Title: Small Sacrifices
Author: J. Brooks
Challenge: June
Universe: OW
Major Characters: Josiah, Ezra
Rating: PG-13
Archive: Yes please
Spoilers: Penance
E-mail: JenBr11@aol.com
Note:  Okay, so the challenge was to fill in the family history of one of the Seven.  I took the little bit Josiah mentioned about his background and ran with it:

Josiah: "She's my sister. She wasn't always like you saw her. Time was when she was real full of life. Course, bein' a missionary's daughter ain't easy. My father... My father. He said she was, uh, on the road to destruction. He tried to rein her in. But the harder he pulled, the wilder she got. Like she had a demon inside of her. Started doin' crazy things. Goin' off with men, drinkin'. He tried lockin' her up.... Sendin' her away... Beatin' her. I should've stayed. I could've saved her. But I couldn't see past savin' myself. Every time I went home, she was worse off... Till she finally got to be how she is now. Every penny I got goes to keepin' her. And when I see her, it tears me up so bad... It takes me a week before I stop wantin' to die."
--------------

"Hannah!"

"Hannah, no!"

"Stop that, Hannah!"

Josiah was only dimly aware of the shrill cries around him as he fought to keep hold of the frail woman thrashing in his arms. One of his arms was wrapped around her midsection, pinning her hands to her sides, while his other hand cradled her bloodstained gray hair. Again and again, his knuckles scraped across rough plaster as she redoubled her efforts to bash her brains out against the wall.

Gradually, her struggles weakened and he was able to ease his entire body between her and the wall. And then he just held her, rocking back and forth as she sobbed and knocked her head against his chest. Through it all he talked, repeating the litany that Hannah was good, that Hannah was loved, that Hannah's big brother wanted nothing more in this world than for her to be happy and healthy and whole again.

With a corner of his shirtsleeve, Josiah dabbed at the bloody furrows Hannah had clawed into her cheeks. He raised smoldering eyes to the women waiting nearby to settle Hannah in bed as soon as she calmed.

The Mother Superior pursed her lips and glanced toward the young novice cringing in the corner. She nodded a wordless promise to deal with the problem.

The girl kept her eyes down, lips moving soundless as she worried her rosary beads. The oversized wooden crucifix at the end of the strand swayed with each prayer that slipped through her fingers. Tendrils of bright blonde hair peeked out from beneath her veil, dangling in her eyes.  Mother Superior heaved a tired sigh and moved to block the cross from Hannah's line of sight. Her sharp whisper sent the novice scurrying from the room.

Hannah relaxed in Josiah's arms with a low moan of relief. Turning away from the waiting nuns, he rested his cheek on top of his sister's head and took his first real look around her room.

The sisters must have whitewashed recently. Hannah's latest fresco covered less than half of one wall -- the usual drab parade of nuns in sober shades of gray and brown, for the most part. No matter how many boxes of multicolored chalks and paint sticks her brother bought for her, Hannah's palate kept stubbornly to the shadows -- except for the occasional jarring touches of yellow and red.

Josiah could almost pinpoint the moment the new postulant must have taken over caretaking duties. On the wall, images of brown and gray nuns gave way to pictures of yellow-haired girls splashed with
crimson.

"Let's see what you've painted for us today, Hannah," Josiah said conversationally, rubbing soothing circles on the artist's frail shoulders. He trailed one finger down the wall, brushing over two blonde figures all but saturated in red. "The martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicity, is it? You did a fine job with the lions. And this must be St. Catherine on the wheel? And look at these flames! You can almost feel the heat. You always were partial to Joan of Arc, weren't you?"

Hannah raised her head from his chest to peek shyly at the saint burning to death just above the footboard of her bed. She blinked at her brother and nudged him with an elbow, eyebrows raised expectantly as his finger moved on to point to a particularly graphic depiction of the martyrdom of St. Agnes.

"You've been practicing your Agnes, haven't you?" Josiah continued agreeably, keeping his voice level as his fingers skimmed across the image of a yellow-haired girl smiling serenely as her breasts were ripped off with hooks.

He scooted away from the wall, his grip on Hannah relaxing into a one-armed hug as he studied the smudged finger-painting behind him. "And here's St. Cecilia in the bath," he said, smiling sadly as Hannah let out a rusty chuckle. "Yes, I know -- they boiled her in her bathtub, chopped her head half off her shoulders and it still took her three days to die. Remember how you used to laugh when you read me that story? You used to say it was a wonder we ended up with any martyrs at all, if it was that hard to kill them off."

He paused, on the off chance that Hannah might have something to add to the conversation, then continued on to the final images -- dozens of crumpled figures ringing a single woman about to be hacked to pieces by turbaned swordsmen. "Would you look at that? St. Ursula and the eleven-thousand virgin martyrs. Mighty ambitious of you, Hannah." He kissed the top of her head, careful to avoid the blood drying into her silver hair.

"But don't you think it's time for a change of scenery? Think you could paint me a flower this afternoon?" Hannah ignored the question and reached over his shoulder to rub at the nearest chalky image, blurring St. Cecilia into a murky mauve smudge.

Josiah sighed in relief at this loss of interest in the early Christian martyrs and nodded to the waiting attendants.  Two nuns rustled forward and lifted Hannah away, clucking softly over her injuries as they led her out of the room. Josiah stayed where he was on the floor, idly studying his bloodied knuckles.

He let his head drop back against the wall, not caring in the slightest that he was smearing St. Agnes. The Mother Superior remained with him in the small room, her hands tucked into the wide sleeves of her habit as she waited to see how he would react to all he had seen and heard this day.

"It's been a while since she worked herself into a state like that," Josiah ground out finally, clenching his fists, testing the pull and ache of abused skin across bruised knuckles.

"It has indeed," the nun agreed softly, picking up a bucket of water from the corner and moving toward the wall with a dripping rag. She swiped the cloth across Saints Perpetua and Felicity, watching for a moment as the images wept and ran down the wall in dull reddish streaks.  "It's a blessing you were able to come so soon," she continued, washed away Joan of Arc.

Josiah shifted wearily out of the way of the cleansing rag, turning to watch the wall and its vanishing frescoes.  He found himself staring at Catherine of Alexandra, pinned to her spiked metal wheel. Around and around she turned, always ending up exactly where she began, tearing open the same old wounds. The Catherine wheel had shattered, he remembered. God's great mercy broke the wheel that should have broken Catherine, forcing her persecutors to chop off her head instead. Hannah used to have a great deal to say about those halfway miracles of the Lord.

"I was in the area. Friend back in Four Corners passed along your message," he answered at last, turning his eyes away as Catherine vanished with a few swift swipes of the rag. "It was the girl who set her off?"

"I am sorry. I should have made certain that Marta kept her hair covered and put her crucifix away when she attended Hannah. And I am afraid she has been somewhat ... thoughtless in her words and deeds while in this room. I will deal with the matter."  Mother Superior dropped the rag back in the bucket and nodded, satisfied, at the wall that was now a uniform and inoffensive expanse of beige.

She turned back to Josiah. "It was good of you to come." The words carried a distinct tone of dismissal.

For a long moment, Josiah Sanchez simply sat, not raising his head, not meeting her eyes.  Then he heaved himself out of the puddle of colored water that had pooled around him without his notice. Withoutanother word, he headed for the door.

There was no use protesting that he wanted to stay. Both of them knew better.

*******

Vista City was a hellhole.

Ezra P. Standish slammed his empty glass down on the pitted, uneven tabletop with a little more force than necessary and glared around the interior of the hellhole's premiere saloon -- if two poles, one wall and a thatch roof could be said to constitute a saloon.

A lizard eyed him incuriously as it sunned itself on the rock that doubled as the establishment's bar. The bartender, drowsing in the meager shade near the wall, ignored him entirely. "Would you care to engage in a game of chance?" Ezra inquired pleasantly of the cantina's only other customer, a dusty old prospector snoring gently beneath his enormous sombrero. Ezra leaned forward and peered under the hat brim. "Queria a jugar a los naipes?" The old man snored a negative and Ezra settled back in his rickety chair with a disconsolate sigh.

Eight hours. Eight hours since he and Josiah had pelted into this hellhole. Eight hours since Josiah left him on the outskirts of town and rode off like the hounds of hell were on his tail. Seven hours and fifty-six minutes since Ezra recovered enough from his spluttering outrage to follow.

He'd trailed the preacher to the convent outside town. There, he'd shared an enlightening conversation with a chatty little urchin outside the gates.  After idling several hours in the punishing midday heat, with no sign that Josiah planned to emerge from the nunnery any time soon, he had retreated back to town and the dubious comforts of the cantina.

Ezra fished out a deck of cards and riffled them from hand to hand, amusing himself with the notion that the motion of the cards might stir a faint breeze.  The only thing more oppressive than the heat was the thought of returning to Four Corners with their mission incomplete.  Chris Larabee would ... Ezra shuddered and reached for his glass, remembered it was empty, reached for his pocket flask, remembered it was empty, and leaned back with a defeated sigh.  Best not to dwell on Mr. Larabee's reaction.  He would duck that punch when he came to it.

They'd been sent, the two of them, to chase a rumor that Elias Marsh had been seen haunting the border towns again, perhaps gathering men to replace the one's he'd lost when his gang rode straight into an Army ambush the year before.  They'd found tantalizing hints, second-hand sightings of the legendary bandit, and one solid lead.  A lead they had abandoned the moment the telegram arrived and Josiah lit out for Vista City without another word.  Without even waiting to see if Ezra would follow.

Ezra grimaced.  Now there was an embarrassing revelation.  He *had* followed.  Tailing meekly along on that wild ride, neither expecting nor receiving an explanation for the preacher's bizarre behavior.  Knowing only that something was terribly wrong and there was nothing Josiah thought Ezra could do to help.

After his conversation with the boy outside the convent, Ezra was
tempted to agree.  He was the last person anyone in their right mind -- he winced at his own poor choice of words -- would come to him for advice about family problems.

Still.  Still, it might have been nice to be asked. 

In dire need of a drink, Ezra peeled himself out of his chair and headed toward the bar.  He nudged the sunbathing lizard aside with one finger and refilled his glass with watery whiskey from an earthenware jug, flipping a few coins onto the sleeping bartender's chest.

He raised the glass for a quick inspection for any floating insects and turned, ready to down the drink and resume his vigil outside the convent.  Perhaps the boy he'd met might like to pass the time with a few hands of--

Six strangers strolled into the cantina, laughing and elbowing each other out of the way as they headed toward the bar.  They brushed past Ezra as if he was invisible and scooped up the whiskey jug, leaving a gold coin shining in its place.  The bartender snapped awake, snatched up the coin and, with a hopeful glance at the newcomers, uncorked a fresh jug of liquor and set it on the edge of the bar, ready for the next round.

Ezra set his glass down untouched and turned to study the strangers now crowded around his former table, tossing bright coins onto the rough wood as one man shuffled a battered deck of cards.

A slow smile spread across Ezra's face.  This day was looking up.

PART 2

The desert swam around Josiah.  Currents of air shimmered above the furnace-hot sand and rocks, creating a pleasantly liquid view of the world that went well with the liquor heating his blood and watering his vision.  He tilted the earthenware jug in a toast to the saguaro cactus that appeared to be undulating off to his right and belted  down another mouthful of his chosen painkiller.  Drunk enough to see a cactus dance wasn't nearly drunk enough to suit him.

He stumbled forward another step, absently tugging on the reins of the puzzled horse trailing after him as he staggered away from the convent. 

Bless the boy -- whatshisname? Pedro? Miguelito? Diego? -- Josiah raised the jug in benediction in the boy's general direction.  Bless the enterprising young nameless one, who was always there after every visit, waiting with a shy smile and a jug of his grandfather's homebrew for sale.  The fumes from the raw liquor were strong enough to peel paint. After visits like this one, Josiah nurtured the forlorn hope that one day he would drink so much that the fumes would seep into his brain and start peeling away a few layers in there.

