Resolution

74.

The deputies came boiling up over the hill where they figured to be, and rode hard after Virgil. There might have been ten. They were bunched, and at the distance and speed, it was hard to count for sure. When they came to the dead men, they reined in. Some of their horses were a little spooked about the corpses and shied and danced a little. Some didn’t seem to notice that anything had happened. The horses of the dead men had paid very little attention, and were now eating grass a few feet from the bodies. I guess shooting bothered some horses and not others. Horses were hard to figure. Like people.

The deputies gathered, milling around the deceased as they discussed what to do. Nobody got down and checked on the dead men. They’d all seen it enough to recognize death when they saw it.

Virgil was well up the hill now, past the bush that marked rifle range. The deputies still milled. Virgil’s horse pounded up to the rock outcropping and around it. His hooves clattered where some of the ledge was exposed underfoot, and then he was behind the rocks, breathing in big huffs. Virgil slid off him, took a loop around a tree with the reins, and joined us in the rocks.

“Swann was good,” Virgil said.

Below us, the deputy with the big mustache, who had killed three men in Ellsworth, rode a ways up the hill but stopped a long way short of the rifle-range bush.

“Cole,” he shouted.

Virgil climbed down from the rocks and went out in front of them, and stood. I slid forward a little so I could see him.

“You hear me, Cole?” the deputy shouted.

“Yep.”

“We got no stake in this, we’re hired hands. For us, the job’s over.”

Virgil waited.

“You hear that?” the deputy yelled.

“Yep.”

“We’ll be out of here by tomorrow night,” the deputy shouted.

Virgil didn’t say anything for a minute. He looked up at me looking down from the rocks, and he grinned.

Then he turned back to the deputy down the slope and waved his right hand.

“Hasta la vista,” he shouted.

And the deputy turned his horse and headed back down the slope and joined the other deputies. They left the bodies where they had lain, rounded up the riderless horses, and drove them ahead of them as they went back into town. After maybe an hour or so, someone came from town in a buckboard and gathered up the bodies.