Роберт Паркер - Robert B. Parker's Revelation

It turned out the bullet that entered Skillman’s shoulder did minimal damage both on its way in and on its way out. He hung his head low with the look of a man knowing he would for certain be tried for the murders of the mill workers in Yaqui and most likely hanged for his actions, but Skillman was good to ride.

The following morning we got some help from a couple of local hands and we went about the task of burying Wythe and Dekalb in shallow graves. When we finished, we stopped by Lavern’s on our way out to let her know that prison officials or next of kin might come and exhume the dead in the near future.

“And if not?” Lavern said.

“If not,” Virgil said, “may they do their best not to rot in hell too quickly.”

We mounted up and departed Vadito with Skillman and the other two stolen horses in tow and headed toward Yaqui. We had Skillman to return to Cibola, and since Yaqui was en route between Cibola and us, we figured to collect Dobbin, the other convict wounded in the shootout at the Yaqui sawmill.

We rode for the day, and as we did, Skillman never said a word. He sat slumped in his saddle as if he had no more life left in him. When it started to get dark we stopped for the evening and made camp in a dry red-rock area not far from the railroad tracks that led to Yaqui.

We fed Skillman, then redressed his shoulder wound. He was in pain but was not losing blood, and the salve Lavern used was doing the job. We got him back into a clean shirt, put his jacket back on him, then moved him to the edge of our campsite and locked him to the base of a thick piñon with a single handcuff and chain. We left him with a bedroll and a canteen. He could move some, drink water, and lie down, but if he wanted to run off he’d have to uproot a twenty-foot-tall tree.

About an hour after sunset Virgil and I sat on a huge rock and drank some whiskey. The wide, clear night sky stretched out over us like a deep blue blanket full of pinholes.

Virgil leaned back on the rock with his cup of whiskey resting on his stomach and after a long moment of not talking said, “Hear that?”

I listened.

“What?”

“Train.”

I listened some more.

“Now I do.”

“I guess shooting that eight-gauge all these years has taken its toll.”

I nodded.

“That and the cannons of my youth.”

We sat listening to the sound of the thumping steam engine chugging rhythmically in the distance as it got closer and closer. Then we saw the beam of the engine’s light sweeping across the land in front of us as the train turned and started thudding its way toward us.

“Here she comes,” Virgil said.

We watched as the train came toward us, its light getting brighter and the thumping sound of the engine getting louder and louder. Then we could see the cars, and inside the cars, the seated passengers.

We could feel the tamping vibration of the engine now, and no sooner was the train upon us than it passed quickly and left us again in the dark. We listened for an extended moment as the pounding cadence of the locomotive slowly faded away.

We sat in silence for a while.

“Makes you wonder,” I said. “Where they’re all going.”

“And why?”

I thought about that for a moment, the necessities of where and the curiosities of why.

“A lot of people coming and going these days,” I said.

“Damn sure are,” Virgil said.

“Not like it used to be.”

“No,” Virgil said. “It ain’t.”

“Remember when you’d never see anybody?” I said.

“I do.”

“Now there is somebody everywhere, it seems,” I said.

Virgil nodded.

“With something they got to do.”

“Or someplace they got to go,” I said.

“Needing to get there,” Virgil said.

“And need to get,” I said. “Get this and get that.”

Virgil nodded a little.

“Saving for a good time,” he said.

“You wonder,” I said, “just what it will all lead to?”

“Better not to,” Virgil said.

“There was a time the Mississippi felt like the edge of the world.”

“Every day,” Virgil said. “There is a little bit more of something.”

We sat without talking as we listened to a faraway coyote.

“Times are changing right before our eyes, Everett.”

“We can still get lost,” I said.

“We can,” he said.

Virgil looked down to Skillman sitting up with his back to the tree.

“We damn sure can,” he said again. Then, without saying another word, Virgil got up. He moved down off the rock and walked over to where our saddles were. He leaned down by the saddles for a moment, then walked over to Skillman. He handed Skillman a cigar, lit a match, and cupped his hand around it as Skillman drew on the cigar.

Embers skittered off the waning campfire from a stiff bone-dry breeze that kicked up through the night. The wind whistled through the piñons and chaparral. Virgil was up, out of his bedroll with his Colt in hand, looking toward our animals.

I lifted my head from my saddle seat that I used as a pillow and reached for my eight-gauge.

“What?” I said. “What is it?”

“Don’t know,” he said.

“Horses are damn sure spooked,” Virgil said.

I looked over to see Skillman move a little. He sat up in his bedroll and looked over to us. Besides the train that had come through and the occasional yapping of a coyote, the evening had been quiet and peaceful.

“Get ready,” Virgil said.

I sat up and looked about in the dark, thinking maybe some critter had sniffed his way to our camp and was agitating our horses. All the grub that would attract animals was stashed in an oilcloth bag and hanging ten feet above camp by a rope draped over a tall evergreen so as to keep such pests away.

“Wind, maybe,” I said. “Blowing like a son of a bitch.”

“Don’t think so,” Virgil said.

Our horses were tied on a head-high Dutchman picket, close to camp. It was dark, but there was a quarter-moon and we could see well enough to know the horses were good and restless about something.

From the reach of the moon I figured it was near midnight. I gathered up my eight-gauge and moved toward the picket when I heard a horse blow off in the distance.

“You hear that, Virgil?”

“I heard it.”

I backed up a few steps toward Virgil and cocked my eight-gauge.

“Damn sure somebody out there,” I said.

“Is.”

“Could be them,” I said. “Or some of them?”

“By God,” Virgil said.

We waited in silence for a time before we heard a man call from the dark. The voice cut through the steady breeze.

“We got you boxed in and outnumbered. Lay aside any goddamn thing you got to fight with and give yourself up or you will be killed.”

Virgil looked at me.

“Sounds like Stringer,” he said.

“Does.”

“Do it,” the man said. “Or consider being dead and gone.”

“That you, Stringer?” Virgil called.

There was a bit of silence, then we heard him call back loudly, “Cole?”

“It is.”

“Goddamn,” Stringer shouted. “Coming in.”

Stringer was once a deputy of Yaqui, but he’d outlasted the others and was now Yaqui’s top-ranking official. He’d been a good lawman and a good friend of ours through the years and he was someone we trusted.

He barked out loudly as he approached, “Boys, stay put, stay where you are, I’m going in.”

In a few moments, big Sheriff Stringer walked into our camp with two of his deputies lagging behind him. They were pulling their horses and carrying rifles.

Stringer was a tall man with a full mustache and was never without his bone-handle long-barreled Colt, which he wore butt forward on his left.