“Also true,” I said.
“So we’ll see,” Cato said.
“And pretty quick,” I said.
Virgil reached the foot of the slope and stopped his horse maybe twenty feet in front of the three men. I looked at Swann through the glass. He was perfectly still on his horse, relaxed, looking at Virgil. Virgil had the same stillness in a fight. He had it now.
I put the glass away so I could see the whole scene.
Apparently, Wolfson said something and Virgil answered. Swann’s gaze never wavered from Virgil. Then it seemed as if nobody said anything, as if everything stopped. Then, with no visible hurry, Virgil drew. Swann was good, he had cleared his holster when Virgil shot him and turned quietly and shot Lujack, as Lujack was still fumbling with his holster. Wolfson didn’t draw. Instead, he raised both hands over his head as high as he could reach. Virgil shot him. There was almost a rhythm to it. As if something in Virgil’s head was counting time. Swann. Lujack. Wolfson. Orderly. Graceful. One bullet each. And three men dead.
Then, with the three men on the ground and their riderless horses starting to browse the short grass, Virgil opened the cylinder, took out the three spent shells, inserted three fresh ones, closed the cylinder, holstered his gun, turned his horse, and headed back up the hill at a dead gallop.
“Swann started things, ’stead of Virgil,” Cato said, “he mighta won.”
“But he didn’t,” I said.
74.
The deputies came boiling up over the hill where they figured to be, and rode hard after Virgil. There might have been ten. They were bunched, and at the distance and speed, it was hard to count for sure. When they came to the dead men, they reined in. Some of their horses were a little spooked about the corpses and shied and danced a little. Some didn’t seem to notice that anything had happened. The horses of the dead men had paid very little attention, and were now eating grass a few feet from the bodies. I guess shooting bothered some horses and not others. Horses were hard to figure. Like people.
The deputies gathered, milling around the deceased as they discussed what to do. Nobody got down and checked on the dead men. They’d all seen it enough to recognize death when they saw it.
Virgil was well up the hill now, past the bush that marked rifle range. The deputies still milled. Virgil’s horse pounded up to the rock outcropping and around it. His hooves clattered where some of the ledge was exposed underfoot, and then he was behind the rocks, breathing in big huffs. Virgil slid off him, took a loop around a tree with the reins, and joined us in the rocks.
“Swann was good,” Virgil said.
Below us, the deputy with the big mustache, who had killed three men in Ellsworth, rode a ways up the hill but stopped a long way short of the rifle-range bush.
“Cole,” he shouted.
Virgil climbed down from the rocks and went out in front of them, and stood. I slid forward a little so I could see him.
“You hear me, Cole?” the deputy shouted.
“Yep.”
“We got no stake in this, we’re hired hands. For us, the job’s over.”
Virgil waited.
“You hear that?” the deputy yelled.
“Yep.”
“We’ll be out of here by tomorrow night,” the deputy shouted.
Virgil didn’t say anything for a minute. He looked up at me looking down from the rocks, and he grinned.
Then he turned back to the deputy down the slope and waved his right hand.
“Hasta la vista,” he shouted.
And the deputy turned his horse and headed back down the slope and joined the other deputies. They left the bodies where they had lain, rounded up the riderless horses, and drove them ahead of them as they went back into town. After maybe an hour or so, someone came from town in a buckboard and gathered up the bodies.
75.
We had a pack mule for supplies, and were saying good-bye to Cato and Rose, when Beth Redmond came out of the hotel that used to belong to Wolfson.
“You’re really going,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“I’ll miss you.”
“We’ll miss you, too, ma’am,” I said. “Won’t we, Virgil.”
“We will,” Virgil said.
“You know, the men got together and elected Mr. Stark mayor of Resolution,” she said.
“Yep,” Virgil said.
“He’s going to run the bank and the store and everything that poor Mr. Wolfson, ah, left behind.”
“Stark knows how to run things,” I said.
“Everybody wanted both of you to stay on, too,” she said.
“These boys’ll make a fine pair of marshals,” Virgil said.
Rose grinned at her.
“Like my new badge?” he said.
“You and Mr. Tillson look very nice,” she said.
No one mentioned that the badges were lifted from the dead bodies of Lujack and Swann.
“You have any problems,” Virgil said, “with anybody, you understand? You see Cato or Rose, they’ll straighten it out.”
She nodded.
“Will you be coming back this way anytime?” she said.
“Never know,” Virgil said. “Right now I got to go to Texas.”
She stood in front of him, looking at him for a moment, then she put her arms around him and kissed him hard on the mouth.
“You’re a good man, Virgil Cole,” she said when she was through. “Thank you.”
Virgil grinned at her.
“You’re welcome,” he said, and patted her on the backside, and swung up onto his horse.
She gave me a little hug, too, and a kiss on the cheek, but with less enthusiasm. I hugged her back gently.
“Good-bye, Beth,” I said, and got on the horse.
Virgil looked down at Beth.
“Remember, he gives you any trouble…”
“Come see us,” Rose said.
“He’s changed,” Beth said. “But thank you.”
Beth turned and went back into the hotel. Virgil and I looked at Cato and Rose.
“Never got to fight you,” Virgil said.
“Not this time,” Rose said.
“Probably just as well,” Virgil said.
“Probably,” Cato said.
We nodded. They nodded. Then we started the horses and headed south out of Resolution.
Virgil didn’t say anything the whole day. We were in open country when we camped that night. I took a bottle of whiskey out of my saddlebag, and we had some while we made a fire and cooked some sowbelly and beans under the big, dark sky.
“You think he’ll leave her alone?” Virgil said.
“Redmond?” I said. “Probably not.”
“Be all right for a while,” Virgil said. “Then something’ll go wrong and he’ll be under pressure…”
“And he won’t be man enough to handle it,” I said. “So he’ll convince himself it’s her fault and smack her couple times to make himself feel better.”
“He hurts her,” Virgil said, “Cato will kill him.”
“I know,” I said.
“And it’ll break her heart,” he said.
“Yep.”
“But she’ll be better off,” Virgil said.
“She won’t think so for a while,” I said.
Virgil leaned back against his saddle and drank from the bottle and looked up at the infinite scatter of stars.
“She was a nice clean woman,” he said. “Always took a bath ’fore we done anything.”
I didn’t comment. He handed me the bottle. I had some.
“Smart,” he said. “Good lookin’, good hearted. Hard to figure why she’d love a jackass like Redmond.”
I said, “Uh-huh.”
“But she does,” Virgil said.
“Uh-huh.”
Virgil took another turn on the bottle, then he looked at me and grinned.
“She’s such a dope,” he said. “He ran off to Texas with somebody else, she’d go on down there looking for him.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
I put my hand out for the bottle and Virgil passed it to me.
“And her friend would go with her,” he said.
I drank some whiskey.
“Uh-huh,” I said.