with the back of a dust-coated hand. The air smelled like new grass and sage. All around us the grasshoppers were humming their summer song.
The shot came just as I let myself breathe. Amity bucked and reared and I, unprepared, fell backward into the dirt. I called out to her like she was a child, but she was galloping north, fast as any wild horse. She must be hit, I knew, or she would never throw me. But I had only a moment to worry for her when I heard the other horse approaching, its hooves loud on the hard pan of the valley.
I did the only thing I could think to do—I climbed into the alder tree and sheltered as best I could among the leaves. I was there only a moment before the man came into view. I recognized his narrow frame and blood-colored hat—the sheriff of Casper. I waited until I thought he was twenty paces away. I fired.
The bullet served only to tell him where I was. He raised his eyes to mine and fired, but he missed, too, the lead lodging itself in the bark of the tree. I dropped to the ground. He fired again and missed again, and then I heard the click of an empty chamber in his hands. I looked at his narrow chest and the broad body of his horse bearing down on me, and I knew where my best chance lay. I said a silent apology and fired.
The horse made a sound like Faith had, reared, and crumpled in the dirt. The sheriff came off cursing and running. I aimed at his chest and fired, but this time I felt the click of emptiness in my own fist.
I tried to run through the long grass, but without Amity I was slow, my leg still wounded. I hobbled, and crumpled, and then the sheriff was on me from behind, pinning my hands together behind my back, pushing my face into the dirt. I braced myself for the blow of the pistol butt to the back of my head. I thought of all the people I would never see again—my family, Agnes Rose, News, the Kid—and all the questions I would never answer. I would never know why some babies were born with a cleft lip or a clubfoot, how two brown-eyed parents could have a blue-eyed child, or why I was barren. I was angry at the knowledge the sheriff was stealing from me, and as I realized I was angry, I realized the blow of the pistol had not come. The sheriff yanked me to my feet. Lacking cuffs or a rope to bind me, he had to keep both hands on my wrists and shove me ahead of him, like I was a piece of furniture he was trying to move.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“We built stocks in the town square just for you,” he said. “You’ll stay there three days. Then, if you’re still alive, you’ll hang.”
I heard in his voice a kind of contemptuous familiarity. He had been thinking about me since News and Agnes Rose had sprung me from his jail a few weeks before, and I had been thinking about him. Hate, I saw, breeds a kind of closeness. I fell in step with him.
“How did you find me?” I asked.