“I want you to arrest me,” George said. “Reclaim your horse, turn from here, and take me to Selby to be charged with whatever crimes you see fit.”
Hackstedde had his gun perched upon his saddle horn, so lackadaisical it was as if he didn’t have the energy to hold it steady himself.
“Listen to Wade,” he said. “Consider this your only warning.”
“Put it down,” Wade repeated. “I promised my son no harm would come to you or Caleb. I plan to honor that. Don’t be difficult, George. Just this once.”
“What if it was August?” George said. “You’d do the same. You would, Wade.”
He felt no fear. In his mind he was a world away, back home on his porch with a glass of lemonade, the barn before him, the brothers sleeping there, and Caleb inside at the dining-room table, lost in conversation with his mother. Things were right again. So right.
A pistol spoke.
The men looked about at one another in confusion until the smoke floated off the end of Hackstedde’s gun barrel.
“I gave the man his warning,” he said casually. “That’s how that works.”
George inspected himself, as there was no pain, his body having gone numb. Finally, after a span of a few long seconds, a slow-burning heat spread through his leg, rising to a temperature so great that he thought the whole limb might be on fire. He crumpled to the ground and blood trickled and then poured from the wound and by the time the men had dismounted he was already resigning himself to a slow death at the hands of this corpulent sheriff.
“Goddamn it!” Wade said. He took off his hat and smacked Hackstedde with the brim repeatedly. “He wasn’t going to shoot!”
“He was aiming like he was,” Hackstedde said. “You all saw as much.”
The others were horror-struck.
Only Wade had the nerve to approach George himself. He jogged over, still furious.
“Goddamn you too, George!”
He leaned down and repeated the same treatment he’d given Hackstedde, beating his hat against George’s shoulder, though more lightly, whether in anger or sorrow or frustration or perhaps some combination of all three.
“Stop,” George managed to croak. “Please.”
The man was right upon him, a fear in his eyes—fear in the eyes of them both, George was sure—and they looked at each other as if with the realization of a misunderstanding that had gone too far and yet was now beyond fixing.
“I’m dying,” George said.
“It’s only your thigh,” Wade said. “You’ll be up and jabbering nonsense in no time.” He turned to the others. “One of you cowards get off your ass and bring me something to tie off this leg. Now.”
It felt to George as though the tendons in his leg had coiled like a wet rag twisted dry. He could sense nothing save the heat pouring off him in waves—the conviction, radiating through him, that this was the end. The sheer panic of his own death. And it was a true panic, like none he had ever met. He had no sense of comfort, no sense of closure. Only fear.
Wade was ripping off a piece of his own shirt and George reached out and clung to his forearm in terror. “What will you tell Isabelle?”
“George.”
“Will you capture the boys? Tell me you won’t. Tell me you’ll leave them be.”
“George, I’m busy saving your goddamn life! Quit it!”
Hackstedde loomed over them in shadow. He lit a cigarette.
“That’s bleeding heavy.”
“Wade,” George said, his voice fading. “Tell me.” His grip on Wade’s arm loosened.
“Try to stay awake for me,” Wade said. “Can you do that? George? Answer me.”
His head sank into the ground, the soil soft and cool, a sensation that couldn’t have been more welcome, for it brought him back home once more. Back to his own bed, swaddled under fresh sheets, with the night breaking over him as he descended toward sleep.
CHAPTER 24
It would be described to Isabelle many times over, those first few hours when the fire ravaged Old Ox—told so often, by so many people—that she could piece together the entire event without having been present herself. A stable was the first to fall, after which the blaze stampeded through the square as though driven by the Four Horsemen themselves. Dirt wagons sat before each home and families who had been told repeatedly by the fire warden to be prepared with their water buckets shrugged off the instruction in favor of saving their possessions. There were the terrified cries of children and women, cries of glass shattering as storefronts fell, and cries of penned-up livestock that whirled about in a frenzy and died without mercy. The old and the sick who could not find their way to safety met the same fate as the animals, their lifeless arms hanging limply from the windows of burning buildings until the smoke clouded them from view. Braver men, leather buckets in hand, along with soldiers armed as though for battle, stood before the approaching flames with admirable intentions yet trembled in fear and eventually fled with all the rest.