Panting now from the heat, he staggered toward the shade of an overhanging cliff, collapsing against the rocks with the jug cradled protectively against his chest.  As he touched the sun-blasted sandstone, he felt the first of the memories he was trying to out-drink wash over him.

*******

Hot sun above, hot rocks below.  Fifteen-year-old Josiah Sanchez pressed himself closer to the stone ledge, trying not to twitch like bacon on a hot griddle, willing the men passing below to keep their eyes turned piously to the ground.

Sweat trickled down his forehead, stinging his eyes and blurring his view of the figures marching in a slow procession along the mountain path directly beneath him. He closed his eyes as a small, muffled gasp floated over the boulder beside him.  Josiah offered up his first heartfelt prayer in weeks, and was rewarded when the marchers continued on their way, their hymn uninterrupted. Slowly he relaxed, listening to the familiar words of the plainsong chant and the equally familiar sound of rawhide lashes scourging flesh.

The men below were stripped to the waist, their shoulders covered with welts from the small whips they were flailing against their own backs as they chanted. At the head of the procession was a huge rawboned man with burning eyes and wild curly hair, marching just ahead of a rough pine coffin. Alone among the congregation, he had whipped his back hard enough to draw blood.

Despite the risks, Josiah edged his gangly adolescent frame closer to the edge of the cliff, the better to look down upon his father.

Joaquim Sanchez was going to have a great deal to say about his son's absence from the funeral services for old Alvero. But any punishment the missionary might hand out paled beside the rewards of a free afternoon. In fact, after so many years of harsh punishments for minor transgressions, something deep within him reveled in the thought that he was *earning* this one. This was Old Testament-quality disobedience. This was at least one broken commandment and two deadly sins -- and it wasn't even noon yet.

A noise beside him interrupted Josiah's smug contemplation of his own wickedness, freezing his blood. Over the crack of leather that punctuated each downbeat, he could hear a small breathless voice chanting on the other side of the boulder, maddeningly out of reach.

Gritting his teeth, he lowered his forehead to the hot rock, surrendering to the will of God.

For a moment, the voices below fell silent and the whips stilled. Then the chant began again as the Penitentes moved slowly out of view, snatches of their hymn floating back to him on the breeze.

"Dies irae, dies illa
solvet saeclum in favilla:
teste David cum Sibylla."

The Latin chant died slowly away, while the small voice providing the unnecessary and unwelcome translation beside him gradually increased in volume.

"Day of wrath! O day of mourning
See fulfilled the prophets' warning
Heaven and earth in ashes burning..."

Slowly, Josiah felt his muscled unknot as he realized the small voice was singing solo. He pulled himself to his knees and peered over the boulder just as the voice fell silent. A girl huddled in the shade on the other side, her face buried in her hands while her shoulders heaved and shook.

Josiah leaned forward on his elbows and studied the scene for a long moment. Then he reached down and gave an unsympathetic tug to one of the girl's long blonde braids. She let out another muffled snort as her shoulders shook even harder.

"They're gone, Hannah," he prompted, the unvoiced `No thanks to you' hanging heavy in the air between them.

Hannah looked up at last, her eyes brimming, her hands clamped over her mouth, her face beet-red with the effort of staying silent. Her shoulders convulsed one more time before she doubled over with a scream of laughter.

"That wasn't funny," Josiah grumbled, clambering awkwardly to his feet. Since he hit his growth spurt the previous spring, everything seemed to come awkwardly to Josiah. He took one last cautious look toward the trail below before turning a sulky adolescent glare on his giggling little sister.

Hannah bounced to her feet and flashed him an unrepentant grin before skipping away, still laughing.  She resumed her rendition of the Dies Irae, smacking herself dramatically on the forehead at the end of each verse.

"Guilty now I pour my moaning -- ouch!
All my shame with anguish owning -- ouch!
Spare, O God, Thy suppliant groaning--"

Josiah caught up to her in three ground-eating strides and grabbed her hand before she could smack herself a third time. After a quick glance heavenward for any sign that the Almighty was about to smite the puny blasphemer, he completed the motion, thumping her gently on the forehead with her own hand. Twice.

"Not. Funny," he said, fighting to hide a grin of his own. "And it's not even an exact translation."

Hannah crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue. "Is. Too," she countered, twisting deftly out of his grasp and resuming her bouncing path downhill. "And at least my translation rhymes."

Josiah snorted and followed, a slow smile splitting his own face as he prepared himself for an afternoon entirely free of adult influences. While his father and the congregation were occupied with the tedious funeral of an unmemorable old man, there would be no lectures, no chores, no scripture readings, no hours spent hunched over the Rosary in contemplation of the Sorrowful Mysteries. No responsibilities at all, in short, except his ten-year-old sister. And looking after Hannah was something he had done for so long that it came as naturally and effortlessly as breathing.

Without breaking stride, Josiah reached out and hooked one of Hannah's arms, pulling her back from the steep drop-off and resettling her by his side, with his body between her and the cliff. She wrinkled her nose but fell in step beside him, chattering away. She flitted here and there on the path, darting back to him to display her finds and pepper him with questions in a mish-mash of Latin, English and Spanish. What kind of flowers are these? How far can you throw this rock? Is this lizard poisonous?

Josiah led the way down the slope, turning now and then to lift Hannah over high boulders or treacherous stretches of loose rock. He kept enough of an ear on her conversation to identify the flowers, confiscate the lizard and heave the rock a respectable distance. All the while, his eyes strayed to the horizon, beyond the snow-capped peaks of the Sangre de Cristos mountains where the Sanchez family maintained their remote mission.

For most of his life, the mountains had marked the boundary of his world. Everything he knew or needed was contained within -- the mission, his sister, his father, his mother's grave. But lately, when he stared at the mountains, what he saw was not the line where his world ended, but where a wider world began. A world of unimaginable freedom -- not just an afternoon, but a lifetime away from his father's rule.

And then Hannah slipped her hand into his and Josiah turned his attention from the horizon to the here-and-now.

"Father's going to be so angry," she said matter-of-factly, watching
him closely to see how worried she should be.

"Not at you," he assured her.  Nine-tenths of the job of looking after Hannah involved gettomg between Hannah and their father.  Hannah, whose birth had been the death of her mother and whose life served as a constant reminder to Joachim of that original sin.  Nothing Hannah could do could please him.  Not the hours she spent studying his beloved scriptures, not her best efforts at housekeeping, not the pictures she drew for him, and certainly not the endless stream of questions and comments that spilled out of her in an unstoppable flood.

She wormed her way under the crook of Josiah's arm, still unconvinced.

"Is it wicked to hide like this? Father says I'm wicked," she pressed, peering up at him.

He squeezed her head affectionately.  "Well, I say you're not."

Satisfied, Hannah slipped away from him, leaving only the echo of her laughter behind.

*******

The whiskey jug was empty and the desert was dark as night by the time Josiah staggered back to town, rumbling softly to himself in Latin. "Qui Mariam absolvisti...et latronem exaudisti--oof!"

His desert serenade broke off as he smacked face-first into an adobe wall. Blearily, he reached out and patted the rough mud bricks, his ears slowly registering the sounds of clinking glasses and loud conversations on the other side.

Still humming to himself in a minor key, Josiah scraped along the wall until he found the entrance, squinting against a sudden assault of light, noise and odor. Vista City's sleepy cantina had transformed itself at twilight. It seemed the town's entire population had crowded into the place to drink, fight or dance beneath the lanterns that dangled precariously close to the thatched roof.

A small spark of interest kindled in Josiah's hazy brain as he spotted the stone bar, now crowded with customers and lined with bottles and jugs that were probably more water than whiskey. Lurching forward with a sudden sense of purpose, he crossed the threshold and made an uncoordinated grab at one of the bottles, snagging it on his third try. Ignoring the bartender's howl of protest, he carried his whiskey toward the tables, falling into a chair without bothering to check if it was occupied or not.

He rested, grateful for the distractions only a rowdy saloon in a lawless town could offer. To his right, a pretty girl in a tight red dress was picking the pockets of the man who had pulled her onto his lap. In the center of the room, musicians pounded out a driving rhythm that sent dancing couples twirling into the furniture, the customers and each other with wild abandon. And off in one corner, a small crowd had gathered to stare at the pile of gold coins accumulating in the center of a poker table.

Poker table. Josiah frowned over the rim of his bottle, suddenly aware that he'd forgotten something -- something important -- in the middle of all the remembering he'd done today. He squinted toward the table again and found a familiar pair of green eyes staring back at him over a fan of cards.

Ezra. That was it. He'd forgotten Ezra. Josiah dropped his gaze and tossed back another drink. Ezra, who had clearly idled the day away in a shady cantina while Josiah cycled through the endless levels of his own personal Hell.

A burst of laughter from the poker table brought his head snapping up again. Ezra was leaning forward, raking in his money with a smile as he bantered with the unpleasant customer in the eye patch seated beside him. Ezra's eyes flickered toward the preacher again, trying to telegraph a message that Josiah was far too drunk to understand.

And that was just one too many people today looking at him as if he was the solution to all their problems. Ezra should know better. Lord knew Hannah should have known better. With a grunt of disgust, Josiah caught up his bottle and turned his back on the poker players, elbowing his way to a far corner where he could get on with the business of drowning his sorrows or himself, whichever sank first.

He woke twelve hours later to a blinding headache and an empty room.

*******

Another day, another vigil.

Ezra shifted uncomfortably in his hiding place, never taking his eyes off the crumbling remains of the old mission in the valley below.  The small cave protected him from the sun but not the heat, and he sat sweating in his shirtsleeves, his half-empty canteen calling to him like a lover.

He blew out a gusty sigh and left the water where it was.  The only way to refill the canteen would be to leave the cave.  The only safe way to leave the cave was under cover of darkness -- and twilight was a day away. 

The next drink of water could wait.  Ezra could wait.  Patience was Ezra P. Standish's middle name. 

As soon as night fell, he would quit this damnable granite oven, collect Josiah and return to Four Corners for reinforcements.

And really, it wasn't such a bad trade.  A few hours of discomfort were a small price to pay for the look on the others' faces when he told them that the mission had been a success after all.  That the one-eyed bandit Elias Marsh had been found -- holed up under their very noses in fleaspeck Vista City, luring new recruits to his gang with gold coins and free drinks.

True, Ezra would feel better about his current situation if he had managed to alert his colleagues to Marsh's whereabouts.  No telegraph wires ran through Vista City.  No stage lines.  No roads.  The only way to get word to Four Corners would have been to send Josiah -- but Josiah had barely been able to stand last night, never mind spot the wanted man sitting at Ezra's elbow.

And so he had resigned himself to an unpleasant evening in the company of One-Eye and his merry band of thieves. 

Ezra's eyes drifted toward the jacket he had folded neatly over a rock slab, off the dusty cave floor.  The soft black fabric bulged at the pockets under the weight of the gold coins he'd won, ruining the tailored lines of the garment.

He'd taken some satisfaction in fleecing those men of their ill-gotten gains.  But even that had been tarnished by the stories they traded over each hand of cards.

Ezra glanced down at the notebook balanced on his knee, crammed cover-to-cover with his report to Judge Travis.  Idly, he flipped the handwritten pages, reassuring himself that it was all there: every word, every story, every coin he'd raked in across the poker table, the metal still warm from the robbers' pockets.

First hand, sixteen dollars on the table, a full house in his hands, and the story of the Fenton bank job ringing in his ears like a reproach as he collected.  Fenton, where a girl waiting in line at the bank had screamed and the deputies had come running, guns blazing.  The gang had been forced to flee with nothing but half a cash drawer and the girl for their troubles.  They'd left her, what was left of her, out in the desert, afterward.  Marsh had elbowed Ezra in the ribs at that point in the story, his eyebrow waggling obscenely over his eyepatch.  Ezra smiled pleasantly and dealt the man two pair -- aces over eights -- to keep him talking.

