Chapter 19: Walk Funny

Cassidy was just outside the mouth of the tunnel when the shadows inside it moved.

Four riders in vests came out of the dark.

The one in front was the big man from the owners' box, with a cast on his wrist and a bandage on his throat.

He grinned at me.

"I owe you," he said.

"You don't," I said. "Go home."

"I said we'd geld you in the dirt," he said. "I'm a man of my word."

He pulled a short curved knife out of his boot.

It was a stockman's knife, the kind used on calves, and he turned it so the light ran down the blade.

The crowd along the rail gasped.

Cassidy stopped moving backward.

She stood behind them with Poppy in her arm, and she looked at me with fresh hope.

"Do it," she said to the big man. "Do it now, while they're all looking."

"Daddy," Poppy said, in a very small voice.

"I'm here, baby," I said. "Don't look."

The riders spread out in a line and came across the dirt.

I stood where I was.

I had nothing in my hands.

My rifle was on the catwalk, and my pistol was still in a truck in the parking lot.

I had fifteen years of killing men with rifles and a body that remembered every other way.

I moved my weight to the balls of my feet.

"Walk funny, I think you said," the big man said.

"I think you've got that backwards," Carys said.

She had come up on my left.

She wasn't alone.

Behind the riders, out of the tunnel's other mouth, came Carys's pickup riders on their horses at a walk.

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