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I was about a hundred and twenty-five yards out, and for some reason, besides being very angry, I was feeling lucky.

18.
    I aimed my Winchester at the center of the window and waited. Then I waited some more. With my cheek to the stock and my eye looking down the barrel, I was waiting and ready.
    “Come on, you no-good sonofabitch,” I said quietly to myself. “Surely you’re not done. Show yourself; show your no-good goddamn sonofabitch coward self. Just show me a piece, the smallest piece, and . . .”
    There he was. I squeezed off one shot. Then I heard screaming from inside, followed by a woman running out the front door.
    She ran across the road and up a slight embankment. She was a short, heavy woman wearing a dark dress that she held up as she ran. She slipped trying to get up the embankment but kept churning and churning her feet until she was upright, over the rise and running away from the way station.
    I cocked the rifle and waited for another shot, but there was no movement and no more sound from within the way station.
    I looked over to Virgil. He was making his way back to his horse.
    I watched the window for a moment longer, then pulled my rifle from the bush, got to my feet, and made my way back to my horse.
    I mounted up but did not move out onto the road. I rode off farther from the road and angled my way toward the direction in which the woman was running.
    I rode a ways and then I saw her. She was in the bottom of a dry wash, no longer running, but was bent over with her hands on her knees, trying to catch her breath.
    She looked up as I rode closer. Her round face was tearstained and her chest was heaving as she continued to try to catch her breath.
    I dismounted and walked toward her.
    She was frightened and tried to back away.
    I showed her my badge.
    “I’m Deputy Marshal Everett Hitch, ma’am,” I said. “I’m here now. You’ll be okay.”
    She looked at me, chest still heaving, and dropped to her knees.
    I moved to her. She looked up at me and shook her head.
    “Who are you?” I said.
    “This . . . here,” she said, trying to breathe and shaking her head, “is . . . our place. Me . . . and my husband, Ray.”
    She started crying.
    “What’s happened here?”
    “He’s dead,” she said. “Big Ray is dead.”
    “Just try and tell me what we’re dealing with here.”
    “Three men come here,” she said.
    She dropped to her bottom and leaned back to the side of the wash, shaking her head slowly.
    “Me and Ray been out here eighteen years. Never had a problem, raised two boys here, now he’s dead, just like that. He’s lying out there in the field behind the house, dead.”
    “What about the three men?”
    “Two of them left. They left the third man and he shot and killed my Ray this morning. He would have killed me, too, but I took care of him, I pulled two of his teeth. Then you come riding up and shot him. Thank God in Heaven. Thank God.”
    “What caused him to shoot your husband?”
    “I do not think that man needs a reason. Besides being a goddamn miscreant,” she said. “He’s completely out of his mind, delirious and sick with the fever.”
    “Is he dead?”
    “I don’t know,” she said. “I sure hope so . . . oh, God, I hope so. He screamed and fell back, holding his bloody face. Then I got up, opened the door, and ran.”
    “The other two men, when did they leave?”
    “This morning,” she said. “While the other fella was asleep. He woke up mad as hell and with no horse. Them other two took his horse. Wished my boys would had been here. This would have never have happened.”
    “Where are they,” I said. “Your boys.”
    “They made a supply run and took all the horses to get re-shod over in Pilgrim’s Corner,” she said. “Be back anytime. Ray told the sonofabitch to wait and he’d have a fresh horse, but no, he was angry and . . . Oh, God, I don’t know, this is, oh, God . . .”
    “How many of them, your