In spite of myself, I slept hard when at last I hit the ground that night. Cold and hard as it was, an open sky does more for a man’s rest than a soft cot in a closed cell. The rain, never too strong to begin with, had let up considerably, though my hair and trousers and shirt were damp when I was kicked awake at dawn.
“Get up,” Lefty growled at me.
I said, “Mornin’, Lefty.”
Lefty sneered at me. I grinned. Then, a crackling pop echoed loudly over the flatland. Left turned his head slightly at the sound, just in time to catch a bullet in the throat. With the gunshot still rippling in the air, I could hear the round punch into and through his skin and windpipe, smash out through the other side in a red mist. Lefty’s eyes bulged and he grasped his throat with both hands, working his mouth like he wanted to say something, only no words were forthcoming. Red-black blood oozed between his dirty fingers. It looked like molasses.
“Shit-fire,” said one of the other deputies, a dark-faced lad no older than twenty-one. He had most of his teeth, but they were already gone black. “Somebody by God shot Lefty.”
Lefty struggled for a breath he’d never take as he dropped first to his knees, then down to his side, still clutching at the jetting hole through his neck. The rest of the deputies scrambled for cover amongst the cottonwoods, though Tom Willocks stood stock-still in the middle of the copse, his arms limp at his sides, peering angrily into the distance.
“Why don’t you get down,” said the huge deputy, the brute who never spoke much.
Another shot cracked out, and a second later a cottonwood was hit in a shower of bark splinters. The shot missed the marshal by about a foot.
“Fuckin’ Indians,” said Blackmouth.
Willocks spit on the ground and rolled his shoulders.
“No,” he said. “It’s her.”
To be truthful, the notion had not occurred to me. But damned if those weren’t the sweetest words I’d heard in days. I just hoped he was right.
“First shot was lucky,” said Blackmouth. “Missed the second, first was lucky. She can’t see shit.”
He was growing hysterical, giggling and breathing hard like a snorting mustang.
Willocks went slowly and purposefully past the cooling firepit to a tree where he’d hung his belt on a low branch. He was quiet and stone-faced as he strapped it on, clumsy and fitful with his bandaged hand, a Smith & Wesson six-shooter bouncing against his leg in its holster as he secured the buckle. He then squatted down to retrieve a Springfield conversion rifle formerly belonging to Lefty. It was a .50-70 with a long, needle-gun firing pin that could most likely take down a buffalo with one good shot. He then went back to the edge of the clearing, the escarpment rising imperiously behind him and all of us, and went down on one knee to survey the broad horizon.
There came nickering from the remuda as the horses shifted about uneasily. Some horses got used to guns and others didn’t. I didn’t know which kind these were.
While Willocks watched and waited, I sat up and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes to watch along with him. The remaining three deputies squatted in the trees, uncertain. Lefty just kept bleeding out of his neck into the dust and dead, brown leaves. No one much seemed to mourn his passing.
The morning was cool and still. I looked for movement, signs of life, and I reckoned the marshal did, too. Who had the better eyes, I couldn’t say, though I never judged mine too poorly. But I did not see anything at all.
The morning chugged along slow, like a train trudging uphill towards a water station, getting hotter all the time and not a sound made by anyone or anyone’s gun. Willocks moved from one knee to the other, stood for some while, then went down again. Now and again he tested his ability to hold the rifle backwards from the way he was accustomed to, his untried left forefinger brushing tentatively against the trigger. The men in the trees shuffled in the brush, some smoking here and there, checking their guns, sighing with frustration. Black ants had found Lefty before long; they came in two military columns and poked around the hole in his neck, filed into his mouth and nose. It was gruesome to look at, so I quit looking at it.
The sun got high, white as paper, and every man jack of us was getting to sweating in the gathering heat. Paddy pissed back in the trees and Blackmouth barked at him to stop splashing with his equipment all over the place. That seemed to be the last straw for the kid, who then leapt to his feet and hollered, “All right! All right, God damn it!”
“Quit your bellering,” said Paddy.
“All right,” Blackmouth said again with a high giggle. He burst from the cover of the copse and bounded for the remuda, a single-action Army revolver gripped tight in his right hand.
Willocks said, “What in hell do you think you’re doing?”
Paddy said, “Scared crazy, that’s what he is.”
“All by God right,” Blackmouth said, swinging up into the saddle of the barrel-chested gray he’d ridden out of Revelation.
“Get your ass down and back to cover,” the marshal scolded him.
