It’ll be like it was with the Shoshones,” I said. "They may not come, but you can’t plan on it.”
"We’re losing manpower,” Stark said, “every day. Mostly miners are moving on.”
“Mine’s dried up,” Faison said. “Nothin’ to hold ’em.”
“Wolfson know that?” I said.
“They send somebody up every day to look at us,” Stark said. “Coupla riders.”
“Where?” I said.
“Top the ridge over there,” Stark said.
He pointed west.
“Where we’ve cleared the trees,” he said.
“When do they come?”
“Late afternoon.”
“So the sun’s behind them,” Rose said.
“And anybody wanted to pick them off from down here,” I said, “be shooting into it.”
It was the middle of the afternoon. We were at the lumber camp, outside the lumber office, with Stark and Faison and Redmond and several men I didn’t know. Virgil and Cato both looked up at the sun.
“Awful long shot, sun or no sun,” I said.
“Better to be closer,” Virgil said. “And not facing the sun.”
Cato nodded and tapped himself on the chest. Virgil nodded back. Cato stood and walked away from the group and around the corner of the lumber office. Everyone watched him go. No one said anything.
So I said, after a time, “You need to stay careful. Keep your pickets posted on the road, and above the camp, too. Lujack and his posse may not come prancing up the road for you.”
Stark and Faison nodded.
“So that’s it?” Redmond said. “That’s your plan? They’re stealing our land and killing our people, and we sit here and wait for them to starve us out?”
Virgil looked at Redmond.
Since he never showed anything, only somebody who knew Virgil as well as I did would know how close Redmond was coming to the edge of Virgil’s patience.
“That’s what you should do,” I said. “We got other plans.”
“I want to know what they are,” Redmond said. “I got a right. I got a right to know. I got a right to know where Tillson went. What’s he doing? I…”
“Redmond,” Virgil said.
His voice was so soft it was barely more than a whisper. But it was clear and hard, and all of us turned toward it. And Redmond stopped talking.
“You need to understand coupla things,” Virgil said. “We got no quarrel with Wolfson. He hired us. He paid us, and when he didn’t need us no more, he paid us off. Nothing wrong with any of that.”
Redmond nodded.
“And we all need to make a living,” Virgil said. “And there ain’t one to be made here.”
Virgil paused and looked around. No one said anything.
“And Everett and I need to get on down to Texas,” Virgil said.
Redmond nodded.
“So we stayin’ here is a big pain in the ass for us, and a big favor for you,” Virgil said. “You got that part of it, Bob?”
Redmond nodded.
“Now, here’s the other thing,” Virgil said. “What we do, me, Everett, Cato, and Rose, what we do is a thing where you kind of feel your way along, extinctual, you might say.”
“Instinctual,” I said.
Virgil nodded approvingly.
“That’s right. So people always askin’ us what we gonna do and how and when, we find that very annoying, especially when we doin’ those people a big, large fucking favor for nothing.”
Nobody said anything.
“You understand that?” Virgil said to Redmond.
“Yeah.”
“Good. Then shut the fuck up and do what we tell you.”
Redmond opened his mouth and couldn’t seem to think of anything to say and shut it and nodded yes.
Virgil looked at him silently for another moment, then looked at me and nodded.
“So you got women and children here,” I said. “And you got a lot of men with Winchesters, and nothing else to do. Put the men around the perimeter.”
“Any advice on exactly where?” Stark said.
“You know the place better than I do,” I said. “Just keep them close enough together so nobody can slide in between ’em. Change the guards often so they don’t get skittish and shoot each other.”
“Even though you don’t think they’ll come,” Stark said.
“Ain’t no reason for them to come,” I said. “But people ain’t always reasonable. And Wolfson’s probably less reasonable than most.”
“There’s the riders,” Rose said.
Squinting into the sun, I could see two horsemen on the top of the treeless hill. One might have had a telescope. As I watched, both of them whirled suddenly and reached for their guns. Before they cleared leather they toppled slowly from their horses, and the sound of two shots rolled down the hill toward us, slowed and softened by the distance.
“That’d be Cato,” Rose said.