He'd lost twenty-four dollars to One-Eye in the next hand, in exchange for a final accounting of the stagecoach that had vanished south of Red Fork last spring. Then a small straight won Ezra thirty-seven dollars and the details of the train robbery that had cost the Army a five-thousand-dollar payroll shipment and cost the four soldiers guarding it their lives.

And so it went for the rest of the evening, every coin a story.  He'd smiled and nodded and made encouraging noises to keep the conversation flowing.  He'd flattered and charmed and taken them for every penny he safely could.  And through it all, he'd watched Marsh's scarred face, looking for a flash of distrust or flicker of unease.  Surely Marsh would realize he'd said too much, shared secrets that would send any decent man running to the authorities?

But Marsh's one good eye had reflected nothing but a smug certainty that he and his new gambling friend were of like kind.

Which was fortunate indeed, Ezra reminded himself sharply.  Other kinds of men seldom lasted long in the company of thieves.  He closed the notebook with a snap and turned his attention back to the view outside the cave.  An enormously fat bandit plodded slowly across the mission roof, idly scanning the horizon for any sign of movement.  Ezra held his breath as the outlaw's dull eyes swept across the entrance of the cave and moved on without pausing.

Yes, it was fortunate he had been in the cantina last night.  A more trustworthy man would have found no place at last night's poker table. A decent man would have shied away from them and their blood money.  A good man would have missed the point entirely.

At one point in the evening -- while One-Eye was merrily revisiting a wagon train he'd plundered -- Ezra had found his gaze straying across the cantina, searching for Josiah, feeling a sudden need to see himself reflected through different eyes.  He found the preacher staring dully back, looking at him without seeing him at all. 

Ezra had squinted at him, willing the preacher to pick up on the clues -- the slightly raised eyebrow, the subtle tilt of the head that all but screamed the-gentleman-in-the-eyepatch-to-my-right-is-a-dead-ringer- for-the-face-on-the-wanted-poster-in-your-right-jacket-pocket.  But by then Josiah had turned his back, loosing himself in the smoke and shadows of a distant corner.

By the time the poker game finally broke up, the players were the only ones left awake in the cantina.  Josiah snored in the corner, unmolested.  The hard men and loose women of Vista City knew by now to steer clear of the volatile man during his visits to town.

Ezra waved a brittle, cheery farewell to the Marsh gang as they staggered off into the night.  As the last man stepped beyond the circle of lamplight, he slipped after them.

It had been sheer, blind luck that he'd stumbled across the cave before the gray light of dawn caught him out in the open.  What on earth had possessed him to tail the gang back to their hideout?  The sensible thing would have been to wait for first light, scrape Josiah off the cantina floor and high-tail it back to Four Corners for help.

But the voice of reason in Ezra's head had been shouted down by the voice of experience.   Professional gamblers heard hundreds of poker table confessions.  In Ezra's experience, wanted men shared their secrets for only one of two reasons -- to intimidate the other players into losing, or to impress the other players into spreading their legend around.  Elias Marsh was no fool.  He knew what he was doing when he struck up a conversation with an itinerant gambler -- someone who might drift through a dozen towns in the coming weeks, entertaining his marks along the way with tales of his brush with the infamous Marsh gang.

By the end of the month, people would be jumping at their own shadows for fifty miles in every direction.  And every lawman in the territory would be zeroing in on Vista City.

Ezra leaned forward with a frown, watching a sudden flurry of movement around the mission's front gate. One-Eye had no intention of being here when those lawmen arrived.

*******

Cruel sunlight slanted through the cantina's thatched roof to stab at Josiah's eyes.

The suffering man twitched, trying to escape the sunbeam without actually moving his throbbing head.  Beneath his face, the tavern table pitched and swayed in time to the alcohol still sloshing, undiluted, through his veins.  Purgatory.  Penance.  Punishment richly deserved.

"My son." A voice, a wisp of memory curled through the fog in his head, spouting Proverbs. "Do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, not lose courage when you are punished by him. For the Lord disciplines him whom he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives."  A voice and a half-forgotten memory of a wild-eyed, wild-haired man, hovering over him as he coughed his way miserably through a bout of childhood influenza.  The voice of a father who had long ago lost the ability to communicate with his children without filtering his words through the scriptures.

Josiah felt his headache double, redouble, as his traitorous brain dredged up the very memories he had worked so hard to drown the night before.  He closed his eyes tighter, as if he could block out the ghost of Joaquim Sanchez along with the sunlight.

He raised a hand to shade his eyes and felt something small and hard slide through his fingers.  The object cracked against his nose and bounced away to land on the table with a metallic clink.  What the--?   Eyes still closed, head still glued firmly to the tabletop, Josiah groped across the sticky wood until he found whatever it was.

Reluctantly, he opened one eye.  A gold coin gleamed between his fingers.

*******

Ezra rocked back on his heels and took stock of his situation.  He held the high ground.  He had the advantage of surprise.  He had a small arsenal of his personal weaponry and several boxes of spare ammunition.

He edged closer to the mouth of the cave and stared down at the outlaws milling around the small mountain of baggage, crates and strongboxes piled before the front gates of their hideout.  The pile was dwindling with frightening speed as the Marsh gang -- fifteen men strong, by his count -- distributed the load among their horses and  pack ponies.  Behind them, the mission stood stripped and abandoned once again.

Ezra had, at best, ten minutes to make up his mind.

He turned, reluctantly, toward the back of the cave and the final item on his inventory.

Vista City had gotten its start as a mining town, springing up around the prospectors who had chased rumors of gold to this unpromising corner of nowhere.  Eventually, the miners left, sorely disappointed, leaving behind a shell of a town and hills riddled with their mineworks and abandoned supplies.  Stored and forgotten in the back of Ezra's cave were tarp-covered crates full of rusted shovels and pickaxes, desiccated root vegetables and one straw-packed box that cradled three sticks of dynamite so old they wept beads of pure nitroglycerin.

Ezra scowled down at the unstable explosives.   No one, no one at all, would blame him if he chose to sit quietly in his cave until the outlaws moved along.  The odds of finding them again might not be high, but they had to beat 15-to-1.

His eyes fell on his discarded jacket and its burden of gold. Gold from the Fenton bank job and the Red Fork stage. 

And in the end, it wasn't such a hard choice after all. 


*******
Part 4

Old Emilio limped down the path he'd worn between his front stoop and the Vista City cantina.  The blazing sun had burned the grass below to brittle straw and bleached the sky white above him.  He squinted against the bright, colorless landscape and pressed on toward the promised shade of the saloon.  He needed to get started on the afternoon's drinking -- the bottle he'd had with breakfast was  beginning to cool in his belly. In the distance, he could hear his daughter-in-law's shrill complaints as she realized he'd slipped away from her again.  He hobbled faster, smiling in toothless anticipation.

The smile faded as he took in the two men standing motionless in the entrance to the cantina.  Emilio cleared his throat, glaring up at the man in the long black duster who blocked his way. 

The intruder ignored him, his attention fixed on the shanty's interior.  The second man -- shorter, dressed in buckskins faded to the color of the dead grass around them -- glanced back at the old timer and stepped obligingly aside with a bemused smile.  Emilio ignored the opening and turned back to the man still standing between him and his drink. It was a matter of honor now.

Balancing carefully, Emilio raised his wooden cane and poked the man
in black in the backside.

The man moved.  Fast.  Thirty years earlier, Emilio might have been impressed by the speed and skill of the man, or at least intimidated by the pistol he found pressed against his temple in the space of an eyeblink.  But all that mattered now was that the gringo had finally cleared the way.  Ignoring the gun at his head, Emilo lowered his cane and shuffled happily into the cantina, dimly aware of what sounded like a scuffle behind him, punctuated by muffled swearing.  With a contented sigh, he reached the rough stone bar and poured the first round, slightly surprised to see that he and the gringos weren't the first customers of the day.

*******

A callused hand caught Josiah by the shoulder, startling him back to semiconsciousness.  Father?  Had he fallen asleep during his prayers again?  Another sin to add to the litany of his faults, his faults, his most grievous faults. *Confío en que me perdonarás, por tu infinita misericordia...*

"Didn't quite catch that, Josiah. Say again?"

"Huh?" Josiah cracked open one eye to find Vin Tanner's smiling face hovering inches from his own.  Huh.  He let the heavy lid slide shut again.

"This is a damn waste of time."  Chris Larabee's voice.  Josiah frowned and braved the sunlight on the other side of his eyelids  again.  What was Larabee doing in Vista City?  The preacher and the man in black had an unspoken agreement. Josiah kept his prayers and his platitudes about the Afterlife to himself, and in return, Larabee never asked him about his periodic absences from town.  He squinted reproachfully at Vin.

As always, the glare rolled right off Tanner.  "Josiah," Vin plunked a ceramic mug of water down in front of the preacher.  "Josiah?  Where's Ezra?  We need to talk to him."

Ezra?  Josiah blinked slowly.  Where was that boy?  He made a feeble attempt to push himself upright and felt the edge of something hard dig into his palm.  Ah yes, the gold coin.  Head still firmly pressed to the table, Josiah held up his prize.

"Ezra," he mumbled through what felt like a mouthful of wallpaper paste.  "Ezra's buyin' the next round." The coin slipped from his lax fingers, catching the sunlight in blinding golden flashes as it tumbled down.

A flash of gold.  And Josiah was sixteen, watching the sunlight halo Hannah's hair as she stood in the doorway of the mission, waving, as he left for the seminary.

A flash of gold.  And he was twenty-one, off to spread the Good Word among the California gold miners -- his vocation fading fast as he lost himself in the thrill of panning treasure from the stream beds.  At night, he read the letters from home by lantern light in his tent: pretty pictures and gossipy letters from Hannah; impatient demands from his father.  Joachim could not possibly send Hannah away to school until his son returned to take his rightful place at the mission.  Josiah filled envelopes with gold dust and promises to return.  Someday.

A flash of gold.  And a long blonde braid, shorn off raggedly close to the scalp and mailed to him.  A terse message from his father, demanding that he return to chastise his sister, the harlot, the fallen woman.  Hannah's face, blotchy with tears but unapologetic under her close-cropped hair.  Hannah, refusing to come with him back to California, refusing to leave Father, refusing to leave Thomas, who loved her, and who was going to leave his wife for her someday, she was sure.

A flash of gold.  And India, where he'd drifted.  Golden sunsets over the sacred River Ganges. Golden Buddhas in golden temples. Monks in saffron robes sweeping the roads so that even the insects would be safe from their passing.  Great rajas, dripping gold as they were borne shoulder-high above the teeming streets.  No letters from Joachim now.  Just Hannah, charting the old man's slow descent into abusive madness.  The unspoken plea bleeding between each line.  Come home.  Come home. Take care of me.

A flash of gold and it was gone, as Larabee's quick hand darted out to snag the coin out of the air.

"Ezra," Larabee echoed skeptically, raising the coin to eye-level for inspection.  "Ezra left this with you? Gold?" 

Josiah grumbled irritably into the tabletop, wishing they'd just put the next bottle on Ezra's tab and get the hell out of his way for the next twelve hours or so.  Vin was poking his shoulder now, jabbering about something.  Since when was the tracker such a chatterbox?

"Josiah!"   A harder poke on his shoulder.  "I said, where'd Ezra go?  We need to talk to him about that telegram he sent yesterday."

With a groan, Josiah heaved himself up on his elbows, ignoring the unpleasant suctioning sound of his face detaching from the sticky table.  "Ezra?  He should be around here someplace," he said, swiping a hand across his tacky forehead.  He squinted up at the two younger men, who were staring at him oddly.

"You check the stables?" Josiah sighed, resigned to the idea that he wasn't going to get another drink until the Ezra question was settled.  "His horse is there.  He isn't," Larabee said.

Josiah frowned.  A stranger's sightseeing options in Vista City were pretty much limited to the stables, the saloon and the outhouse. Even the working girls would have turned him out by this time of day. 

He swiped at his forehead again and felt something flutter to the table.  A playing card.  He blinked in surprise.

