He did it slowly, and the shotgun in the doorway came up with him. The woman in brown made a small noise. The drummer said, "Oh, Lord," quite clearly, to no one.
"Who's your father?" Gabriel asked her.
She held his eyes across the aisle. "Owner of this railroad."
Gabriel let out a breath through his nose. Everything he had suspected since Pueblo arranged itself, the way iron filings jump into a pattern when the magnet is set down beneath the paper.
"Then they aren't here for jewelry."
She turned, still in the bandit's grip, and looked past both masked men, past the open door, to the platform beyond and the dark shape of the car coupled behind theirs: not a passenger coach but an old wooden express car, slab-sided and windowless, its paint the color of dried blood.
"What's in that car?"
Gabriel's right hand went inside his overcoat and came out with a revolver, a big Schofield, nickel-plated and polished so that it threw the window light up onto the ceiling. He did not point it at anyone's heart. He held it low and sure, as a man holds a tool he has used and hoped not to use again.
"Something your father stole," he said. Then, to the masked man, quietly, as if they were alone: "Snell, let her go."
The blue eyes widened above the bandana.
And the world behind them broke open.
The sound came first as a shove, not a noise, a fist of air that lifted the car and set it down again. Then the noise, too large to be heard, felt instead in the teeth and the ribs. The rear door and the platform beyond it and the gangway between the cars became a sheet of orange fire rolling inward, and Gabriel was already down in the aisle, one knee on the carpet, his free arm over his head, the way he had gone down a hundred times in Texas when the first shot came off a ridge. Glass burst out of the rear windows. Across from him the young woman threw her gloved hands across her face and twisted away. He saw, or thought he saw, the man in the duster turn toward the blast with his arm still out, and then the fire took both bandits, swallowed them, and they were gone.
Smoke poured through the coach, black and stinking of powder and scorched varnish. Somebody was screaming in a high, steady tone. The car bucked, surged, and leapt forward as if a hand had let go of it.
When the smoke thinned, the back of the car was simply not there. Where the door had been there was a ragged hole of splintered walnut and twisted iron, and beyond it, open air, and the track running away behind them, the two rails converging into the brown distance.
The young woman lowered her hands. Her hat was crooked. There was soot on her cheek and a fleck of something burning on her sleeve; she slapped it out without looking.