Outlawed(74)

“Shut up,” the sheriff said, giving me a shove.

I tried a different tack.

“Surely the sheriffs of Fairchild and Fiddleback want to hang me in their town squares too. How did you win the privilege?”

“They didn’t catch you,” he said. “I did. They can hang your friends if they want to. I’m sure Sheriff Donnelly will be excited to string up a gelding in front of his jailhouse.”

When he said the word I understood. The wrinkled face of the woman in the jail came back to me clear as if she stood before me on the grass. She must have heard everything I’d said to Lark, and I had said everything to him, about Hole in the Wall and Fiddleback and myself and my family. After our escape attempt she must have traded the information to the sheriff in exchange for her freedom. I almost laughed, almost cried. My marriage had been so costly, and I had barely gotten to enjoy it.

The sheriff and I were the same height, about the same build. But I remembered what Lo had taught me about fighting with men, how I’d have to fight dirty. I broke into a run, as though trying to break free of his grasp. He had to run to keep up with me. Then I stopped short, and when I felt his breath on the back of my neck I brought my head back fast and hard into his face. He yelled and dropped my hands—it was all I needed. I drew my gun and cracked it as hard as I could against his skull. I did not wait to find out if he was dead. I ran.

Soon I had to slow to a walk, then a hop, dragging my hurt leg behind me. The sun seemed to swell in the sky. The birds went silent in the midday heat. Sweat and dust turned to mud on my skin. On foot it would take me another day at least to reach the wall, longer in my injured state. Knowing how much ground I had left to cover made the pain worse; I grew dizzy with it. On a hill above a salt flat I sat down to rest.

I must have been dozing when a sound roused me, a single, high yip from the flat below. At first I thought I saw a wolf crossing the cracked, red earth, and my blood pounded in my ears. But as my eyes adjusted to the sun, I saw from the animal’s hunched posture, the sly sneakiness in its movements, that it was not a wolf but a coyote. My heart slowed and I watched the animal without fear. I began to make calculations—if I alternated walking and resting, an hour each, I could make it to the wall in two days, maybe a day and a half. But by then my friends might be dead or captured. And of course, Sheriff Branch or the sheriff of Fiddleback or one of their men might find me before then. The best thing might be to hide and wait the battle out, but the flat open space of the valley yielded few if any places where I could conceal myself. This was part of the strength of Hole in the Wall—from its perch you could see everything and everyone in the open space below. But until you got there, you were totally exposed, vulnerable to whoever might come upon you.

The coyote was nosing its way along the flat, slowly working its way toward the hill. It was a big animal, not as big as a wolf but bigger and more powerful than a dog, the ruff of red-gold fur at its shoulders concealing a girdle of muscle. As I watched, it must have caught my scent on the wind: it raised its head and opened its lips in what would have been, in a dog, a smile of recognition. It began to come near.

I knew a lone coyote would not attack a healthy human. But if it took me for dead, or too sick to move, it might nose around me and take an exploratory bite. I got painfully to my feet. The coyote stopped, but did not back off.

“Hey,” I yelled.

The coyote stood its ground. I began to hop-walk in the direction of the wall. The sun was reaching its high point and the shadows on the rock were shrinking, dark giving way to red. I looked behind me. The coyote was following, its mouth still slightly open. It gave another yip, the sound loud in the silent afternoon, and this time I heard an answer—to my left, in the tall grass south of the hill, another coyote was approaching. This one was smaller, and its fur had the soft, bushy look common to young animals. A yearling, I guessed, traveling with its mother.

I hopped faster. The coyotes yipped back and forth to each other, their calls increasing in frequency and excitement.

The third coyote was invisible until I was almost upon it. It stood motionless in the tall grass, silvery where the others were red, and with a heaviness around its head and jaws that marked it as a male. I was close enough to see into its eyes, which were golden, intelligent, and unafraid. I began to run.

The sound that went up around me was one of exultation—high and musical, almost like singing. It would have been beautiful had I not been the injured animal at its center, the prey whose fear-smell set the wild dogs racing through the grass, baying with joy.

The mother and father coyotes were running alongside me, waiting for my first stumble so they could close in, and I felt that stumble in my injured leg, I felt my muscles giving way, when another sound broke through the coyote song.

I did not see the source of the hoofbeats until she was galloping past the coyotes, powerful as a thundercloud, scaring them twenty paces off to either side of her, where they resumed their normal postures, their shamefaced scavengers’ crouch. Then she circled back and slowed, just long enough for me to clamber onto her back, where my saddle waited for me as though I’d never left it.

As I gathered the reins and guided Amity toward the wall, I saw blood drying along her left flank. Its source was a raw wound across her gray shoulder, angry red but shallow, easily healed. I thought of the flesh wound Lark had sustained in Casper, and the deeper, more terrible one he’d suffered in Mobridge—I thought of all the wounds that hadn’t killed him, and the wound that had. For a moment I bent low to Amity’s mane and inhaled her smell of hay and dust and something sweet, like mother’s milk. I told her I loved her. She dropped her head and covered the miles of grassland like they were inches, and we reached the rocky outskirts of the red wall with the sun still high in the sky.