The Outsider (73 page)

Behind her, she heard the door bang shut, heard her
Englische
husband come out of the house. She didn’t have to turn around and look to know he was already wearing his gun. He slept with it looped over the bedpost at night. He put it on first thing in the morning, along with his trousers.

She was running alongside the wagon before Benjo could pull it to a complete stop. Like something out of a terrible dream that kept coming back night after night, she saw that a boy was lying in the wagon bed, only it was Mose Weaver this time, and his leg wasn’t bloody, it was his arm. His arm was wrapped up in Benjo’s coat. MacDuff was back there, too. She thought the dog was dead until she saw his head move.

Her boy’s face looked bloodless beneath a covering of soot and ash. Rachel’s gaze jerked off her son for an instant
and lifted up to the mountain where their sheep summered. She hadn’t noticed it before, probably thinking the red glow was part of the rising sun, but she could see it plain now. The mountain was on fire.

Benjo’s lips pulled back from his teeth, his throat worked hard, his eyes bulged with the effort to force the words out, but they weren’t coming. Young Mose Weaver, though, was conscious enough to tell them most all of what had happened.

Her
Englische
husband didn’t offer to kill them for her this time; he didn’t even bother to tell her he
was
going to kill them. He just went about the business of getting himself ready to do it.

Their old draft mare’s head was dragging the ground, and her legs were splayed with exhaustion. He unhitched her from the harness and brought out his own horse. There was no thought, no feeling, nothing showing on his face. Nothing.

“I’m going with you,” Rachel said.

He gave her a curt nod. “I want you and Benjo both with me, where I can keep you safe. You heard what the boy said about that man-killer threatening to come after me here. But you do what I tell you once we get into town, Rachel. You stay put where I tell you to stay put.”

“Johnny.” She touched his arm. The flesh beneath his shirt was rigid. He stepped back away from her, out of her reach. “Please think about Jesus. About how, although His person was always yielding, His heart was never weak.”

“Better to say here’s where he ran, than here’s where he died, huh?”

“Don’t—”

He looked up from buckling the harness parts, and his hard blue gaze met hers like a blow.

“You remember what I told you up on the mountain, about killing that hog farmer? I told you how I killed him, but I never said how I felt about it. After I’d done it, when I looked down on him, on what I could see of his face through the blood, I knew he’d broken me because I was still scared of him. Even with him dead, I was scared of him. And I hated him worse than ever then, because I knew I was never going to be free. I was always going to be his slave.”

She heard his words, but it was his eyes that broke her heart. It was like watching a blizzard blow in from the north to seal up the land in a cold sheet of ice. He can never change, she thought. Never.

“But not ever again, Rachel. I’ll not be a slave to another man ever again. I won’t yield, I won’t run, I won’t turn the other cheek.” His voice was as hard and cold as his eyes.

“I will pray for you, Johnny Cain,” she said.

“I HAD TO TAKE
the Weaver boy’s arm off,” Doctor Lucas Henry said.

He spoke to the woman who sat on his black horsehair sofa. She had one arm wrapped around her son, and she was holding him pressed close to her thighs. At Lucas’s words, she put her curled fingers to her mouth and bowed her head to pray.

Except for no longer wearing the starched white cap on her head, she looked the same as she always had. It was hard for the mind to accept that she was wife to the man standing at the window.

Johnny Cain was looking through the dusty panes at the deserted street beyond, waiting. He was apart from everyone in the room, drawn into a taut alertness deep inside himself. A true outsider.

Lucas was worried about the boy, that he might be going into shock. He went to him for a closer look, squatting to put himself at eye level. He saw that while the pale skin beneath the gray eyes looked bruised, the eyes themselves were clear and bright. He was tougher than he looked. He took the boy’s wrist, feeling for his pulse.

“I set your dog’s leg,” Lucas said, his voice gentle, yet firm. The boy’s pulse was normal. “What was his name again?”

The boy’s head jerked, his throat clenching. His lips pulled back from his teeth. “Muh!”

“MacDuff, isn’t it?” Lucas dropped the boy’s wrist, straightening up. “Well, he’s going to be just fine. Though he might not run as fast as he used to.”

“The jackrabbits out at our place will be grateful to hear that,” Rachel said. She tried to smile, but she couldn’t. She put her trembling mouth to her son’s head and held him tighter.

The boy’s left hand hovered near his sling, much the way Johnny Cain’s stayed close to his gun. A couple of hours ago, Lucas had cleaned out and sewn up the right orbit of young Quinten Hunter, who had lost an eye for forever after to a rock hurled from that sling.

But then, young Quinten and his father had set fire to a whole herd of sheep and had shot off a boy’s arm. So who was to say he didn’t get what he deserved? Lucas thought. Maybe God liked to balance things out after all.

Rachel stirred, holding her boy closer. She was praying again: she had her eyes closed and her lips were moving. Lucas marveled at the depth of her faith, envying her.

