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“You!” somebody yelled, and he looked downslope as Cloud backed and tried to maneuver on the hill. A man came riding up on him, the horse imaging <gun firing.> Da
“Hold it, hold it!” the other rider said. “No need.” But that rider had a pistol in hand, aimed generally toward him and Cloud. “Just come back here. Need a word with you.”
He wasn’t sure. Maybe the man had simply been trying to get his attention after he spooked—but shooting at people wasn’t how he wanted a word with them. The man wasn’t alone. Another rode up through the woods, weaving among the trees.
He was still on foot and downhill from Cloud, where he couldn’t mount up without maneuvering. <Cloud standing,> Da
That man came up with the first. He’d thought he might have detected a south-hills, Hallanslake accent, and he saw now for certain it was Ancel Harper. Harper was holding a pistol aimed at him while one more rider was closing in.
He was scared half to death. He’d never in his life dealt with a gun aimed at him. He saw very clearly now that it wasn’t just a misunderstanding, and he didn’t want to face these three men trembling like a fool kid, but he didn’t know what to do about his situation, he didn’t know what he should have done to escape it, and Cloud didn’t know, either. Guns had shot at Cloud before, but
Cloud hadn’t had a rider who fell off, the last time guns had fired at him, and nobody had wanted Cloud to come toward them under that circumstance, either, the way these men wanted him to do. Cloud was mad, and confused, and the ambient was thick with nighthorse threats, the Hallanslake horses’ and Cloud’s.
“So what do you want?” Da
“Sitting out here all alone,” Harper said, and the gun in Harper’s hand never wavered. “No place for a kid. Where are the Westmans?”
“I don’t know. Tell the truth, I don’t care. I’m tired of being bossed.”
“Are you?” Harper said flatly.
“I’m tired of people acting crazy. What’s the matter with everybody, anyway?” He managed high indignation, and told himself that Harper wasn’t ‘sir.’ Nobody who pointed guns at him was ever voluntarily ‘sir.’ He made up his mind to that right then, as scared as he was.
“Friend of Stuart’s, are you?”
“No.” He managed to be surprised andmad. “I know the man, that’s all. I never dealt with him.”
“Not what I picked up in Meeting. Not what anybody in Shamesey camp picked up. What’s your name, kid?”
“Dan—” He almost said Da
“We know each other?”
“Same place as you know me.” Thoroughly bad odds, Da
Harper slid his pistol back into the holster, threw a leg over and slipped easily down from his horse’s back. “So he hired you, did he? For what?”
You didn’t lie, near a horse. “I heard Stuart the night they were shooting. Jonas thought I could hear him loud enough on the trail to help out. I couldn’t. So I left.”
“Maybe you’d like to travel with us.”
“You paying?”
“Yeah,” Harper said. “Your neck, if you follow orders. And maybe a junior’s share of the bounty, if ever happens they put one on the rogue. Not unlikely they will. So you could go back with pocket money.”
What was smart to do? Say go to hell, to three borderers with guns? Da
“Gun’s not part of it,” Harper said. “Kid like you, a ca
“I’m not going up there with no gun!”
“Kid, you haven’t figured it yet. You’re going up there stark naked if you want to argue with us, but you are going. No gun. You want a strip search while we’re at it? Or you want to hand the gun over? You don’t need it. Blow you right off your horse, the kick it’s got. Guy like Watt, here, that’s his size gun.”
The man named Watt gri
And Cloud thought <fight.>
Da
Cloud’s ears were flat to his skull.
“Yeah,” Da
But he let the gun and holster fall to the ground.
Harper motioned back the way they’d come. “Quig, get his stuff.”
“Yeah,” the other man said, and turned his horse about on the hill and went after the stuff while the big guy, Watt, got off and collected the gun he’d dropped.
In the deepest well of his thoughts he was sorry now he hadn’t stuck tight to Jonas and said yes, sir, no matter what. Harper left no doubt who gave the orders with this bunch, and who was meaner, or smarter, or whatever it took to get that obedience out of men both bigger and stronger than Harper was.
“Get on your horse,” Harper said, and Da
Cloud moved as he was about to get up.
“Cloud!” he hissed, scared, because he wasn’t all that steady in his knees, and wasn’t sure his nerves weren’t most of the reason for the upset he felt in Cloud. “Stand still, all right? Just stand still.”
Cloud’s ears were still flat. <Bite,> Cloud imaged, a shivery, angry sort of image, and Da
He made it onto Cloud’s back, and Harper and the others led the way to the site downhill, where the man called Quig was putting his blanket rolls together and gathering up his supplies.
They stopped there. Quig handed him up his packets and his blankets. He sat there between Watt and Harper until Quig had finished and gotten back on his horse.
Harper brushed close to him. “You ride alongside me, hear?”
Cloud didn’t want be close to Harper or his horse, Cloud was consistently thinking <bite,> but Da
Following Jonas and company.
Not on Stuart’s trail, he was relieved to think, Stuart having gone—
Shit! he thought, remembering the look of that town—heart sinking.
“… Anveney, is it?” Harper asked him.
“Yeah, well, that’s what Jonas Westman thinks. That’s all I know.”
“Why does Westman think that?”
Try not to think of something. <Hawley patting his pocket,> image of < money.>