Hawley hadn’t said about the money. Though, granted, Hawley wasn’t damned bright: Aby’s mother’s half-sister must’ve screwed a post to get Hawley—he’d maintained that for years. Aby’d argued he wasn’t that dim, but, damn, he’d far undershot it. Hawley pulling what he’d pulled at the bank—God, what did you dowith a man like that?
He wanted to pound Hawley’s head in right now, if only because Hawley was the easiest problem to puzzle out, and probably the one of the three with no malice: Hawley got ideas and got himself in trouble, not thinking things through, not remotely adding it up why he was going to make people mad. You wanted to beat his head in, but you didn’t somehow ever get around to doing it, because to make it worth a human being’s time, Hawley had to understand why you were mad at him—and, dammit, you had a better chance explaining morals to a lorry-lie.
At least you knew where Hawley was on an issue. You could even call him honest, he was so stupid about his pilfering.
Jonas, on the other hand—if Jonas was coming up here with honest intentions, meaning nothing else on his mind than paying debts to Aby, it needed more reasons than he’d ever pried out of the man. Shadow was a spooky, chancy horse, and Jonas was that kind of a man—you had to get Lukealone and a few beers along if you wanted the truth. Jonas and that horse were both spooks. In a minute and twice on a weekday, yes, Jonas would opt to keep the truth to himself. Jonas, even to his partners, especially to outsiders to that threesome, parted with information the way a townsman parted with cash money, piece at a time, and always, alwaysto Jonas’ advantage.
Jonas always did his job. Letter of the contract. Depend on it.
Jonas come up here out of belated remorse? Loyalty? —Friendship? Not to him.
And where was Hawley, if Jonas was involved?
Hell, ask Jonas what Hawley thought. Hawley always did.
<Horses> crept up into Cloud’s awareness, <Froth> first, a noisy presence through the palisade walls and the gate.
<Harper shooting from the hill,> Danny imaged hard, the instant he picked up Jonas’ party at all. <Hallanslakers in the Meeting in camp.
<Harper on his feet yelling. Harper shooting. Harper shooting. Harper shooting—Harper and Quig at the gate—
<Danny shooting at a man in the blowing snow.>
<Ice> appeared almost immediately after <Froth.> <Shadow> had to be that disturbance around them. Cloud snorted and wasn’t sure he wanted them back, but the boys were glad enough to realize they weren’t on their own any longer. And—which he had trouble admitting—he was.
“Is that the riders?” Carlo wanted to know without his saying anything. “Is that Jonas? Are you warning them?”
“Yeah,” he said, trying to steady down his images andhis nerves before he had to deal with Jonas.
“Are they coming back?” Randy wanted to know—Randy had a sore cheek, but Randy wasn’t hurt otherwise, and Randy had maybe learned to stay away from a horse when there was something you didn’t want shouted to minds all over the area. Randy had figured a number of things out, maybe, and at least wasn’t mad at him anymore.
“Yeah, they’re coming in. I don’t think Harper’s stayed around in range, or he’s real quiet out there.” He put a hand on Randy’s shoulder and squeezed, feeling the shivery excitement in Randy’s mind. “Just calm down. If you want to go around horses you have to keep it down all the time, all right?”
“Yeah,” Randy said; and took a deep breath. “Are they going to shoot? Are they going to find this Harper guy?”
“Just be ready to open the gate,” Danny said to the boys; he kept thinking of <Harper> and ambush. “Fast.”
But <Harper> was gone from the ambient and had been since the gunshot at the gate, spooked out, elusive as any four-footed ghosty.
“Have they found the man?” Randy asked. “The man Harper was shooting at?”
“Stuart?” he said. “No, the blurry one’s probably Jonas. He’s not real noisy. They’re coming up on the gates. Be ready. They’ll come in and we shut it behind them fast as we can. Harper’s a coward. He’ll lie low if he’s outnumbered. But he could try shooting at them.” He was sending <Harper with gun. Harper’s face,> as clearly as he could—he couldn’t put any time sense with it, he couldn’t tellJonas it was now and not then he was worried about. <Man with rifle. Shooting at gate.>
Randy handled the latch, and he and Carlo hauled at the door, moving a blanket of snow along with it. They hauled hard, making a horse-wide fan of it as Luke and then Hawley rode in, their faces stung red with cold above their scarves, snow thick on them and their horses. Then Jonas came in last and <not happy.>
“Harper was here!” Danny said. “Harper and Quig. We shot at them.”
“Explains the gunshot,” Jonas said, and slid down.
“What about Stuart?”
“Man’s a damn spook,” Jonas said. “Couldn’t stop him. Wouldn’t listen.”
“He thinks wewere shooting at him,” Luke said. “Lit out up and over a slope somewhere—couldn’t track him in this stew.”
<Steep rocks, brush, blowing snow> came through. So did the fear of <Stuart shooting from ambush.>
And from Hawley, Danny thought, the more pleasant image of <ham and biscuits and a warm fire.>
<Danny shooting at Harper?> Jonas asked.
<Harper at front gate, gate shut, Jonas and Luke and Hawley off on road. Danny talking to Carlo, Carlo running for rider gate—>
He didn’t want to confess how entirely stupid he’d been, but <Harper or Quig maybe being shot, thick snow, gate coming open> was something Jonas needed to know.
“Hit him?”
“Could have. Could have hit Quig. That’s the other guy. But I’m not sure.”
“You’d know,” Jonas said matter of factly, and the ambient went queasy with <pain, anger, horse going crazy> while Jonas’ personal shell around it was cold as ice. Jonas took his hat off and dusted it against his leg. “Get us inside. Damn near frozen.”
<Cattle,> was Burn’s judgment on the situation, and Guil patted Burn on the neck as he walked beside him, too numb and too sore to be coherent.
Snowed on. Shot at. Chased. Yelled at for a spooky fool. His feet were numb. His head hurt.
<Box on the lead truck. The truck that had gone over the edge.
Burn snorted, shook his neck, throwing off a warning to the neighborhood — a dangerously loud sending out into the ambient, considering the danger they knew was on the loose up here.
But Burn always thought he owned the territory. Guil caught a fistful of mane in the middle of Burn’s neck and yanked it to distract him from challenging everything in reach.
<Shooting at him.> He was stilldamned mad.
Wouldn’t really have thought it of Jonas — wouldn’t have thought that Jonas would miss, for one thing, but the snow had been blowing hard. Gust of wind, snow in the eyes… nobody was perfect.
Or it couldhave been an overexcited villager, thinking that he was the rogue: spooked villagers could shoot at any damn thing they thought they saw.
Could have, could have. The fact was Aby was dead and he didn’t know he was in any sense justified in his increasingly dark suspicions of Jonas — but somewhere between the headache and the ache in his leg, he was on the irrational edge of very damned mad.
Give Jonas credit—he’d lay odds Hawley hadn’t run straight to inform his partners about the bank. On a day in town with the horses a long way off, even dimbrain Hawley could conceivably have done something Jonas and Luke didn’t know about.