Larabee pulled out a chair and settled himself beside Josiah.  Vin followed suit on the other side of the table, reaching to pick up the fallen pasteboard square.

"You sure he didn't leave you a note?" Larabee pressed.  "He wired us from Red River yesterday morning to say you'd found a lead on Elias Marsh."

Josiah stared at the man uneasily, nagged by a vague memory of standing in a telegraph office, one hand crumpling the message Vin had relayed for the nuns, the other hand brushing Ezra aside as the younger man tried to tell him ... something.  He patted his shirt pockets, then the pants.

"No note," he concluded.

"I wouldn't be so sure about that, Josiah." Vin leaned forward and held up the playing card.  It was the jack of spades.

The One-Eyed Jack.

*******

Damn One-Eye.

Ezra threw himself back from the mouth of the cave, watching with almost clinical detachment as the air above him went silver with flying bullets.  The barrage ricocheted off the back of the cave, sending rock chips flying like shrapnel through the small space, biting into Ezra's scalp and shoulders.  Damn One-Eye and damn whoever kept him well-supplied with ammunition.

Until this moment, he'd believed "hail of bullets" was nothing but a bit of purple prose dreamed up by dime novel authors.  He'd have to remember to tell JD about this.  Unless this encounter stayed true to the dime novel formula, where hails of bullets were usually followed by someone going out in a "blaze of glory."

Damn One-Eye anyway.  Ezra tossed aside his empty pistols and rolled back to the cave entrance with the rifle.  A gratifying number of corpses littered the ground around the old mission. But the number of outlaws up and shooting was larger still.  He sighted down the barrel toward the mission walls, where at least half a dozen riflemen were in ideal position to pick him off like a duck in a shooting gallery.  He fired two shots in quick succession.  Make that, four riflemen. 

Now officially out of ammunition and out of options, Ezra turned unhappy eyes on the crate he'd shifted to the most protected corner of the cave.  With a muffled curse, he threw himself toward it, grunting as he felt something burn across his shoulder.  Hail, he presumed.

Quickly, carefully, he eased an old miner's shovel into the crate, gently working under the closest stick of dynamite.  He backed toward the cave entrance, hugging the wall as he fished for a sulfur match.  The stick was so old and unstable that lighting the fuse was probably a redundant gesture, but he was Ezra P. Standish, and the P stood for Pyrotechnic Excess.

The fuse caught and hissed, burning down toward the dynamite with frightening speed.

Ezra closed his eyes and tightened his grip on the shovel. 

One deep breath. 

Another.

He stepped toward the entrance and swung the shovel with all his might, watching as the dynamite sailed up, up in a perfect arc toward the mission walls.  Without waiting to see if it would reach its intended target, the snipers' nest, Ezra threw himself down on the cave floor, covering his head.

The explosion shook the ground beneath him, showering him with dust from cave ceiling.  Coughing, he crawled back toward the entrance to study the smoking ruin where dynamite and nitroglycerin met mud-brick wall. 

He sat grinning at the charred rubble until the crack of a bullet against the cave wall sent him reeling back. The other outlaws were still out there -- and in a truly foul mood by now.

Ezra retrieved the shovel and moved back toward the crate, calculating angles and trajectories.  He'd caught a glimpse of Elias Marsh, pinned down near the front gates.  With a bit of luck and a good tail wind, he might be able to lob the second stick of dynamite straight into the man's teeth.

He fished out another red cylinder and took up position near the cave entrance, fully aware that the gunmen were waiting below for just this move. 

Ezra glanced over at his neatly folded jacket and its weighted pockets.   If worst came to worst and the outlaws overran his position, he could only hope they would grab the gold and overlook the small notebook he'd tucked between crates of dusty vegetables. If any of his associates came looking for him later, he would like to leave them with some explanation.  He always did like to have the last word.

One deep breath.

Another.

Ezra stepped into the sunlight -- and into the path of two bullets.

A third bullet snapped the shovel handle in half as his hands tightened in a convulsive swing.  The unstable dynamite flew out of the cave to bounce, hissing and sparking, down the steep hillside.  It detonated on the third bounce, the fiery explosion touching off an avalanche of boulders and loose rock that completely buried the cave entrance.

The last thing Ezra saw, through the curtain of falling rock and his own dimming vision, was a wall of fire, spreading through the tinder-dry grass and sweeping down on the outlaws in a blaze of glory.

*******

The first explosion reached Vista City as distant thunder that shook dust from the cantina's thatched roof and set the liquid trembling in the half-empty cups and bottles that littered Josiah's table. Old Emilio and the bartender searched the clear skies in confusion while Josiah rested his chin on the table to watch the whiskey dance.

Larabee, knowing the thunder for what it was, bolted out of the cantina, trying to pinpoint the blast as the echoes bounced crazily off the low hills.

"Northeast," said Vin, coming up behind him. "Back beyond that rise."

Larabee ran a hand through his hair, squinting in that direction. "Could be nothing," he said. Could be miners or a railway work crew or any one of a dozen perfectly legitimate reasons for setting off dynamite in the middle of the day, in the middle of nowhere.

The two men exchanged a look. A dozen innocent reasons and only one that explained the uneasy chill that had been creeping up Larabee's spine since he touched that gold coin.

Vin nodded, understanding. "I'll saddle the horses." He tucked Ezra's one-eyed jack into his pocket and slipped away toward the stables, leaving Larabee staring off into the hills as if he could close the distance with his eyes alone.

And so he was the only person to catch the brief flash of flame that back-lit one nondescript hill, just before the concussion from the second blast rolled through town.

"What was that?" Josiah muttered, blinking in the sunlight as he leaned against the post that served as the cantina's north wall.

"Could be nothing," Larabee said again. The words sounded convincing with each repetition.

"Like hell," Josiah coughed, walking toward him with the exaggerated care of a man worried that his head might fall off. "Some fool's settin' off dynamite."

The two stood silently, mentally reviewing the short list of dynamite-happy fools of their acquaintance.

"I'll go get my--" Josiah paused, looking around distractedly as he tried to remember just where he'd left his horse. "Stuff," he concluded lamely, turning toward the stables.

Larabee caught him by the arm. "You can't sit a horse," Larabee said, his tone carefully neutral. "Best you wait here in town in case Ezra comes back..." His words trailed off as a flicker of light to the northeast caught his eye. There was a glow behind the distant hill again, faint and orange. A smudge of smoke rose in the air to be caught by the wind and blown toward town.

Oh...

"Shit!" Vin hollered from the stable, ducking back inside.

Larabee rounded on Josiah. "They got a river near here?"

Josiah nodded south of town.

Shit, shit, shit.

"Round everybody up, start 'em moving toward the water," Larabee gritted through his teeth, staring out over the two miles of tinder that lay between the village and the flashpoint to the north. Like a sheet of paper held over a flame, he could almost see the distant grassland curling and blackening, a moment before the fire burst through to ignite the next patch of ground -- drawing that much closer to Vista City.

Behind him, there was a babble of alarmed voices as the villagers tumbled out of their homes to stare in dismay at the fast-moving line of flames. Josiah was trying to make himself heard over the din. Larabee, who had picked up most of his Spanish in brothels and bar brawls, could only hope that whatever the preacher was shouting would get the people moving.

He closed his eyes, waiting for the breeze to carry the first whiff of smoke into the village. God, how he hated the scent of smoke.

A hand on his back caught him before he could stray too far down that path. Vin stood waiting, three horses prancing nervously at the ends of the lead lines, rolling their eyes anxiously as they scented danger on the wind. Josiah's horse was nowhere to be seen. Larabee allowed himself a brief flash of hope that Ezra and the missing horse were off cooling their heels in the shade of some distant saloon.

"Think there'd be time to dig a fire break?" Vin asked, securing the horses to a nearby stump as he watched the fire consume another set of foothills. Smoke darkened the skies above, billowing toxic and gray across the sun.

Larabee shook his head regretfully. "No time," he said, turning his back on the fire to take in the twenty or so ramshackle adobes that the citizens of Vista City called home. Wordlessly, the two men waded into the chaos.

*******

"This way! This way! Salgan de aquí!" Josiah's booming voice cut through the noise and provided a lone point of reference in the swirling confusion. Men, women, children and dogs mobbed the town square, crying out in dismay at the wall of smoke and flame sweeping down on them.

Larabee thumped Vin on the shoulder and broke away to help a young man who was loading a mutinous-looking burro with what looked like the contents of half his house.

A pretty young woman bumped into Vin, her eyes wild as she clutched a toddler in one arm and a massive blanket-wrapped bundle in the other. Without a word, she shoved both baby and bundle into his arms and darted back into her house. The tracker stared after her, open mouthed, as the child took one look at him and burst into tears.

"Uh, ma'am? Señora?" He called hopefully into the darkened doorway, bouncing the howling baby on his hip. The woman re-emerged, three small children and a goat in tow, every one of them weighed down by massive bundles. With an exasperated tilt of her head, she joined the straggling line of people moving toward the river. Vin blinked and fell in behind.

He looked up as Larabee galloped past, balancing an enormously pregnant woman on the saddle before him. An anxious-looking young man sprinted behind the horse, pushing a loaded wheelbarrow.

They found Josiah waiting for them on the north bank of the river, shepherding villagers across a broad plank bridge. Larabee blew out a sigh of relief as he studied the waterway. It was wide. They could only hope it was wide enough to keep the flames from jumping to the opposite bank. He slid out of the saddle and helped the young woman as she dismounted with surprising grace. Her husband pulled up, wheezing, and she led the way across the bridge to supervise as he emptied the cart and started back toward town for another load.

"No! Wait! Come back here!" Larabee called futilely, realizing that there were as many people heading back to Vista City as leaving it.

"Save your breath, Chris," Josiah sighed, sidestepping a family that was maneuvering an entire bed across the footbridge. "Let them salvage what they can."

Larabee shook his head incredulously. These people had their lives and they had their loved ones. Anything else could be sacrificed to the flames gladly.

The air was growing hazy, heavy with the scent of charred mesquite and the sharp tang of burnt grass.

Muttering darkly, Larabee started back toward town. A line of refugees struggled past him toward the river, weighted down by their household goods. He spotted Vin among them, balancing somebody's lumpy baggage and somebody's screaming baby.

"Cowboy," Vin greeted him as the child shrieked a protest directly in his ear.

Larabee winced in sympathy and held his arms out -- for the luggage. "How much time?" he asked, falling into step as the group trouped across the creaking bridge. He let the heavy bundle drop at the foot of a harried-looking young mother. The woman nodded distractedly and held her arms out for the baby, who, in an abrupt change of heart was now clinging to Vin's neck with all her might.

"Not much. Wind's picking up," Tanner said, trying to pry the kid loose. It took the combined efforts of mother and tracker before the little one popped off, wailing. Vin tipped his hat and backed hastily away.

The refugees milled uncertainly on the south bank, staring numbly back toward the doomed village and the broken line of men and women rushing back and forth through the thickening smoke.

Josiah stood slightly apart from everyone, shoulders slumped. Larabee approached him warily. "We need to get these people away from here, Josiah," he said. "We need to find shelter. You know of anyplace they can go?" 

Sanchez's chin dropped onto his chest, as though the added responsibility was a physical weight pressing down on him.

"A few miles south of the river, there's a convent."  It was Vin who answered, when it became clear Josiah would not.  Larabee cocked an eyebrow at the tracker, who shrugged.

Larabee gritted his teeth and left the obvious questions unasked.  "Right.  You and Josiah, start the villagers moving in that direction.  I'll round up the strays."

He started back toward town, swearing under his breath. A call from Josiah stopped him in his tracks.

"Chris?" Larabee half turned, knowing what Josiah was going to say and not wanting to look him in the eye when he said it.

"What about Ezra?"

