Chato rose and scanned his surroundings. His senses turned to the land like a hound. Marisol’s rifle barked once more, precise and cold.
One of the two bandits on the right bank slumped, a neat hole through his chest. The last wounded man made a run for the scrub, bleeding and frantic.
“Stop him!” Marisol screamed.
Blaze started forward with his Colt raised. The bandit lurched, eyes wide with the shock of pain.
That was when Blaze fired. The bullet hit him, and the man’s shoulders convulsed. He dropped face-first into the sand. Wounded, not dead.
Blaze’s breath came in ragged pulls. He didn’t feel like a killer, yet his hands had done it.
“Are you alright?” Marisol panted, coming up beside him.
Her Hawken Plains rifle hung loosely in one hand, smoke curling from the barrel. Her eyes searched his face, then flicked to the dying horse.
The sight of Nancy’s stillness seemed to hit her like a physical blow. She knelt, fingers moving quickly to check the animal’s throat, then shook her head.
“Oh no,” she whispered. “She was a good horse.”
Blaze sank down on a rock, the sand hot beneath his palms. “She was everything.”
The blood pooled dark near Nancy’s flared nostrils. Blaze reached out and ran his hand along the animal’s neck, feeling the last warmth fade. He closed his eyes for a second and let himself feel the grief.
It was sharp and immediate. Another loss.
“You okay?” Chato asked quietly. He’d already gone through the ridges, counted bodies, and marked spare cartridges. He crouched with his knife set down, polishing the blade on his sleeve as if nothing had happened.
“No,” Blaze said simply. His voice was small. “Not really.”
Marisol looked away for a second. “Fight’s done,” she said. “We need to gather what we can. Check for supplies. Take whatever is worth anything.”
Chato moved like water through the brush. He returned with a few slashed saddlebags and a tossed-over blanket.
“Gold’s not on them,” he said. “I ripped open their sacks and took what they had.”
He pointed at the dead men’s collars. Each bore the hollowed horseshoe and serpent mark of the Hollow Creek Riders.
“It’s them,” Blaze muttered. “We’re closer.”
His hands still shook when he holstered his Colt Navy revolver. The weight of it was something he could hold onto, a small promise of something he could do. He drew breath and exhaled slowly.
“You did good,” Marisol said at last. The words were rough, as if pulled up from some buried place. “You kept your head.”
“I didn’t finish him,” Blaze said. The shame tasted worse than the dust. “I—”
“You wounded him,” Chato said. “Alive can be worse than dead if we catch him.”
Marisol’s jaw clenched. She kicked a spent shell, then looked at Blaze with a raw, searching intensity.
“You sure about this?” she asked. “About what it turns a man into?”
“I don’t get to be sure,” Blaze replied. “I only get to do what I must.”
She turned away, looking out across the creek bed where bodies lay like rag dolls.
“We should move fast,” she said. “We take their horses, their maps, anything that tells us where they go.”
Nobody objected to her plan. They couldn’t stay here for long anyway. They had to act.
