14

The eastern light summoned from the darkness a world of shapes turned to stone and the wind blew at nothing, but it blew unsparing, and the four riders found no shelter or mercy as the cold came into the land like the flowing of a river into the sea.

A herd of antelope crossed the flat plain and the dawn saw the life-breath from their nostrils and the dust of the earth come up from their feet and they paid the riders no mind save a glance before moving on into the mist of morning.

Randall felt the iron at either side shifting as Mara moved under him and his gaze was to Charlotte and he felt something else. Their horses moved in unison, as if being called home into the rising sun, and soon his look of adoration was returned—and even a smile—and so they were as a pair, horses and riders.

“People coming,” Tad said, and they sat their horses, watching the specters grow taller in the distance.

“Pumpkin,” the child said.

“Shut up,” Tad told him.

The images appeared on the horizon as if born from the morning and moved slowly on foot and a mule behind them carried what little there was. The man among them saw the horses and their riders and sent the rest of his party scurrying mouselike into the cover of the underbrush and that cover would not have been enough and the man knew it.

He raised a shotgun and called out and took a few steps toward the unknown, then thought better of it and stood sentry midtrail. Randall put the horse forward and called “friend” to the man, who kept the shotgun trained on the rider even so.

The distance between eroded, and Randall put both his hands out near his shoulders and again called “friend” and the man lowered the gun, nervous, and each motioned to their companions and there they all met in the road, in the desert, in the world.

With the man were a woman and two girls no older than ten years.

“Y’all bandits?” the man asked of Randall in a scratched and low tone, and though the sun was at his back his eyes were squinted almost to closure.

“Nossir,” Randall told him.

“Alright then, Geanie, go on,” the man said, nodding, and shoved forward the woman, who kept her head down as she spoke.

“You like to go yonder behind them bushes with me?” the woman asked softly, and only when she was finished asking did she tilt her eyes up enough to see an answer.

Randall looked to Charlotte, who shook her head in a sad way, and to Tad, whose eyes had grown double their size, and then back to the woman.

“No ma’am,” he managed, at a loss for what else is to be said at such a strange encounter as this, and the man in front of him grabbed the woman and pulled her back behind him, where she began to cry.

“Shut up, whore,” the man said and turned back to the silent onlookers. “Well, I would offer up the little’uns, but I imagine I’ll get more for ’em if they ain’t ruint.”

Charlotte moved as if she were made of lightning. Before Randall could turn his head, she had a pistol drawn and lowered at the man’s head.

The man looked at first confused, then angered.

“You better tell this nigger to holster that thirty-eight,” he said to Randall. “These is my women and I’ll treat ’em however way I please, as the Good Book says is my right.”

“Put it away, Charlotte,” Randall told her.

“He don’t deserve to live,” she replied, thumbing back the hammer.

The world around them moved, but they did not. Then forward came the woman called Geanie and she stood in front of the man and looked up at Charlotte.

“Please,” she asked. “Don’t shoot him. He’s my husband. He takes care of us.”

The man smiled a crooked smile as Charlotte lowered her gun. He spit and it landed in the dirt near Mara’s hoof.

Randall eyed the man and felt his own violent urge growing.

“We’re gonna head on down this road the way we were going,” Randall nodded to the man. “I suggest you do the same.”

The man grunted and hurried his wife, or his whore, or both, down the road and the two girls in rags trudged behind and Randall’s bunch all just sat their horses and didn’t say anything and when somebody did it was Tad.

“Sorry sumbitch we just crossed paths with,” he said, and no one argued. “Sure hate if he was my daddy.”

He spit and shook his head.

“Pumpkin,” the younger boy said in a matching tone and he too spit and shook.

“Let’s get on down the trail,” Charlotte said. “I don’t much care to be no closer to that man than I got to.”

* * *

They rode in silence and nooned off to the side of the road and there was no shade and, the cold of the morning long gone, they began to sweat. A fire seemed too much trouble and time, so they ate cold beans and dried meat and there were berries fallen from bushes along a retired fence line and they ate those too.

“You would’ve killed that man,” Randall said to Charlotte as if she herself were wondering.

She nodded.

“I imagine I would have,” she said.

“That’s murder.”

“It is,” she nodded again.

“And the woman and the children? What would have happened to them, alone in the desert?”

“They would have been free,” she snapped.

“Free to die, maybe.”

“Death is better than some things, Mr. Dawson,” Charlotte said, her voice cold and cutting. “Maybe you didn’t learn that growing up with money spilling out your ears. Some painful things in this life.”

Randall was silent for a moment, then he nodded.

“There are indeed,” he said. “Some of the men on my ranch, they had to drag me away from Harry’s body. I wouldn’t let anyone near him that night. I could smell the burning trees and hear the shouts of the men, but I just sat there, holding him. We were going to go hunting, once the weather cooled. This was going to be the year he took his first buck.”

Randall swallowed his tears.

“It was my pistol,” he said, soft and choked. “It was my pistol he tried to stop them with.”

Charlotte came to him and put her arm around his back and his head slumped and he wept.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

Randall raised his head and took a deep breath and opened his mouth wide. He stood.

“I’m fine,” he said. “I’ll be just fine.”

Charlotte watched him walk away and felt inside herself both pity and desire. Desire to comfort him, to watch over him, somehow. Or perhaps, she thought, it was her failure to save her brother that was driving this need to protect the helpless. And Randall Dawson was nothing if not helpless.

Randall left the camp for nearly half an hour and when he returned he acted as if nothing had happened. He fastened the strap under Mara and called to the others to mount up.

“We oughta get off the main road,” Charlotte said. “There’ll be more water and better places to make camp if we head north a piece and then cut east.”

“Too many banditos on the main road, anyhow,” Tad added.

Randall drained the last of a cup of coffee and flung the crud from the bottom of the cup and squatted down on his haunches, bounced, and then stood back up and shook his head.

“We can’t afford to lose time. Not to mention we have to ask the whereabouts of the Bentleys and the best place to do that is in towns along the road.”

“Them boys weren’t going through no towns, Randall,” Charlotte said.

He smiled. “Randall? ” he repeated, then nodded. “We’re still sticking to the main road. If you all disagree, you’re welcome to head back.”

He took his empty cup and swung himself atop Mara and put her into the road.

“He must be feeling better,” Charlotte said and clicked her tongue.

“Pumpkin,” the small boy said and clicked his tongue in turn.