He took another quarter-turn toward Josiah, still avoiding those weary, bloodshot eyes.  Half a dozen glib reassurances came to mind. *You know Ezra.* *Man knows how to take care of himself.* *More lives than a cat.* *Probably sitting in a saloon somewhere right now...*

He opened his mouth to say something reassuring, then closed it with a snap and resumed his march toward town.  "Get those people moving," he barked over his shoulder.  The smoke was a solid wall before him, with Vista City nothing more than the occasional hazy shadow in the gray.  Somewhere beyond, the fire raged unseen.  Somewhere beyond that, in a landscape already burned black and dead, would be the blast site that sparked the fire.  And somewhere near there would be the person who set off the blast -- or what was left of him.

A sudden clatter of hooves brought him back from his morbid thoughts.  Larabee turned and stared incredulously at the sight of the preacher, mounted on *his* horse.  Josiah galloped past him without a glance, ignoring Larabee's angry shout.  In moments, he was lost from sight in the curling smoke.

Larabee screamed threats and abuse into the hazy air until he ran out of breath and doubled over, coughing.  He didn't notice Vin beside him until he felt someone thumping him across the shoulder blades.

He braced his hands on his knees and drew a few deep, calming breaths before straightening to face the only man left to order around.  "Okay, let's try this again," he hissed.  "*You* get these people moving toward that convent."

Vin's mouth tightened unhappily, but he nodded and headed back to the bridge.

Larabee took off running toward town.

********

"Anybody in here?"  Larabee pounded the flat of his hand against the last door in town, wryly amused that the owner had locked up -- as if that could keep the fire out.

Satisfied that the last of the villagers had fled, he groped his way back along the house wall, making for the river.  In one hand, he tugged Chaucer and Peso's reins, sympathizing completely with the complaints of the spooked horses.

The smoke was so thick now, he could barely see his hand outstretched before him into the disorienting gray.  It was unnerving, knowing how close he was to the fire and not being able to see it.  But he could feel it in the oppressive heat of the air. And he could hear it -- a low, terrible hiss and crackle through the unnatural silence that had fallen over Vista City.  He stooped closer to the ground to confirm that he was still on the river trail and picked up the pace, leading the balky horses. 

Until another sound reached him through the smoke.  Not the dull roar of the wildfire or the shrill squeals of the horses, but something even more alarming.

Singing.

Larabee froze, listening incredulously as a creaky old voice warbled through the smoke, crooning something in Spanish about a girl named Margarita and her enormous--

Ahem. The lawman shook off his stupor and started toward the sound, ready to throw the singer over his saddle.  Right after he ripped out his tongue.

The cantina swam out of the smoke in front of him.  Of course.  It would be the cantina again.  Larabee led the horses right into the shelter, peering through the gloom.

Old Emilio cackled at him from his perch on top of the bar. Unattended jugs of liquor sat heaped triumphantly around him.

"What the hell do you think you're doing??" Larabee hollered, reaching out to haul the old man away.  Quick as a snake, Emilio whipped his cane around and cracked the lawman over the head, still singing.

"Ow! Cut that out!" Larabee yelped.  The old man waggled his cane warningly in one hand as he reached for a jug with the other.  Larabee took advantage of the distraction to swat the cane aside and tip the old man unceremoniously over his shoulder.

Emilio howled a protest, snagging a jug of mescal in passing as Larabee hauled him out of the cantina for the last time.

Outside, the smoke had taken on an ominous orange glow.  The horses, pushed beyond their limits, snapped their reins out of Larabee's grip and bolted.  Smoke blind and gasping for air, Larabee could only follow them in what he hoped was the direction of the river.

"Fuego."  He heard the old man murmur over his shoulder, as if noticing the danger for the first time.

"Fuego," Chris gasped in agreement, feeling the heat radiating behind them as he ran.  "No bueno."

A pair of hands caught him by the shoulders a few steps before he would have run both of them into the river.

"What's `no bueno' mean?" Vin deadpanned.  "The horses got here a few minutes ago.  Figured you wouldn't be far behind."

Larabee gasped in relief as the old man slid off his shoulder in a flurry of knees and sharp elbows.  Vin grabbed Emilio and hauled him across the dim shadow of the bridge.

The rough wood of the bridge railing felt reassuringly solid beneath Larabee's hand.  He stood for a long moment, unwilling to take that first step across the bridge and away from the two men still missing somewhere in the smoke.

"Chris?"  Vin's voice from the opposite shore.

"Yeah," Larabee whispered and stepped onto the wooden planks.

Once again, a clatter of hooves interrupted him. He whirled around in mid-bridge, hoping against hope.

A huge black horse, eyes rolling in panic, was barreling down on him.  His horse.  His riderless horse. 

The empty saddle was the last detail he had time to notice before fifteen-hundred pounds of horseflesh plowed into him, sending him crashing through the guardrail and into fast-moving water below.

Larabee landed badly, the force of the fall driving all the air from his lungs.  Dimly, he could hear frightened calls from shore, as people peered through the smoke, trying to figure what had happened.

And then the water closed over his head.  He had just enough time to marvel at the irony of drowning in a world on fire, before the current smashed him into boulder and everything went black.

*******

The deepest circles of Hell were reserved for the betrayers of trust. 

Face to the inferno, Josiah tugged his bandanna higher in a futile effort to protect himself from the scorching heat and smoke.  For a quarter of a mile now, he had been weaving through narrow corridors of unburned grass, flanked by roaring walls of flame, hot enough to redden and blister his skin through his clothes.


Reckless with alcohol and remorse, he barely flinched as a resinous creosote bush exploded beside him with a sound like a rifle shot.  He brushed absently at the sparks that showered down to smolder on his jacket sleeve.

Dante had it all wrong.

He remembered the well-thumbed copy of The Divine Comedy in his father's library.  Remembered that when the poet finished describing the torments of the murderers, thieves and adulterers, he turned his pen on the betrayers.  The traitors. Those who had failed their families, their friends and their God.

But Dante's Hell was a frigid place.  A realm of bitter, pitiless cold, where the betrayers of family suffered eternal torment, frozen head-down in a river of black ice.  And those who broke faith with a friend were stretched out flat on the ice, their eyes sealed shut with frozen tears.

A sudden shift in the wind sent flames shooting across his path, forcing him back a few steps.  Josiah gasped in a lungful of cinders as he watched the flames twist and twine before him like a living thing. 

The fire roared. Roared.  Why, in all those years of lighting candles, of filling his church with hundreds of flickering tongues of flame, had he never noticed the *noise* a fire could make?  He'd spent a lifetime huddled beside campfires, listening to the sleepy crackle of the burning logs, feeling safe because the fire was burning.  Trusting the fire to keep the dangers of a dark world at bay.

The wind shifted again and the fire danced away, clearing Josiah's path.  He crunched forward across the scorched earth, feeling every ember through the soles of his boots. 

He wondered what Dante would make of this hellfire, or the sinner who had cast himself into it.

Josiah had stood on the bank of the river, torn between two broken trusts.  He was damned, he knew that.  Had been damned, he supposed, since that bright afternoon when a 15-year-old boy first began to see his little sister as a burden.

Try as he might, he would never be able to atone for that original sin. He would never be able to fix what he had broken in his sister.

But he might still be able to make things right with Ezra.  Ezra, who had come to him twice for help, and twice Josiah had turned his back.

He tripped and fell to his knees, coughing, coughing. The updraft from the fire carried the worst of the smoke skyward and it was actually easier to see here than it had been in Vista City.  But it was getting harder and harder to breathe the stifling air.  The ground radiated heat like a stove, burning through the rough fabric of his trousers.

Hannah would be terrified when all those strangers turned up at the convent, he knew.  She'd cry out for Josiah, Josiah to come and protect her.  And once again, Josiah would be nowhere to be found.

*Take care of her, Vin.*

He forced himself back to his feet and pressed on, ignoring the heat, ignoring the flames, ignoring the blood trickling down the side of his head, from when he had fallen after Larabee's sensible horse threw him and bolted for safety.

His thoughts were drifting again, trying to recall who actually burned in Dante's Inferno.  There were the heretics, locked in flaming tombs for all eternity.  Who else?  Blasphemers and usurers, wracked forever on burning sands… Oh, and the false counselors, of course.  The ones who held themselves up as wise and righteous men, while steering others down the path to their doom.  Those, the fire consumed utterly.

Josiah's eyes lit upon a rocky stretch of ground, safe from the flames.  The flames might consume him someday.  But not today. 

He leapt over a burning log and made his way from rock to rock, heading northeast.

*******

Vin heard Chris's startled shout a second before the great black horse materialized out of the smoke in the same spot on the bridge where Larabee was supposed to be.

He threw himself out of the panicked horse's path, dragging old Emilio with him as the big animal gathered itself and jumped up, over the two of them and the wheelbarrow someone had overturned on the path behind them. Vin rolled on his elbow and stared as the riderless black raced away, presumably in search of bluer skies and greener pastures. 

"Chris!" he scrambled up and onto the bridge, expecting to find Larabee swearing up a storm on the other side.  He groped blindly through the smoke, feeling along the bridge railing -- until his fingers brushed across sharp splinters and the two-foot gap that hadn't been there the last time he crossed.

"CHRIS!" He crouched down, peering futilely through the smoke toward the river rushing unseen below.  He could see nothing but the same formless gray that choked the rest of the world and he could hear nothing but the choppy rush of water and the alarmed cries from the riverbank as the villagers worked out what must have happened.

"Damnit, Larabee!"  Vin pounded his fists against the wooden planks, wanting to throw back his head and howl at the unfairness of this day that was snatching his friends away, one by one. 

Without another word, Vin rose, braced his hands against the splintered edges of the bridge railing and took a blind leap.

*******

On the still-smoldering hillside above the bandits' hideout, a rock tumbled down-slope, breaking the utter stillness left in the fire's wake.  A shower of pebbles followed, and another rock.  And finally a hand, soot-blackened and blistered, thrust into the open air.

More rocks skittered downslope as a second hand shoved enough debris away to free a head, plastered with rock dust and ribboned with dried blood.

Coughing, the survivor stared around, trying to take in the devastation.  The dun-colored landscape of straw grass and dried shrubs had burned away to a grayscale wasteland of charcoal black and ash white.  The charred skeletons of trees stood silhouetted against the smoke that billowed on the southern horizon.  The charred corpses of the Marsh gang lay twisted before the mission gates.

How could a single decision, a simple invitation to a game of cards, have led to such ruin?  With a groan, he heaved himself free of the debris and limped down the hill.
 
Moving methodically, he searched the killing field for the man responsible.  Eight dead before the gates, six *very* dead in the smoking crater in the wall where the lookout post used to be. Fourteen.

The survivor's one good eye narrowed.

Callously toeing one of the corpses aside, he uncovered what was left of the gang's treasure.  Metal strongboxes, warped by the same heat that had converted the dollars within to so much charcoal.  The crates that had held the gold coins had burned away completely, leaving the treasure in fused, awkward lumps.

With a roar of frustration, Elias Marsh delivered a vicious kick to the closest corpse.

"Where are you, gambling man?" he screamed, spinning in a full circle.  The cave on the hillside where he'd last seen the cocky little bastard was gone completely, buried under the same landslide that had caught One-Eye and screened him from the worst of the fire.

He'd seen the man fall.  Hell, he'd put at least one bullet in him himself.  If the shot didn't kill him, the rocks surely finished the job.  Marsh didn't care.  He'd dig -- what had he called himself? Edward? Ephraim? Something with an E.  He'd dig old E out of the hill with his bare hands just for the pleasure of cutting out his cheating heart.

A noise from above brought him whirling around, reaching for the guns he belated realized he'd lost in the landslide.  Marsh shrank back around the corner of the mission courtyard, waiting.

A figure crested the hill, covered head to toe in ash and soot, all but invisible against the burnt ground.  In spite of himself, Marsh felt a thrill of superstitious dread at the sight of this creature that had walked through the fire and come for him. 

Then the demon coughed, stumbled, and fell, tumbling down the hill in a painful tangle of limbs.  Not a demon then.  Just a man with the luck of the devil. 

