He had been lying in the sage ten yards to Larrabee's left, where Larrabee had put him because there was nowhere else to put him and he would not stay by the fire. Now he stood up straight in the gray light, a tall dark figure in a cavalry cape on the rim of the bench, with his hands empty and open at his sides, and called down the slope in a clear, carrying, parade-ground voice.
"Sorrell! Lucan Sorrell! This is Lieutenant Gaskell. It's finished. The wire's mended and Keogh has the whole of it. Kimbrough's taken. Put down your rifles and come up, and nobody need be hurt."
For one second everything on the slope was still.
Then somebody down there fired, and then all four of them fired, at the voice and the cape, in a ragged crash of sound and flame, and Larrabee saw Gaskell turn halfway around as if somebody had called his name from behind and go down into the sage, and from the dark under the third wagon, where he had been lying all night with his carbine, Private Malachy Shea of County Clare rose up on one knee to see and was struck in the throat by a ball that had gone over the rim, and fell back against the wheel.
"Fire," Larrabee said, and the line along the rim went off together in one long sheet of yellow, and then again, and down the slope the four shapes broke and ran. One of them fell, and got up, and ran on limping. The troopers fired after them until Larrabee shouted cease, and then it was quiet except for the running, and the running went away down into the dark of the willows, and stopped.
It stopped because there was nothing there.
They heard it from the rim, in the great stillness that comes after rifle fire: a man's voice in the willows, high and cracking, swearing, and another calling a horse's name, and a third crying out, where are they, where are the damned horses, Lucan, where are the horses, and then, from far off across the creek on the other side, very faint and very clear, the sound of several horses being driven at an easy lope over frozen ground, going away toward the southwest, and a single high, long, ululating cry above them that rose and fell and rose again in the dawn and then was gone.
"Mount up," Larrabee said. "Ten men. Donnellan, take the rest and see to Lieutenant Gaskell and to Shea." He was already running for the corral.