How can you look at what your own son has done, at what has been done to you and yours, and not know what we are in our hearts, Plain Rachel? How can you not see the self’s dark potential that exists in us all?

A boot heel scraped on the walk outside, and boards creaked. Lucas’s gaze jerked to the man at the window, but Johnny Cain stood in stillness. His hand didn’t go for his gun.

The door banged open without a knock. Noah Weaver stood at the threshold, his eyes searching.

Lucas started toward him, but the big man pushed him aside and headed for the back room. “I had to amputate his arm,” Lucas said. “He’s had a severe shock to his nervous system and he’s lost a lot of blood. He shouldn’t be moved.”

Lucas might as well have been talking to a stone wall. The Plain man’s broad back disappeared through the door.

He came out with the boy in his arms, carrying him like a babe, his cheeks, his beard, gleaming wetly with tears. The boy groaned, his eyelids fluttering, but he didn’t awaken.

“He is my son,” Noah Weaver said. “I am taking him home.”

Rachel stood up, holding out her hand to him. “Noah . . .”

The Plain man looked at her, then through her.

He walked straight and sure out the open door, with his son in his arms, taking him home.

They all stood unmoving and Lucas could hear no sound in the room but his own breathing. Then Johnny Cain left the window and walked to the door. He didn’t look at anyone, he didn’t move quickly, he just walked to the door and went through it.

His wife watched him go. “He didn’t even tell me goodbye,” she said.

“I reckon,” Doctor Lucas Henry said, going to the door and pushing it closed, “that’s because he figures he’s coming back.”

JOHNNY CAIN WALKED OUT
into the middle of the sunbaked road. He walked slowly, letting his eyes adjust to the brighter light, letting his ears open up to hear even the
slightest of sounds. His hat was pulled low, shading his eyes, so he could see better. He flexed his fingers, unconsciously limbering the muscles for the draw.

He saw the town barber dart into the Gilded Cage saloon, and he smiled. He felt a single, quick pulse of fear, and then nothing.

He stopped across the street from the saloon, directly in line with the swinging summer doors. He leaned against the post of a hitching rail, next to a horse trough, and waited.

Jarvis Kennedy burst out of the doors, firing, a Colt in each hand. But Cain had seen the toe of his boot coming a full second before the rest of him.

Cain’s revolver was in his hand in a motion so quick and smooth and natural that it was like the act of breathing.

His first bullet ripped Jarvis Kennedy’s throat open. Blood spilled in a scarlet wash down the front of his white vest and shirt. The second bullet got Jarvis in the back as he spun around. He fell through the saloon’s doors. He was dead before his face came to rest in the sawdust on the floor.

Cain was already swinging the barrel of his Colt to the right, aiming, firing at the man who was coming at him from an alley with a shotgun.

Shotgun pellets smacked into the trough behind Cain with a splintering crackle, but he ignored it. The first of his bullets went through the man’s coattails, the second went where it was supposed to, right where a gold watch chain hung with seals stretched across his belly. The man screamed, doubling over, his arm clutching at his middle. He started to crawl, bleeding, back toward the mouth of the alley, and Cain fired again. The man jerked and went still.

The sound of the last shot fell, echoing, into a breath-held silence. Skeins of gunsmoke drifted past on the wind. Cain opened the gate of his Colt, ejected the empty cartridges
and reloaded, his fingers moving sure and fast. He could taste the bitterness of gunpowder on his lips.

The man lying in the road, at the mouth of the alley, was dressed rich and had a fine head of white hair. Cain thought he could be Fergus Hunter, probably was, but he really didn’t care a damn. If he didn’t get Hunter today, he’d get him later. He often didn’t know the names of the men he had killed, and didn’t suppose it mattered one bit, to them or to him.

He knew there was someone else in the alley, but whoever it was had apparently quit on the notion of dying today. Cain kept his gun cocked, his finger a hair’s breadth from squeezing the trigger, and waited.

A young man with long dark hair and a bandage wrapped around his head to cover one eye inched out of the shadows into the light, his hands raised high in the air. “I threw down my gun!” he called out, his voice breaking. “That’s my father, please . . .”

Cain didn’t move, not even his eyelids stirred. The young man fell to his knees and crawled through the dust to the man who lay in a spreading pool of blood. He pulled the dead man into his lap, and the man’s arm flopped over, revealing a gaping hole in his belly. But a man didn’t die from a gunshot, not right away. The killing wound, Cain knew, was the bullet he had put right in the middle of the man’s forehead, like a third eye.

The quiet that came after death was different than any other silence, Cain thought. There was almost a terrible beauty about it. All he could hear was the beat of his own heart.

Cain waited. He waited a long while, gun in hand, because you could never be too careful. Many a man had died from holstering his pistol too soon.

Something banged behind him.

He whirled . . .

When he saw Rachel come running out Doc Henry’s front door, crying his name, he had already fired.

“JOHNNY!” SHE SHOUTED,
and felt something slam into her chest, knocking the breath out of her, and she fell.