Marsh cast about for a suitable rock to bash the lucky man's brains out, then realized the man had staggered back to his feet and was weaving straight toward the mission, crying and muttering hoarsely to himself.

Marsh withdrew deeper into the shadows, curious now, as the stranger threw himself down on his knees beside the first body.  Gently, he traced the outline of what remained of the face, checked the clothes, the boots, the hands, before dragging himself away to repeat the process on each of the other corpses.

"Ezra?" The call came out as a strangled croak as the man stepped back from the dead bandits and looked around frantically. He lurched toward the burned out mission, still calling.

Marsh easily evaded the search, watching from the shadows as the stranger gently examined the gruesome remains beneath the wall.

This was convenient.  He'd let the crazy stranger find Ezra the Gambler for him, sparing him the effort of the search and leaving him the pleasure of cutting out both their hearts.  The man stumbled back outside, calling for Ezra in that pathetic smoker's croak.  Marsh rolled his one eye and remained in the mission, searching for any weapons or supplies that might have escaped the fire.

And so he missed the moment when the raw despair on Josiah's Sanchez's face gave way to an expression of desperate hope.

Moving faster than he would have believed possible, the preacher scrambled straight up the side of the hill, slipping on the loose scree of rocks until his blistered fingers closed over object he'd spotted.

A gold coin.

Other coins, untouched by the flames, lay glittering on the smoke-blackened rocks nearby.

"Ezra?" he tried again, his voice barely carrying to his own ears.

In reply, a gold coin sailed out of a gap between the rocks and bounced off his head.

*******

Chris Larabee returned to consciousness in much the same condition he'd left it -- in pain and soaking wet.

Water, shockingly cold, splashed his upturned face and trickled past his lips, turning his groan of protest into a gargle. He rolled sluggishly on his side, feeling something cool and clammy slide off his forehead.

"Rest easy, my child." A voice. Unfamiliar, unthreatening and therefore unimportant.

He swiped feebly at the hands that were trying to roll him flat again. The hands withdrew and were replaced by a blanket, hot and scratchy but wonderfully dry. Larabee lay still, trying to collect his scattered senses.

There were other voices, talking softly all around him, the hum of conversation punctuated by coughs. A small child was wailing somewhere nearby and there was a steady scuffle of footsteps and the scrape and thud of heavy objects being moved around.

Again, cold water splashed his skin. The back of his neck this time. Again, he tried to move away from the dripping cloth. He was sick to death of water -- he remembered that, even if he couldn't quite remember why. Water and ... smoke. Smoke and water. A swirl of disjointed memories. A riderless horse. A card missing from its deck. And fire, consuming the world again.

"No!" He bolted upright, only to double over again in a vicious coughing fit.

"Easy," the unfamiliar voice and hands were back again, easing him down, rubbing his back as he coughed and choked. Blinking furiously through tearing eyes, Larabee found himself glaring into the serene face of a middle-aged nun.

He blinked again, confused. He and the woman crouched nose-to-nose, her hands bracing his shoulders as he gasped for breath. He jerked back, searching frantically among the other faces that came crowding around him.

Smoke and soot were the great equalizers. There was a curious sameness to the faces in the small crowd. Young and old, men and women, all so smudged and filthy it was almost impossible to make out individual features beyond red-rimmed eyes and white teeth as the people flashed him quick, relieved smiles and returned to their business.

They moved around him, shadowy gray shapes against a gray backdrop of thinning smoke. Larabee turned his head, searching through the figures as they moved here and there, arranging the belongings they'd saved from Vista City. Chairs and tables, pots and pans, shapeless bundles stacked in neat rows, following the remembered room plans of their abandoned homes. Belatedly, Larabee realized that the soft surface beneath him was a bed that someone had hauled across the bridge and reassembled under the open sky. In the center of the chaos stood a sturdy stucco compound with bars on the gate and a cross on the roof. The convent.

Larabee squinted again at the nun, whose pink cheeks and starched white wimple stood out in stark contrast to the filth around her.

"The fire did not cross the river," she assured him, planting a hand in the middle of his chest and pushing him inexorably back toward the mattress. "It's burning itself out as we speak."

"Vi--?" Larabee rasped out, his breath hitching painfully.

"Your friend pulled you from the water and brought you here," she said, understanding. "He's by the river now, waiting for the fire to die down so he can cross and search for Father Sanchez and the other missing man."

Hell. Larabee rolled into a sitting position again, hissing as the movement set his head and ribs throbbing. He sensed someone moving behind him, a moment before a dripping wet cloth slapped against the back of his neck.

Larabee saw the nun's eyes widen as she stared over his shoulder. He reached up to touch the wet cloth, holding it in place against his neck -- willing to put up with the unpleasant damp if it would help his headache. Slowly, he turned to find a strange woman crouched beside the bed, her white hair tangled over hollow, haunted eyes.

The woman cocked her head, evaluating him, then smiled -- a broad, oddly familiar grin. She patted his cheek gently, her smile widening as she studied the smudge that transferred from his skin to her fingers. She held the blackened fingers up for him to admire, then brushed the soot across her own cheek in ashen streaks, like war paint.

"Thank you, Hannah," the nun said. Larabee nodded mutely, still staring at the woman's pale blue eyes. Hannah bobbed her head in return and scuttled away.

"She loves to take care of people," the nun sighed, watching her go. "But she's usually so afraid of strangers--" The woman broke off, realizing she was talking to empty air as the injured man made his unsteady way back to the river.

*******

The rifle barrel panned lazily across the hillside, following the ridgeline. From time to time the weapon paused to line up targets in its sights. A burned-out tree. A scorched boulder. The back of the crazy man's head.

One-Eye tsked regretfully as he drew a bead on the stranger. The big man was still tearing into the hillside as if he expected to find something a lot more valuable on the other side of those rocks than a flattened gambler. Marsh's eyebrows shot up as he watched him send a pair of good-sized boulders flying. Crazy man was strong as an ox.

He took aim again, weighing his options. Clean shot to the back of the head? Boring.  He let the rifle sight drift lower, centering on the broad back as it bent to its task. Not much entertainment value in that shot either. He nudged the barrel down, down the spine, down the left leg to the knee that was bent, supporting the man's weight as he crouched to lift another heavy rock.

Perfect.

He squinted, centering the target. Already, he could imagine the recoil against his shoulder, the sulfurous blowback from the old gun barrel, the agonized shriek from the hillside. If the gambling man were here right now, he'd bet him a fistful of dollars that the old fool would stagger back up on his one good knee and keep digging. He wondered what odds the gambler would lay once he shot the stranger's other leg out from under him.

Marsh drew a steadying breath, willing himself not to cough and spoil his aim. He exhaled slowly, held it -- and let his finger tighten on the trigger.

"Bang," he whispered, as the hammer fell with a soft snick over the empty chamber.

Below, the big man kept digging.

Marsh pushed himself away from his lookout post on an undamaged stretch of the mission wall and tossed the empty, fire-warped rifle away with a disgusted sigh. It looked like he was going to have to do this the old-fashioned way.

He took a long drink from the canteen he'd refilled at the mission's debris-clogged well and stared into a sky that was beginning to clear to blue. The sun shone weakly through the lingering smoke, just two hours west of the spot it had been shining when the gambling man first started throwing dynamite around.

Two hours ago, Elias Marsh's world had been damn near perfect. More money than God. Underlings who were smart enough to follow orders but not smart enough to question them. And a reputation that had the whole territory trembling before him.

Gone now. All gone. All his work blasted to nothing by a chance encounter and a clever plan to spread his fame.

One of Marsh's hands crept up to touch the knotted scar tissue that ran up his cheek and across his empty eye socket. His eye patch could join the list of things he'd lost today. Maybe he'd keep it off. Give the next group of stagecoach passengers he met something to stare at in their final minutes.

He tapped the eye socket thoughtfully. If his encounter with the gambler had taught him anything, it was the dreadful folly of leaving anyone alive to tell the tale. There had to be a better way to make people remember his name.

Marsh hefted the serrated kitchen knife he'd liberated from one of the mission's inside rooms -- the only intact weapon in the place. When the time came, he'd carve out the stranger's eyes. That'd give the papers something to write about. No need to leave witnesses behind if anyone who visited the crime scene could tell at a glance that One-Eye had been there.

He cocked his good eye at the stranger still laboring on the hillside. This was getting old. He'd give the crazy man ten more  minutes and then he'd carve him to pieces, whether he'd unearthed the gambler or not.

*******

Larabee found Vin pacing the riverbank, watching the opposite shore where the charred ground still glowed ember-hot.

"Sit down 'fore you fall down, Chris," the tracker greeted him quietly, not bothering to turn as Larabee limped up to join him.

"How much longer?" Larabee grunted, sinking down without protest next to a bundle of filthy rags. The bundle stirred, grumbled, and produced a earthenware jug of mescal from somewhere within its depths. A familiar pair of rheumy eyes regarded him over the rim of the jug, before offering it to him.

One fool saved from the flames, at least. Wordlessly, Larabee pried the the jug from old Emilio's clawlike hand. The stuff tasted like flaming turpentine, but it cut through the smoke that clogged his throat and lungs like a dirty wool blanket.

"Not long now. Wind's shifted. Fire's burning itself out," Tanner replied. He nodded to the small knot of villagers who were standing guard over the bridge in a bucket brigade. The plank bridge had come through the fire with nothing worse than a few scorch marks and a broken railing. Chris's battered ribs twinged in sympathy as he stared at the splintered wood.

With a final glare at the smoldering shoreline, Vin lowered himself down beside them. Larabee eyed his friend critically. The tracker's jawline was grossly bruised and swollen, and one of his arms had been splinted to his chest. Vin met his gaze challengingly, daring him to say anything.

Larabee passed him the mescal without comment and settled back to wait.

*******

"Day of wrath, day of mourning. Heaven and Earth in ashes burning..." Josiah's voice rattled like pebbles in a can. A hoarse counterpoint to boulders grinding against boulders as he worked to clear the way to Ezra. Ezra, who hadn't made a sound since the last coin came flying out of to greet him.

"Almost there Ezra," Josiah reassured the rock wall, digging his fingers around another boulder and wrenching it loose, welcoming the pain of abused muscles and abraded skin. A small measure of the other man's suffering that he could take upon himself.

He jumped back as the rock released a small avalanche of dirt and pebbles, finally clearing a space large enough for him to see into the cave.

For a moment, he simply stared at the opening, reluctant to put his faith to the test.

*Please.*

He rested a hand against the rocks and slowly raised his head to peer into the hole in the hillside. A weak shaft of sunlight filtered into the cave, illuminating a scattered handful of gold coins, awash in red. A pale hand lay outstretched in the blood, as if reaching toward the light.

*Oh, please.* He knew a hundred prayers in half a dozen languages.  Where were the words now? With a frustrated roar, Josiah fell on the rock wall, tearing furiously into the barrier. Dust swirled up to mix with the smoky air and debris showered down upon him, unnoticed.

With a final heave, he broke through, tumbling to his knees next to the still figure on the cave floor.

"Ezra," he whispered, reaching out to touch the bloodied hand.  The skin was cold, despite the stifling heat of the cave. 

Josiah stared down in utter disbelief, taking Ezra's hand between both of his, trying to force some warmth back into it.  Instead, the chill seemed to seep from Ezra's cooling flesh to his, until he was shaking, shaking as if he would never be warm again.

*******

The body was burned almost beyond recognition, crushed and broken by falling rubble.  Vin studied it for a long moment, then straightened with a shaky sigh.  Turning, he made his way out of the collapsed house and back to the spot where Larabee waited, in the middle of what used to be the village saloon.

The ashes of Vista City drifted around his boots as he walked. 

Larabee kept his back to him, trailing a hand across the scorched surface of the old stone bar, the only part of the cantina still
standing. 

