Chapter 5 - The Midpoint Reckoning
The drop from the rimrock took twenty minutes of sliding on their boots through red dust and sharp-edged scree. Clay’s side had gone from a sharp, biting pain to a dull, heavy numbness that meant his blood was soaking his drawers again, but he didn't slow down. He kept his eyes on the cottonwood grove below.
Eli had already ridden out onto the open gravel bar a quarter-mile to the east, his gray mule plodding along at a deliberate, agonizingly slow pace, his slouch hat pulled low, shouting out some incomprehensible song about the Shenandoah.
Down by the spring, the two gunmen jumped to their feet.
“Hey! You down in the brush!” one of them yelled, reaching for a carbine leaning against the water trough. “Clear out of here! This is private domain!”
Eli didn't stop. He raised one hand in a vague, friendly greeting and kept the mule moving toward the creek.
The man in the bowler hat—Vance—stepped out from the shade of the cottonwood, his face red from the heat and whiskey. “Shoot the damn horse if he doesn't turn around! We can't have anyone riding through here before the sheriff files the papers!”
The gunman raised his carbine.
That was the mistake.
From the high rocks fifty yards above the spring, Kea’s rifle cracked.
The gunman’s hat flew off his head, spinning into the water trough with a splash. He dropped his carbine with a curse, diving headfirst behind the stone wall of the spring box.
The second gunman spun around, drawing his pistol, but before he could clear leather, Clay stepped out from behind a boulder twenty feet away, his Colt already leveled at the man’s chest.
“Drop it,” Clay said.
The man froze, his hand hovering over his holster. He looked from the black hole of Clay’s barrel up to Clay’s face—a face carved out of granite and four years of cold fury—and slowly let his fingers uncurl.
“Mercer,” Vance screamed, his face turning the color of a bruised plum as he scrambled backward against the trunk of the cottonwood. “You’re dead. You hear me? You burned your own house down, and now you’ve murdered federal agents—!”
“Shut up, Vance,” Clay walked down the slope, his boots crunching in the gravel. He stopped three feet from the land agent, looking down at the man’s fine city boots covered in red Arizona dust. “You burned my home. You killed Miller. And you’ve been hunting a woman who hasn't done a thing except try to walk back to her people.”
Vance swallowed hard, his eyes darting toward the horses. “It’s business, Mercer. The syndicate needs the water. You don't have a patent on that land; you’re just a squatter holding up progress.”
“Progress,” Clay said softly.
He didn't pull the trigger. Instead, he reached out with his left hand, grabbed the front of Vance’s gray wool coat, and hauled the man up onto his toes so their faces were inches apart.
“You tell your bosses in Tucson that Clay Mercer is done hiding,” Clay said, his voice dropping into a tone that made the gunman behind the wall press himself flatter against the stone. “Tell them the ranch is gone, but the ground is still here. And every man they send to take it is going to end up buried right next to your brother.”
He shoved Vance back so hard the agent tripped over a root and landed flat on his back in the mud of the water trough.
Eli rode up a minute later, pulling his mule to a halt and looking down at Vance with a slow, toothy grin. “Looks like the water’s a mite crowded today, mister.”
Kea came down from the rocks, her rifle slung across her back, her moccasins making no sound as she walked up beside Clay. She didn't look at Vance. She looked past the spring, up toward the high, jagged peaks of the Dragoon Mountains where the blue haze of the distance swallowed the horizon.
“The horses are fresh,” she said to Clay. “We can make the high pass before dark.”
Clay looked down at his blood-soaked shirt, then out over the valley where the smoke from his ruined cabin was finally beginning to turn to gray ash against the sky. The life he had built to keep the world out was gone. There was nothing left to tie him to the graves in the yard.
May you like
He reached down, took his reins from Kea’s hand, and swung up into the saddle.
“Let’s ride,” Clay said.
