So she was reining in the lathered, foaming team the instant the patrol cantered into view, pausing to sob once out of fatigue or possibly dumb rage again, but then had bounded from the surrey and was rushing to accost the troopers even before Hoke himself fully realized they were no longer moving. There were about a dozen riders, led by a captain whose braid Hoke could distinguish even at a substantial remove. Then as they came on in the lifting gray light he recognized the man, a grimed youth named Fiedler. His entire patrol was haggard and spent. The officer recognized Belle immediately in turn (very few male residents of the territory would fail to) but she allowed him no time for pleasantries. “Dingus Billy Magee!” she shouted even before he had halted. “That slimy, yellow-scrotum’d, dingleberry-picking polecat — in a buckboard, headed this way. Did you pass the—?”
For a moment Captain Fiedler simply gazed at her, his lips puckered. Nor was it just puzzlement, mere astonishment at this disheveled and furious yet familiar apparition so frantically hailing him here in the empty mesa at dawn. It wasn’t even the sight of Hoke’s striped pants beneath her dress. Because when he began to curse his sudden implosive anger left even Belle’s protracted blasphemy wan by comparison. “Because I’ll be damned on Judgment Day for a knave,” he explained. “Dingus Billy Magee. Surely. Because ever since we ran into the two of them yesterday I’ve been wondering who he was, where I’d seen him before. Sending us on a wild goose chase after nonexistent Apaches, when there isn’t a—”
“What?” Belle cut in, cried in annoyance, “yesterday? No, I’m talking about today, tonight, right on this road, in a—”
“And I’m talking about yesterday, in the afternoon,” the captain said. “When we were finally on our way into Yerkey’s Hole for a bivouac after a patrol that was already weeks too long and met two riders who told us about a Mescalero abduction raid on a pair of wagons. Wagons that don’t exist any more than the Indians do. Pounding our backsides raw over some saddle tramp’s idea of a joke, and through it all a bell kept ringing in die back of my mind — where had I seen one of them before? The one who called me Fetter-man. Surely. So now I finally remember. It was on a reward poster. The—”
Belle snatched at the man’s pantleg where he sat. “Hang it all,” she demanded, “now what the fornicating thunder do I give a hoot about that? It’s now, tonight, that the mangy little pudding-pounder ran off with my safe and all my life’s savings and — on this blasted road I’m standing an this minute, it’s got to be this road, in a buckboard with—”
But Hoke’s own impatience could withstand no more either. So he forgot why he had not climbed from the surrey to start with, why he had been sitting with a hand shielding his mustache. “In a dress!” he cried. “Don’t forget the—”
He caught himself too late, wilting in mortification as the troopers turned toward him to a man in simultaneous amazement. “Why, you hairy-chested old honey,” one of them started.
But Belle was already back at it. “Will you listen, confound it! Yes, in a dress, him too. And with a trunk, a big wardrobe trunk on the back of the—”
“Dress?” The captain frowned then. “Trunk? Well, surely now, there was a dress. I mean there was a girl, if that’s what you mean. Why, she passed us not twenty minutes ago. As a matter of fact I thought she might be in distress at first, but she told us she was just rushing off to get married. But I don’t understand what—”
But Belle had already spun back to the surrey. Half boarded, she paused anew. “One hundred dollars for each man!” she shouted. “Or hell’s bells, never mind that — there’s that nine thousand or more in rewards for the first one puts a bullet up his giggy. But on top of that I’ll—”
She did not have to pursue it. Only Captain Fiedler hesitated briefly. Then he too had whirled his mount and was pounding after the others.
Nor could the surrey keep up, of course. So half an hour later they were still steaming across the broad vast mesa itself, in full daylight now and some moments after the troopers themselves had disappeared far ahead where the road twisted northward into an abrupt high upthrust of stone hills, into a defile, when they heard the shooting, the rifles. “Git ‘im!” Belle shrieked instantly in approval, harrying the thundering mares even more hysterically, “—git him good now! Fill the miserable meat-beater so full o’ lead even the vultures’ll vomit when they chomp on him!”
“But—” Hoke swallowed in disappointment, reading the same probability into the sounds and certain then that his own meager claim to the rewards was being irrevocably superseded (not by any means accustomed to the idea of a marriage that would render them inconsequential yet, either). But then he became moderately perplexed as well. “Because lissen,” he yelled, or tried to over the horses, “how long kin they keep plinking at him in there anyways? How much of a fight kin he—?”
Because the firing still went on. As a matter of fact it cracked and volleyed so incessantly that if he hadn’t known better Hoke would have estimated a good many more than ten or a dozen rifles to be involved. “My gawd,” he commiserated then, “they truly must be massacrating the misfortunate critter at that, the way they’re—”
“And I say more power to ‘em!” Belle dismissed him. “Pulverize the twerp!” she screamed enthusiastically into the wind. “String him up by his prunes and take target practice! Pop so many holes in the varmint he’ll leak until hell sprouts flowers!”
Except it wasn’t Dingus.
It took only an instant, less than that, as the surrey finally careened into the gorge itself amid high sheer walls, as it screeched precariously around the first unnavigable turn and into sight of the troopers at the same time, for Hoke to understand it had to be something different, something more. But then he was too busy to look, snatching at the reins where Belle had suddenly abandoned control in favor of the brake now but missing them completely as the amok vehicle pitched and lurched and twice almost overturned completely, stopping only after it had slewed about in a full circle to wedge itself against stone. Hoke was already leaping from it before that, however, as the bullets whined and ricocheted about his fluttering skirts, diving for shelter behind boulders where the troopers themselves were pinned down by the relentless fusillade from somewhere beyond. He buried his nose into the shiny blue serge of the soldier across whose sprawled backside he had landed, too startled to be shocked or terrified yet, although hardly failing to hear Belle’s own instantaneous new outburst despite all. “Indians?” she roared at Captain Fiedler. “Indians? Now great bleeding eardrums, it was you yourself jest said there ain’t a hos-tile Indian within six counties of this place, so how could—”
“Well, you’ll pardon me if I don’t exactly call these peaceable,” the officer yelled back, scarcely in need of the irony as a new hail of bullets whistled and chinked overhead. “But at least they’ve most likely done us the favor of dispatching your outlaw friend for you, since he couldn’t have been more than fifteen or twenty minutes ahead of us coming through the—”