They'd started across the river as soon as the ground cooled from hot embers to warm ash -- on foot, since the horses refused to budge from their refuge in the convent barn.  Larabee was the one who had insisted on a quick search of the town. Maybe he'd spotted something through the drifting smoke.  Or maybe he just recognized the smell of charred flesh.  Vin hoped not.

Vin hadn't wanted to look, hadn't wanted to find that this was as far as Josiah had gotten on his mad quest, and no farther.  But if he hadn't searched for bodies, Larabee would have.  And it was costing Chris enough just to be in the burned-out village, with his personal nightmare reflected in every smoking doorway.

"Well?" Larabee barked, not turning as Vin crunched closer. It was another mark of the wrongness of this day that he could track the usually soundless tracker's movements by ear. 

"Goat," Vin reported, watching Chris's hands slowly relax their death grip on the stone slab.  "It was just somebody's goat."

Larabee coughed, nodded jerkily and pushed away from the bar.  Vin fell in behind as they walked in silence to the edge of town. Through the smoky haze, they could just make out the distant hill that had been the fire's flashpoint.  The ravaged landscape stretched between, mile after lifeless mile.

"Heard Josiah tell once about holy men in India who walk barefoot on burning coals," Larabee said softly.

Vin toed a smoldering tree stump, testing the heat.  "Reckon we'll have to ask him how that trick works, when we find him."

They started north, avoiding each other's eyes.

*******

Josiah knelt, too numb to feel much beyond cold shock and the cold hand in his.  He rubbed a thumb gently across Ezra's bloodied knuckles, back and forth, worrying them like prayer beads.  His own hands, he noted absently, were blistered and blackened, scraped and raw.  They'd probably hurt like hell, once the shock wore off.

Everything was going to hurt like hell.

Ezra lay curled on his side, huddled beneath his jacket.  With infinite care, Josiah untangled a hand and reached out to tuck the fabric more snugly around the still shoulders.  *I'm here son,* he would have said, if he had any voice left at all.  *I came for you.  Not in time, never in time. But I was here. You weren't alone.*  

He brushed gently across the dust-matted hair.  And not even the blessed numbing cold could protect him from the pain of that contact.  Again.  He'd let it happen again.  He bowed his head, bringing Ezra's hand up to rest against his forehead in a gesture of apology, of utter anguish.  Unfair, he wanted to scream until it shook the gates of Heaven.  Unfair, these halfway miracles of the Lord.

Darkness flickered at the edges of his vision.  No.  He jerked upright, breaking the contact.  If he let himself truly feel this loss, if he let the pain break through; the pain would break him.  He'd curl up on the floor next to Ezra and never move again.

Squaring his shoulders, Josiah braced for one final act of contrition.  *I'm taking you home, son.*  He squeezed Ezra's hand reassuringly.

And felt Ezra's fingers tighten in return.

*******

The startled yelp from the cliffside jerked One-Eye out a happy daydream about eyeballs, floating like pickled eggs in a jar.  He'd seen something like that in a tavern in St. Louis once.  Only it had been ears, swirling around and around in murky vinegar.  Souvenirs the bouncer had lopped off rowdy patrons on their way out the door.  Young Elias Marsh passed one of the quietest nights of his career in that bar.

Damn, he blinked, noticing the hole in the hill for the first time.  When had that happened?  Watching the crazy man dig got so boring, he'd plumb lost track of time.

He hefted the carving knife critically, testing the blade's edge against his thumb, smiling as the skin parted in a crimson slit.  It'd do.

Knife in one hand, empty rifle in the other, the bandit heaved himself to his feet and made his way down from the mission wall.  It was time to dispatch the crazy man and pay his last respects to the flattened gambler.  

He trailed the tip of the blade along the soot-covered wall, enjoying the grating scrape of steel against stone.  At the mission gates, he paused to admire the view.  Half the valley lay in smoking ruins, while the other half survived, untouched.  Upwind of the blast crater, flowers bloomed and long dry grasses swayed in a breeze that carried the faint scents of dust, sage, and clean, un-burned things.

Marsh coughed wetly, tasting smoke and blood.  Oh, if the gambler was still alive in that rathole up the hill, he would make him pay, and pay, and pay again for this, he thought, skirting carefully around the formless lump that had once been his stash of gold coins. 

He reached the foot of the hill and started upward, knife flashing in the sun.

*******

Josiah found himself sprawled on his backside, chest heaving as he tried to force air back into his lungs, eyes wide and disbelieving.

Before him, the dearly departed was stirring.  Bloodshot green eyes fluttered open, squinting up at him in confusion.

"'Siah?" Ezra croaked. "Why you holdin' my hand?"  The gambler frowned and tugged fretfully at the larger fist clamped around his.

Josiah's mouth worked, but no sound came out.  He blinked down at the hand in his, feeling the faint bump of a pulse beneath his fingers.  Odd.  He always figured he'd lose his mind someday, but he thought the madness would creep up on him slowly, stealing his wits a bit at a time -- not in one sudden snap.

Hesitantly, he released the hand and reached out to touch Ezra's face. The skin was warm there, warmer by far than the hand had been.  He rested his palm against the younger man's cheek.  "Ezra?"  He forced the question past his tightening throat.

Ezra suffered the touch with a small, embarrassed smile.  "Ezra P. Standish at your service," he whispered. "The `P' stands for parched."  His gaze slid hopefully to the canteen that lay on the cave floor, maddeningly out of reach.

Josiah caught up the canteen with a shaking hand.  He tried to hold it steady for Ezra, carefully raising the injured man's head so he could drink.  Standish managed a few sips before slumping back wearily against Josiah's arm.


Josiah kept hold of him, transfixed by the shallow rise and fall of the gambler's chest.  Belatedly, other details began to register.  He nudged back the gambler's jacket and grimaced at the ruin beneath.  Blood had saturated the fine linen shirt, drying hard and black.
Instincts, honed by long hours sitting vigil in Nathan's clinic, kicked in.  And suddenly it didn't matter if this was a delusion.  All that mattered was that Ezra needed help, and for a wonder, Josiah had been given a second chance to offer it.

"Ezra," he repeated, with more confidence this time, carefully peeling back the stiffened fabric for a better look at the injuries.

"Present," Ezra murmured. "Perforated, parboiled, penned-in, piqued…" The litany cut off with a muffled grunt as Josiah probed at the handkerchief that was plugging a jagged hole in Ezra's side.  Standish grumbled and swatted at his rescuer as Josiah levered him into a sitting position, searching for more bullet holes.

"…Perfectly fine," he concluded, slumping face-first into Josiah's shoulder. 

Josiah caught him.  "Fine," he repeated, fighting a sudden, terrible impulse to laugh like a loon.  Ezra was as far from fine as he'd ever seen the man.  He was hurt, exhausted and filthy, and would probably be furious with Josiah, as soon as he recovered enough to remember how he gotten in that condition. 

*I can fix this,* Josiah thought, a smile blooming on his soot- streaked face.  He felt the gambler relax against his shoulder and realized he had been rocking back and forth, whispering nonsense -- the way he used to soothe Hannah when she was small and her nightmares could be banished with a hug and a glass of water.  *This time, this once, I can set things right.* 

And that would be a fine thing indeed.

*******

Without proper supplies, it didn't take long to tend Ezra's injuries.  In all, the gambler sported three new holes and a shallow graze across his shoulder that would probably need stitches. 

The nearest needle and thread, Josiah realized glumly, was probably at the convent. The muscles in his legs twitched in protest at the very thought.  This rescue, he was ready to concede, could have been better planned.

He rocked back on his heels and aimed his most reassuring smile at Ezra. Ezra arched a skeptical eyebrow in response, not buying it.

"You made a hell of a mess outside, boy," Josiah said with a cough, glancing around the cave in a transparent attempt to change the topic. "Where'd you get the dynamite?"

Ezra shot him a bleary version of his usual look of wounded innocence.  He pointed an unsteady finger toward a crate that had been half-crushed in the rock fall, its seams split and leaking old packing straw over the floor.  He made a vague gesture that encompassed the crate, the broken shovel on the floor and the wide world beyond the cave entrance.  His hand flopped weakly back to his chest.  Enough said.

"I see. Good thinking," Josiah said, patting the gambler's shoulder gently. Ezra gave him a small exhausted smile as his eyes slid closed. 

The preacher edged over for a closer look at the crate.  A lone stick of ancient dynamite poked out of the rubble like a sinister exclamation point.  Swallowing hard, Josiah stripped off his shirt, wrapped it around the unstable explosive and lifted it gingerly away from its bed of tinder and shrapnel.

"Be right back Ezra," he called over his shoulder as he eased his way toward the mouth of the cave, holding the bundle at arm's length.

Squinting against the bright afternoon sunlight, Josiah kept his head down, watching his step as he gingerly picked his way down the steep hill.

The voice caught him off guard, a moment before a rifle butt caught him on the side of the head.  

*******

"How do, crazy man," One-Eye greeted as he cracked the gun across the stranger's skull with enough force to fell an ox. 

He stepped back, waiting for the big man to topple over and clear the
path to the gambler.

Except ... the big man didn't fall.

Marsh gulped and took another step back, raising the knife defensively as the stranger staggered, but kept his feet.  The big man shook his head slowly, like a bull set to charge. His head came up, fixing Marsh with a red-rimmed glare that burned hotter than the fire ever had.  His hand shot out, knocking the knife flying and knotting on Marsh's collar.  Marsh let out a strangled squawk as the stranger jammed a cloth-wrapped bundle down the front of his shirt and gave him an almighty shove.

Ice-blue eyes watched impassively as the bandit somersaulted downhill, turning away as Marsh hit a boulder with jarring force; bouncing once...twice...
 
The unstable dynamite detonated on the third bounce.

The concussion from the blast caught Josiah at the mouth of the cave and flung him inside.  A  fireball bloomed, then fizzled on the ashes of the first blaze, leaving nothing but a jagged crater to testify to the fact that One-Eye Marsh had once blackened the land.

*******
FINAL CHAPTER:

Two figures stood frozen in the middle of an ash field, waiting for the last echoes of the explosion to roll through the valley and fade away.

In the silence that followed, Vin stepped away from yet another charbroiled goat carcass and stared up at the smoke rising from the hills ahead.  *Could be anyone,* he reminded himself sternly. Prospectors, railroad crews, the damn Marsh gang.   Not *every* explosion in the world had Ezra Standish somewhere near the center of it.

But still…

He looked over, but Chris had turned his back again, watching the smoke. 

"Ezra?" Vin prompted, squelching a childish impulse to stay silent, as if the name was a wish that wouldn't come true if he said it out loud.

"Idiot," Chris agreed.

Vin started to say something else, but Larabee was already stomping away, spitting insults at the column of smoke as it was caught by the wind and smeared harmlessly across the sky.  He kicked a smoldering log out of his way, cursing in a voice worn hoarse by smoke and water and hours of coughing.  A few words drifted back to Vin.

Gambler...dynamite...jackass... 

Vin fell in behind, smiling for all the same reasons Chris was swearing.  Because for the first time since all hell broke loose, he could let himself think beyond the next step, the next lump on the landscape that was probably a goat but looked, from a certain angle, like a man.  For the first time, he could think ahead to what they might find on the other side, and hope. 

He glanced over at Chris and the smile faded.  All the hope had burned out of Chris Larabee years ago.   

This wasn't the first time the man had followed a smoke trail in the sky, trying to convince himself that he'd be met on the other side with welcome-home hugs and sheepish smiles and a story about a spectacularly burnt casserole or a barn fire at the neighbor's place. 

*Don't know how you bear it,* he thought, watching Larabee's stiff back, wondering how either of them was supposed to bear it if he was wrong about what was waiting for them beyond the smoke this time. 

Maybe Larabee had the right of it.  Some thoughts were best left to nightmares and the bottom inches of whiskey bottles.  He dropped his gaze and concentrated on the uneven ground before him.  One foot after the other, until they were close enough to smell the sulfur from the blast, acrid through the lingering wood smoke.

Vin walked faster, ignoring the way each step jarred his splinted arm.

