Gabriel answered for himself. "Gabriel Tolliver. Secretary of the Freedom Creek Land and Mutual Aid Association, in Bent County." He met the conductor's eye. "I'm on my way to Denver to sit in court Friday morning and watch your company produce a ledger it has been told to produce. That ledger was in the express car. If they burn it, the case is finished, and so are we."
Pruett had already thrown the reverser. "Uncoupled cars on this stretch'll roll back toward the Plum Creek trestle on the grade," he said, "unless somebody's set the hand brake. If they meant it to sit, it's sitting. Three miles. Maybe four." He shoved the throttle forward again. The engine coughed, and the long train, now lighter by one car and a ruined platform, began to back the way it had come.
III.
They rode back on the rear of the last coach, at the edge of the hole the dynamite had made, Gabriel braced in the splintered frame and Louisa beside him holding to a twisted brass rail that had once held a lamp. The prairie ran toward them now instead of away. Behind them in the car, the passengers had gone quiet in the way frightened people do when they sense that someone else has taken charge and they would rather not know of what.
"You called him Snell," Louisa said.
"Amos Snell. Special Service. Your father's company police." Gabriel kept his eyes on the track. "He came to Freedom Creek in January with a deputy from Las Animas and a stack of notices. Read one aloud in front of my sister's house. Her name's Hester Bly. She has four children. He told her the company held her contract in default and she had sixty days to quit the land."
"And had she defaulted?"
"No, Miss Kittredge. She had not."
She took that in. The wind pulled at the loosened coil of her hair. "You were waiting for them," she said. "You sat where you could see the door."
"I was waiting for something. I didn't know it would be them." He paused. "I didn't know it would be you."
A quarter-mile on, Pruett eased the engine, and they saw why. Beside the right-hand rail, in the cinders and the dry bunchgrass, lay a man in a tan duster.
Gabriel was down before the coach stopped rolling. He hit the ballast hard and went to his knees beside the body, and turned it over.
It was the second man, the one who had stood in the doorway with the shotgun. His bandana had come loose. He was young under it, younger than Gabriel would have guessed, with a soft fair mustache and a face that had not yet hardened into anything. The front of him was burned and the back of his head was wrong where it had met the rail. His eyes were open. Gabriel closed them.
"Dutch Rennick," said a voice from the grass. "His name was Dutch Rennick. He was twenty-two."
Twenty yards on, Amos Snell sat with his back against a telegraph pole. His hat was gone. His duster was charred black up one side and the hair on that side of his head had burned away to the scalp, and his left leg was laid out in front of him at an angle that made Louisa, coming up behind Gabriel, put her glove to her mouth. He had pulled the bandana down. He was perhaps forty-five, sun-creased, with a grey-shot beard and those same steady blue eyes, gone glassy now with shock. The dark revolver lay in the grass a yard from his hand. He made no move toward it.