He had told himself, when he mustered out of the Tenth Cavalry at Fort Concho in 1877, that he would not aim at a man again unless the man was standing over a child. He had kept that for seven years. He thought of it now, in the space of one breath, and then he thought of Billy Ochs, who was eighteen, sitting in his own blood, and he raised the revolver and steadied his wrist and fired once at the second rider, the shorter man, who had a pistol out and was turning toward the coach.
The man spun and fell against his horse, and the horse shied away and left him lying in the cinders holding his shoulder.
The tall man fired again and missed again. Then he looked at the train and the people on it and the colored man walking toward him with a silver revolver, steady, not hurrying, and he made a calculation that Gabriel watched happen on his face. He threw the rifle across his saddle, swung up, and rode, leaving the strongbox and the sacks and his partner in the dirt. He went away south along the wash at a dead run, a narrow man on a grey horse, and in a minute he was a shape and in two he was dust.
Gabriel did not shoot at his back. He let the revolver hang. His ears were ringing. He found that he was breathing hard, as if he had run a mile.
"The car," Louisa said behind him. She had come down off the coach. Her gloves were black. "Mr. Tolliver, the car."
The fire had reached the roof. Through the open side door they could see the inside, a dim box of shelves and pigeonholes and canvas mail sacks, and smoke rolling along the ceiling, thickening, creeping down.
"Where is it?" she said. "Where would it be?"
"A ledger. Calf binding, maybe this tall." He held his hands a foot and a half apart. "And a tin dispatch box with the contracts. They'd be together. The court order named them together."
He went in. The heat inside was like walking into an oven door. The smoke was in his eyes at once, and he went down low, under it, and crawled along the floor with his coat over his mouth, feeling along the shelves. Mail sacks. A crate of something. A bundle of track surveys tied with tape. Behind him there was a rustle and a cough, and he turned, and there she was in the doorway on her hands and knees in her magenta velvet, coming in after him.
"Go back," he said.
"There are two of us," she said, "and two things to carry."
The ledger was on the bottom shelf at the forward end, nearest the fire. That was not chance. Somebody had moved it there, under the place where the oil had been poured, so that it would be the first thing to go. The tin box sat beside it. The paint on the box had already bubbled. When Gabriel put his hands on the ledger the leather was hot enough that he heard his own skin hiss, and he did not let go. He shoved it back along the floor to her, and she wrapped it in her skirt, and then he took the tin box by its handle and the handle burned through his palm into the meat of his hand, and he pulled.
Something above them cracked. A roof board came down in a shower of sparks behind him. Louisa was out the door, rolling, the ledger clutched to her chest. He followed her, dragging the box, and fell into the cinders, and a man was there, the drummer with the beard and the bowler hat, of all people, flinging a bucket of water from the engine tank over Gabriel's coat and then over his hands.
"Mercy," the drummer kept saying. "Oh, mercy. Oh, mercy."
They lay in the grass and watched the express car burn. Pruett and Haggerty and two of the cattlemen formed a bucket line from the tender, but the old car was dry as tinder and twenty years old, and in ten minutes the roof fell in and they gave it up. The strongbox sat in the dirt where the riders had dropped it. Haggerty opened its lid with a stick. It was full of canvas bags stenciled DENVER NATIONAL BANK — GOLD COIN — $5,000, twelve of them, every one still sealed.