Closer now, and there was a low haze of dust and yellowish smoke drifting out of the valley ahead, swirling around an old mission with scorch marks and dynamite scars on its walls.

And there was Josiah, standing in the middle of the ruin with smoke curling around his knees.  Just standing there, with his shoulders slumped and a canteen dangling forgotten in his hand; looking for all the world like a statue somebody had chipped out of coal tar and slammed into a wall a few dozen times.

Vin sprang forward and collided with Chris, who hadn't moved.  He shouldered around him and started after Josiah, who simply watched him come, his expression unreadable under the mask of soot and blood.  Vin found himself slowing instinctively, approaching the big man as he would any wounded wild thing. 

"'Ey, Josiah," he said softly.  He reached out and latched on to the filthy fabric of the preacher's jacket, just to be sure.

Josiah looked down at the hand on his arm, then up at him.  Blistered lips moved soundlessly in the shape of Vin's name.  Vin nodded, blinking hard, knowing there were things he should probably be saying right now and questions he should probably be asking. But all he could do was nod and grin like a fool, because he hadn't even let himself hope they'd find *Josiah* safe.

A bright white smile broke through the grime and Vin found himself pulled into a hard hug that reeked like a thousand mesquite barbecues.  He barely had time to catch his breath or his balance before Josiah's full weight came crashing down on him.

*******

Ezra woke, and wished he hadn't.  

He tilted his head far enough to glimpse the darkening blue of the sky outside the cave.  Almost dusk.  He'd promised himself that he would only have to wait until sunset to leave the cave, find some water, and be on his way.  Surely `almost dusk' was close enough?

He rolled slowly up on his good arm, shaky and breathless from that small effort.

Something glittered on the floor at his fingertips.  Ezra blinked owlishly at the coin for a moment, then pocketed it. 

Another coin flashed, a bit closer to the cave entrance.  Evidence.  Hard proof of One-Eye's sins.  Heaven help him if any of the bandit's gold went astray.  The others would never believe he'd simply thrown the money away.  He could scarcely credit it himself.

Three coins later, he collapsed at the mouth of the cave, wheezing.  Water.  He'd give every gold coin in his pocket for a glass of water.  Hadn't there been water around at some point?  He had a vague, mortifying memory of Josiah propping him up and offering the last tepid dregs from the canteen.  And had there been hugging afterward?  Good Lord.

There was no sign of Josiah now.  Nor, more importantly, the canteen. 

A final push propelled him out of the cave to sprawl on the gravel slope.  Much better, he though smugly, closing his eyes against the too-bright sunshine.  The sound of voices below caught his drifting attention.  Odd.  That sounded just like--

"Chris!"

He turned his head sluggishly and spotted Larabee below, pawing at the dead outlaws who lay scattered around the mission gate.  *Don't touch the Marsh gang, Mr. Larabee. You don't know where they've been.*

"Chris!"

He blinked the scene back into focus and spied Josiah unconscious on the ground with an agitated Vin beside him, staring up at Ezra.  Without breaking eye contact, the tracker scooped up a handful of gravel and winged it at Larabee.  When the gunslinger rounded on him, he pointed.

Ezra waved lazily back.

Larabee abandoned the corpses and barreled uphill 

He did not appear to be carrying a canteen. 

Ezra closed his eyes with a discouraged sigh.

*******

Idiots.

The nuns were too polite to say the word, but it was written all over their faces as they rolled into the valley half an hour later to find two men with three good arms between them arguing about how best to carry two unconscious deadweights all the way back to the convent.

"My sons," Mother Superior greeted them dryly as she climbed down from a mule cart loaded with blankets, medical supplies, a sloshing cask of water, and two more nuns. 

"Sisters," Vin replied serenely, as if nuns rode to his rescue every day of the week.  "Much obliged."

Larabee shot him a suspicious look. Somebody would have had to tell the search party where to start searching.  Before he could work out whether he was grateful, or irritated that he hadn't thought of it himself, the sisters had set to work.  Moving with military precision, they lit a fire, spread blankets, laid out supplies and descended on the injured men, tsking.

Vin's easy smile fell as one of the nuns eyed him speculatively, fingers twitching toward a roll of bandages.  He backed away, muttering something about scouting the rest of the valley.

Larabee held his ground, sinking down between the injured men, content to let someone else take the rescue from here.  He watched numbly, as if from a great distance, as the nuns bustled around him.  When they pressed something into his hands, he drank. When they asked for his help, he pinned Ezra's arms down for them.

"It's okay, you're okay..." he heard himself saying over and over, not sure if he was trying to convince Ezra or himself.

"I...most certainly...am not," Ezra gritted back, twisting his wrists sharply, trying to break free.  He rolled glazed eyes toward the two nuns poking at his injuries.  "I've died...and gone to Josiah Hell."

"You're okay," Larabee insisted, tightening his grip.

He glanced down, but Ezra was unconscious again, pale and shivering cold.  Mother Superior touched his arm and murmured something about flesh wounds and blood loss and shock. 

Beside them, the third nun was emptying yet another basin of water stained back by the grime she had sluiced off the preacher.  It should have been easier to look at Josiah now, with his face scrubbed pink and his blistered hands wrapped out of sight.  It wasn't.

Chris turned away and stared out over the ruined valley. He could see Vin pacing off distances between bodies and blast craters, trying to work out what had happened.  He swallowed hard as Tanner approached a burned crate and casually shoved aside a stiffened corpse.  He tightened his hold on Ezra, trying to blot out the memory of charred flesh crumbling to powder at his touch. 

Upwind were the hills the fire never touched.  The yellow grasses swayed in the light breeze and a few hardy wildflowers still turned their faces to the setting sun.  That was the way of fires.  A shift in the wind, a twist of fate, and some escaped while others burned.  He shoved the thoughts away.  Later, much later, he might let Buck drag him down to Purgatorio to smash up a few saloons while he raged against the injustice of it all.  Later.

Josiah coughed and mumbled something that sounded like an apology.  Chris watched the nuns settle the hurting man -- trying to reconcile the sight of Josiah laying there pink and alive with the image he'd been carrying all day of Josiah dying alone, in flames.

Chris coughed, and tasted ashes.  With his free hand, he fished a battered cheroot out of his pocket and stared at it tiredly.

There was a scrape and a hiss as a match flared to life above him. He looked up to find Vin offering him a crooked smile and a light.  He accepted the light, but couldn't work up the energy to return the smile.

He took a deep, appreciative drag of the aromatic smoke -- ignoring the expressions on the nuns' faces as he immediately doubled over, coughing.  Once he got his breathing under control, he leaned back, studying Vin over the controlled burn.

He'd beaten the fire this time.  He'd gotten two of his own back from the flames.

And he was going to sit here and listen to Josiah snore and feel the bump of Ezra's pulse against his fingers until he believed it. 

*******

"Hannah!"

"No, Hannah!"

Josiah startled awake, looking around wildly at the familiar walls of his sister's room.  A parade of gray chalk nuns beamed down at him from the plaster three inches from his nose. 

"Wha--?" he began, as another coughing fit took him and he curled up, choking for air. 

A pair of strong hands propped him up, rubbing his back and offering him a cup of something that smelled so foul it had to be healthful.

"Easy there, Josiah.  Nice steady breaths.  You just relax, now." 

Nathan's voice.  Nathan?  Josiah choked on the herbal brew, blinking up at the healer through streaming eyes.

Nathan grinned.  Then fussed.  Josiah slumped back against the pillows, letting the familiar cadences of Nathan's lecture wash over him as the healer fiddled with the mustard plaster on his chest and the bandages wrapped around his hands. 

He hurt, but whatever had been steeped in the tea had reduced the pain to a distant, annoying buzz.  He patted Nathan's arm gently in thanks and let his gaze wander the room, following the chalky line of nuns until he came to Chris Larabee's head. The man slumped in the corner of the room under a mound of blankets, his head lolling against the frescoes. But his eyes were open, watching Josiah with the desperate, unblinking stare of a man trying to avoid the darkness on the other side of his eyelids.

Josiah nodded, wishing he had breath or words for the apology he owed.

Larabee nodded back.  Which, Josiah figured, was as close as they were ever going to get to a heart-to-heart discussion of the events of the other day.

Belatedly, he noticed Hannah crouched beside Larabee, a bouquet of black and gray chalk sticks clutched in one hand, dividing her efforts between dabbing at the wall and adding to the collection of chalk streaks on Larabee's face.  She stared intently at the lawman, holding up her thumb like a sculptor trying to get the measure of a model, then added a dramatic smudge of black to the end of Chris's nose.  Larabee gave a resigned sigh, but made no move to wipe off the chalk.

"Hannah," Mother Superior scolded again.  "Let the poor gentleman rest." 

The nun rose from her chair near the door and nudged Hannah away from the exhausted man and back to her painting.  Only a rough sketch so far, but Josiah's heart sank as he recognized the yellow outline of a halo and a few strokes of red.  Saints again.  Oh, Hannah, no, he wanted to say.  Not again, not today.

Josiah closed his eyes, not wanting to see another martyr take shape on the wall.  He and the Mother Superior were going to have words about these sleeping arrangements, as soon as he got his voice back.

There was a soft snore from below and Josiah rolled to the edge of the bed, unsurprised to find Vin stretched out asleep on a bedroll on the floor, chalk streaks all over his face.  That only left... 

"Aw hell..."

Nathan broke off mid-sentence and turned toward a cot wedged next to Larabee.  Hannah was already moving, dropping her chalks with a clatter as she rushed to the bedside.

Ezra let out a feeble gargle as Hannah whipped a dripping cloth out of a basin and swiped it across his face.  Mother Superior stepped in again.

The gambler scooted away from the women, bracing himself against the wall and staring wildly around the room, trying to get his bearings.

Josiah shook off Nathan's restraining hands and pushed himself higher on the cot, trying to catch Ezra's eye.  The younger man spotted him and froze, staring hard.  Whatever he read in Josiah's eyes seemed to satisfy him, and he allowed the Mother Superior to settle him back in bed, half-asleep before he hit the mattress.

Nathan turned back to Josiah and read the questions in his eyes.  "Ezra's gonna be fine, just needs to rest up and get his strength.  Same as the rest of you."

Josiah frowned, unconvinced.  Another thought struck him and he tapped Nathan's chest, one eyebrow cocked inquiringly.

"You wondering were I came from?" the healer grinned.  "Your damn horse wandered back to Four Corners on its own.  Rest of us set off after you and ran into the messenger the sisters sent out."

Vin stirred on his makeshift bed, then settled back to sleep.  Nathan paused to tuck the blankets back up around the sleeping man's shoulders, then picked up the story again.

"Buck `n' JD're around here someplace, helping the villagers.  They've already started rebuilding Vista City -- on this side of the river.  Nuns say this is the third time  in ten years the town's burned down." 

He shook his head at the idea that anyone would bother rebuilding Vista City even once. 

"We sent for the Army to come clear away the Marsh gang and their mess," Nathan continued.

"Only way we could get Ezra to stop throwing them gold coins around was to give `em to the villagers. Figured we'd save the army boys the trouble of scraping together a reward," Nathan glanced over at Standish and laughed softly.  "You should hear the plans they're making for the new saloon."

Hannah took one final, satisfied swipe at Ezra with the cloth and moved back to her picture, murmuring nonsense under her breath.  Josiah blinked suddenly as he realized the chalk saint was wearing a red jacket and a low-crowned riverboat gambler's hat.

Mother Superior followed his gaze.  "At first, I thought she was drawing Saint Augustine," she said, dubiously.  Josiah let out a raspy chuckle.  Augustine, author of Hannah's favorite prayer: Give me chastity, O Lord...but not yet.

"But now..."  The nun waved to another figure on the wall, dressed all in black with a halo of blond hair.  Two more rough sketches, one with long hair and one Josiah easily recognized as himself, were taking shape nearby.

Nathan snorted.  "Don't look like saints to me."

The nun smiled knowingly.  "It's a work in progress."


The End