Asa had his field glass to his eye. "Tull," he said quietly. "The buffalo coat, by the near wagon. And—"
He stopped. Iona saw it at the same moment.
A single rider was coming down the old road from the east, through the throat of the canyon, at a walk. A bay horse with white stockings on its forelegs, carrying its head a little to the left. The rider sat very straight. He wore an army blouse with the chevrons of a sergeant. His hands were empty and held away from his body.
"Holloway," Nalté said.
The men in the camp saw him and came together around the wagons. Tull walked out to meet him. They could not hear the words from the rim, but they did not need to. Holloway pointed back down the canyon, toward the road where the wagons should have been rolling by now. He pointed again. He shook his head. Tull stepped close and said something into his face, and Holloway answered and spread his hands, and even from that height Iona could read the shape of it: they're not coming. They know. It's done. Go.
Some of the painted men had begun to look over their shoulders at the walls.
Tull took a revolver from under the buffalo coat and shot Holloway in the chest.
The sound came up to them flat and late, slapping off the black rock. Holloway went backward off his horse. The bay shied and bolted up the canyon with its stirrups flying, just as Nalté's horse had come into Ojo Prieto the evening before.
"Trumpeter," Asa said, already on his feet. "Sound it. All of you on the rim—up, where they can see you. Don't fire unless you're fired upon."
The call went down into the canyon brassy and enormous, and the ten troopers stood up out of the creosote along the skyline with their carbines at port, blue against the bright morning. Iona would remember that afterward: not a charge, not an attack, only men standing up where they could be seen.
It was enough for most of them. The painted men below looked up at the line of blue and broke. They ran for the picket line, cut the ropes, flung themselves onto bare horseback and went pelting up the canyon after Holloway's runaway bay. One knelt behind a wagon wheel and fired at the rim, and the bullet went past Iona's head with a sound like a torn sheet, and Private Varga, two yards to her left, fired once in answer. The man behind the wheel lay down on his side in the sand and did not get up. Varga lowered his carbine and stared down at what he had done, and his mouth worked, and Asa put a hand on his shoulder and said something to him that Iona did not hear.
Tull did not run up the canyon. He ran for the throat of it, toward the road, toward the way out, his buffalo coat flapping. And Corporal Klemm, who had gone over the rim and down the steep talus slope in a long sliding scramble that should have broken his neck, reached the bottom thirty yards ahead of him.
Tull raised the revolver. Klemm did not raise his carbine. He simply kept coming, the whole heavy bulk of him, and he hit Tull at the waist the way a man hits a fence post he means to knock down, and they both went into the sand.