CHAPTER 1
The marshal stood in the road at twenty paces with his pistol already out and hanging at his side.
He had come down off the ridge east of the cut and crossed the brush at its foot while Eli was still coming up the road, so that by the time Eli had him there was nothing to do but pull up. She stood under him and worked her sides. He had asked her for the last quarter mile and she had given him the whole of it.
There was no horse under him and none on that ground, which put his own back over the ridge. Where the road went through the cut it ran narrow between the ridge and the wash and cost a mile to go around. Eli had his own name for that piece. The funnel. He had come into the wide end of it at a run.
Up at the lip of the cut a rifle lay in the brush with the barrel showing against the green as a thin gray line. Beside it in the dirt was a folded white cloth. The marshal had laid the barrel across that cloth and then gone off down the ridge. Eli had the white of it from the road before he had anything else.
"Eli Creed," the marshal said.
"You've been a year saying that to other men."
"I have. I have a warrant on you out of the federal court at Cheyenne. It is inside my coat. I would sooner put it in your hand than read it over you in this road."
"Then you rode a long way to hand it to me."
"I did. And I have been up on that ridge since before light."
Eli took his eyes off the hand at the marshal's side long enough to put them up on the lip of the cut, and brought them back.
"You laid a rifle up there and folded a cloth under it."
"I did."
"Then you had this road in the gray with nobody on it but me, and you left it in the brush and walked down here." Eli paused, "Why?"
The marshal did not answer him. He kept his eyes on Eli and put his left hand inside his coat and left it there.
"I am offering it. Take it out of my hand, and I will not lay a hand on you between here and Cheyenne."
"I won't take it."
The mare shifted and put her weight over. The marshal stood with his left hand still inside his coat and was a while getting to what came next.
"All right," he said.
Wind came up the cut out of the southeast and went thin in the brush above. Nothing had run a wagon over that dust in a week.
The marshal's right arm started up.
Eli was already going off the off side with the rein loose in his fingers, and he drew coming down and fired from under the mare's neck. His round took the marshal in the right side below the ribs and broke bone. The marshal's took him high in the left shoulder at the front of the joint and went through the meat and out the back below the blade and touched no bone.
The marshal stepped back and held his feet a moment. Then his knees went, and he came down sideways into the dust.
The third shot came while he was still going down.
Eli did not see it fired and could not put a direction on the sound of it. The mare took it in the chest. She went down on her knees on the road and then over onto her side and lay out with her flank toward him, and she was some little while dying.
He came in behind her with the pistol in his right hand and put his eye along her spine. The chest put whoever fired it out in front of her, in the brush at the foot of the ridge or up the road in the cottonwoods. Nothing showed in either. The marshal had been on his way down when it came, and his own pistol had gone into the road with him.
The shoulder bled into the front of the coat and ran down the inside of his shirt past the ribs. The mare's breathing came shorter behind him and then quit.
Then the marshal moved.
He came up onto his right knee with his left hand pressed into his side and his fingers going dark in the wool. The pistol he left where it had fallen. He got his boots under him and stood up in the road bleeding with his gun hand empty. His eyes came up on Eli and stayed.
Eli got up with his hand on the saddle. He worked his own rifle out of the scabbard under the mare's shoulder and laid it in the road, because there was no carrying it and the pistol both on one arm. The saddlebag came loose and went over his right shoulder. Twenty paces off, the marshal watched him do every part of it and did not call out.
Eli backed off the road into the brush. Behind it a draw ran up the back of the ridge, and he took it.
The bandanna came off his neck and he folded it twice and pressed it into the front of the shoulder and climbed with his hand on it. Halfway up, the blood had gone through the fold and was warm under his palm. He kept the pistol in the same hand and did not stop.
The bay was in the cottonwoods at the top where he had left her.
Her head came around when he came up on her, and he put his right hand on her neck and let his breathing come down. She had two days of that grass in her and she took his weight different for it.
He had brought her up in the dark two nights back and picketed her where the feed was and gone down the far side on foot before light, and in the two days since he had not come inside a mile of her. It was how he worked now and it had not always been. He put things out ahead of himself and left them. A horse in a draw. A sack under a rock face. A creek ridden twice in daylight so he would have it in the dark. It cost him days to buy a day, and all of it had to be done in the open, where being seen at it was the whole of the risk. Most of what he put out he never came back for. There was ground east of Doyle's he had learned foot by foot in the spring and never once used.
This morning it had paid. He had come up the back of a ridge on one arm and there had been a horse on the rim with a saddle on her and a rifle under the scabbard flap. A year ago there would have been nothing up here but grass.
He could not get the left arm as high as the horn. He took the cantle on the off side and pulled himself across and got turned around in the seat once he was up.
West of him the country opened back down to the cut. There was a wide dark place in the road where the mare had gone down and a smaller one twenty paces up from it, and the marshal stood between the two of them on his feet with his coat open, working at his own side. The road bent a quarter mile north into the cottonwoods and there was nobody in them.
The mare was still down there. He had asked her for the last quarter mile and she had given it, and she had gone down for it.
He turned the bay east and let her pick the country off the back of the ridge at a walk. Brush gave out to grass and the grass ran down to a creek that did not show from the road anywhere along it. He had ridden that creek twice in the week before for that reason.
By the first hour east of the rim he was on it. He let her drink and drank himself and put water on the front of the shoulder and the back. The bleeding had slowed to what a rag would hold. Six weeks, he made it. Eight if it went bad. Until then he had the one arm.
He had counted on taking a round. The third shot he had not counted on, and he had not counted on the man standing up in that road with a hole under his ribs and an empty hand and letting him walk off into the brush.