Spook had hit a rhythm and broke into a run that didn’t pitch him off. They’d reached a road—the road, a road, he didn’t know— where there was easy moving and for a hundred meters or so he was with Spook, and no longer fighting for balance—it was just there. It was wonderful, wild, and right in a way he’d never found anything just happen for him.
Until the stop that almost pitched him over Spook’s shoulder.
<Horse and rider.> Danny was there. On Cloud. With a <rifle halfway lifted for shooting horse.>
Spook saw it, too. Spook swung around and bolted and he didn’t know how he stayed on, except the double handful of mane, both legs wrapped tight and his head ducked down because he swayed less that way.
“Carlo!” he heard Danny yell at him. “Carlo, it’s all right, come back!”
Couldn’t take the chance. Couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t.
<Run> was the only safety. It was what Spook knew. Or he did. He’d have trusted Danny. But Spook was afraid. And he thought now he should have been.
“Damn it!” Danny cried. “Carlo!”
But Carlo wasn’t hearing him. Couldn’t hear him, maybe. Or Spook-horse’s state of mind was contagious.
Chase him, maybe. But push him on a mountain road with no-knowing-what ahead—no. <Going slower,> he wanted of Cloud, and tried sending into the ambient, <Danny and Carlo. Horses walking together.>
Cloud didn’t think so. Cloud’s mind conjured <bad horse> and <Spook following them.> Which wasn’t the case, but that was where Spook had consistently been, long enough that it was part of Cloud’s thinking.
Which he had to calm down. Cloud was of a mind to <fight> right now, and that wasn’t what he wanted.
<Still water,> he thought, patting Cloud’s neck as they walked along the well-defined track in the snow. “It’s all right,” he told Cloud. He didn’t know how far Carlo might make the chase—but he was willing to go that far. He’d come out with his kit, his cold-weather gear and his guns. He was equipped. He’d taken longer than he wanted getting onto Carlo’s trail.
He’d known when <Carlo and Spook> had hit the ambient that he’d been too late, and he’d only come up on them because they were so obsessed with each other, in that way of new pairings, that they wouldn’t have heard a herd of horses coming.
He’d made his mistake when he’d hesitated—one way or the other, shoot fast or don’t shoot. Spook wasn’t a green horse from the mountains, playing tag with echoes of gunshots and sprays of dirt on the hillside, the way Cloud had done with the gate-guards down in Shamesey two years ago. Spook very well knew what guns were, and he’d had one rider shot to death.
Wasn’t going to have a gun pointed at him, no. And he’d been asking himself down to the moment the pair turned up in front of him whether he was going to be obliged to shoot the horse to save Carlo.
The lingering question was, should he have, and whether he’d just stood back and let somebody he was supposed to protect go off on a horse that had last belonged to a crazy man.
Chapter 19
It might have been a quick turnaround—out after the kid, and back again, with a live kid or a dead one, and then maybe a chance for negotiation with the village authorities, or an expedition to Momay.
But neither had happened, and Ridley made a trip over to the villageside, through the little gate, this time, and without Slip, to talk to Eli Peterson.
“No luck so far,” he said to Peterson when he met him on the street in front of the pharmacy.
“I feel bad about it,” Peterson said. “I don’t think the boy did it, fact is.”
“Fact is, I wouldn’t take the Mackeys’ word for a sunrise I was watching.”
“The girl, however,” Peterson said, “the sister—”
“What?”
“Says the brother shot their parents, down in Tarrnin. Says the boy was in jail.”
Ridley drew a slow breath. “I’ve been aware of it.”
“And didn’t say?”
“Fisher told me all about it. Fisher thinks the boy’s innocent.”
“He’s not a judge! Neither are you!”
“I’m asking you—let that matter lie. None of us were in Tarmin. None of us can imagine how it was. What I caught from the Fisher boy—you wouldn’t want to see. Look at what happened this morning! I had a terrified boy running into the camp—”
“The words flew out of my mouth and the damn miners were after somebody. They didn’t give a damn who. —How’s the kid taking it?”
“I’m keeping him. At least till his brother gets back.”
“You think he’s coming back?”
“Eventually.”
“Something you know?”
“Fisher’s still gone. Fisher would come back if it was useless. The boy’s with him. I’ll be willing to bet. And the younger boy’s been through too much as is.” He hadn’t told Peterson the central matter. He thought about it, decided finally on half a truth. The snow was still falling and passersby aboveground were all but nonexistent on this cold day—except a batch of kids sledding the snow-pile across the street on a piece of board. “That horse that’s loose—can’t tell for certain, but I think the older boy’s contacted it. I don’t know what to expect.”
“You mean you think he’s teamed up with it? As a rider?”
“It’s possible. I don’t say it’s going to work. Or that he’s going to survive it. He could fall off, break his neck—the horse could kill him.”
“Do they do that?”
“Oh, I’ve heard of it happening. A horse that’s just too spooked. A rider that’s the wrong rider. Things like that. This isn’t nice and controlled like Rain and Jennie. The kid could break his neck, the horse could go off a cliff—or the kid could come back here and then spook right along with the horse. I have to tell you this—don’t take to account anything the sister says. She’s not right. She’s not innocent. I don’t know how else to warn you. I had to get my horse out of there this morning. She spooked my horse.”
“Scared Slip?” Peterson was clearly dubious.
“Marshal, if I’d kept Slip there to deal with her—she’d have spooked the village out the gates. Lorrie-lies and goblin-cats aren’t as scary as what’s in that girl’s mind.”
Peterson seemed to get the idea, then.
“She’s not right,” he repeated to Peterson. “She’s been associated with the rogue down at Tarmin. She’s dangerous.”
“How—dangerous?”
Fisher had left him with a set of truths—and a situation. As camp-boss, he had a privilege to deal with things in camp. And he didn’t pass blame—or legal matters—on to the village marshal. “Fact is—she was on the Tarmin rogue’s back. And she’s a lot safer with you than with us, is what I’m comfortable saying on the matter.”
“That’s not damn all you owe me to say, rider-boss!”
“Keep her away from the horses. This spring—we’ll find a way to get her down to someplace safe. Anveney would be my advice. No horses in Anveney.”
“Good lovin’ God. What have you handed us? What am I dealing with?”
“Marshal, the situation arrived on us on the sudden, on a junior rider’s best guess what to do. And with that horse out there, and what’s gone on—I’d say Darcy Schaffer’s got a real problem on her hands.”
Peterson was mad. He couldn’t blame him for that. Peterson walked off from him as far as the edge of the walk.