The kid paid no mind. Rather, revolver still in hand, he took up the reins and put heels to haunches, and he spurred the gray out from the cottonwoods at a trot. He hallooed like a wild Indian and his hat blew back from his head, straining the cord against his neck as he gigged the horse’s withers again and again.
“All right, do you hear me,” he cried at the flatland, riding straight out to where the shots had originated. “I am coming, all right, I am coming.”
Willocks’ shoulders sank and his body withered from the heat and the sweat and the disappointment. He groaned and wiped his brow with the back of his hand.
“God damned crazy fool,” he said low.
“I am coming,” Blackmouth shouted. He and the gray got smaller and smaller on the shimmering vista until, finally, another shot cracked the sky and the kid dropped like a hailstone from the saddle to the red earth. The gray reared back, tramped a circle, and fell into a hard gallop east until I could no longer see it.
I could still make out the kid, though. Still and small, flat on the ground where he had died.
Tom Willocks hung his head.
“God damned fool,” he said.
“All right,” I said, grinning.
Willocks swung the Springfield up and around to aim at my center, his face beet-red and eyes burning with hate.
“Say another word,” he said. “One more fucking word, Dutchman. Just one.”
I declined. The marshal of Darling kept that rifle at me for a minute longer, his jaw set tight and finger tickling the trigger. I figured he was going to do what he felt like doing, no matter what I did or said, so I leaned back against a cottonwood and closed my eyes. I listened to a soft breeze pick up and I smelled the foliage and the horses and their shit. I thought about Boon and realized that I still wasn’t altogether sure and certain that it was her out there sniping at us. And when I opened my eyes again, Willocks was back to watch, leaning on the Springfield like a crutch with its butt to the ground, having decided not to further incur the wrath of the executioner in the flatland.
Which, of course, made for an eerie and dispossessing experience that raised the same question, I am sure, in the mind of every man in that cottonwood grove: where could she possibly hide? Were there anything approaching a rise or some rocks or even a log to provide cover, more sense could have been made of the situation. As things were, however, there was little to nothing stretching out before us but dust and yellow short grass. It was as though our shooter was perfectly invisible, a wraith with a rifle that could not be seen nor stopped. None of us voiced this apprehension, but I knew each one of us was thinking it. Whether or not it was Boon out there picking men off, the increased restlessness of the two remaining men in the trees was all the evidence I needed to judge them scared out of their minds.
And if it was not Boon, then there was a good portion of my own self that was a fair bit frightened, too.
The two deputies—or, more properly, gunmen—left to Willocks were the big Brute and the lanky, dark-faced Irishman with a nose like an eagle’s beak. It was this second one who broke the long silence in the late afternoon, throwing down his knife so that it buried itself in the dirt at his feet and shouting, “One woman! One damn woman! What kind of yellow sons of bitches are we, anyhow?”
“Go on ahead and get kilt, then,” said the Brute.
“I won’t be cowed by a God damned woman,” Paddy spat. “And not any Oriental breed, neither, or whatever she be.”
“She’s more,” Willocks said softly.
He didn’t take his eyes from the vista to say it, and it sounded as though he might have been talking to himself.
“Eh?” Paddy said. “What’s that, Willocks?”
“Mayhap you won’t be cowed by a woman,” said the marshal, “but this isn’t just any woman. You’d do well to hear me on that.”
“What is she, then? God’s snot, Willocks! I killed thirteen men in fair fights, mostly, some of them terrible, mean fuckers you never thought could be, and here we are stove in and hiding out from one woman with a rifle? I can’t stand for that, Willocks. God damn you, I can’t stand for that!”
Tom Willocks smiled and laughed soundlessly. Gradually, his head turned to face me, still leaned up against the tree for so long my legs were tingly and half-asleep.
“Whyn’t you tell him,” he said. “Tell him what she is.”
“Boonsri Angchuan?” I said, laughing. “Christ, I don’t reckon God himself knows for sure what she is. And I don’t know for sure whether He made her, or if it was the other fellow down below, ’cause she’s got plenty of devil in her when her blood is up, and it just about always is.”
Paddy scoffed.
“Ain’t no devil out there,” he groused. “Just one fucking woman.”
“Go find out,” Willocks said.
“A woman,” Paddy said.
Willocks twisted around, rising at the same time, and roared, “Go find out, you jabbering son of a bitch!”
The Irishman said nothing in reply to that.
And so, we waited a good deal longer, until the afternoon melted darkly into night. The night, it turned out, was to be considerably more interesting still.