Tell her that from me, Miss Carter. What? Hattie Monroe. Yes. Hattie Monroe buried a husband Pike's men beat to death in '71.

I do not think Hattie Monroe is going to Red Hollow just to watch a sheriff. I know she is not, June. Miss Carter. I know what I am doing. June Bell looked at her for a long moment.

You have grown up in four days, Miss Carter. I have grown up in four minutes, June. The four minutes I was on the floor of that saloon. June Bell got back on her mule and rode. On the fifth day near dusk, two dark shapes came up the back trail at a hard gallop.

And every rifle on the porch rose at once. And then Naomi was off the steps and running. Because she knew that buckskin. And she knew that grulla. And a minute later, Silas Boone and Ethan Reed swung down in her yard covered in road dust and thin with three days of biscuits.

And Ethan had a folded paper in his hand that he held out to her without speaking. Because he was too tired to speak. She opened it. It was a telegram. It was signed by a United States Marshal out of Wichita.

And it said eight words. "Riding out tomorrow. Sunup. Six deputies. Confirm. " Naomi read it twice.

Then a third time. Then she looked up at Silas. And her eyes were bright and dry and terrible all at once. Mr. Boone.

Yes, ma'am. Tomorrow is the 21st. I know it is. Marshal rides from Wichita tomorrow at sunup. Hard ride two days.

He gets here the night of the 22nd. Yes, ma'am. Pike rides on this house the night of the 22nd. Yes, ma'am. They are going to arrive in the same hour, Mr.

Boone. On the same road. In the same dark. Yes, ma'am. They are.

She folded the telegram. She put it in the pocket of her father's shirt over her heart. And she buttoned the flap down. Then we have got 24 hours, Mr. Boone, to make sure the right men are standing in my yard when that hour comes.

Yes, ma'am. Ethan. Yes, ma'am. Eat. Sleep two hours.

Then you ride out again. I have got one more errand for you. And it is the last one. And it is going to be the hardest. Yes, ma'am.

She turned back toward the house, toward the lamplight glowing in the kitchen window, toward the nine rifles on her porch, and the buried ledger under the smokehouse, and the drained spring, and the telegram folded against her heart. And somewhere five miles away in a big house at the north end of the valley, Gideon Pike was pouring himself a glass of good whiskey and counting for the last time the hours until he would own Carter Ridge. He did not know yet that he was counting wrong. The last errand Naomi put on Ethan that night was the hardest one. Because it was the one that sent him alone into the house of the man who was planning to burn her alive.

Gideon Pike's house. Yes, ma'am. By the kitchen door. Yes, ma'am. You will ask for a woman named Delphia Reed.

The boy went still on the porch step. Miss Naomi. I know she is your cousin, Ethan. I have known that since the day you came to work for my father. Your mother told mine the week your aunt took that job in Pike's kitchen.

And your mother made my mother swear never to speak of it because your aunt told Delphia never to come around her kin while she was working that house. That is 12 years ago now. Your cousin is 26 years old and she has been pouring coffee for Gideon Pike every morning for a decade. Miss Naomi, she will not talk to me. She has not spoken my name out loud in this valley in six years.

She will talk to you tonight, Ethan. Because I am going to give you a sentence to say to her. And when you say it, she will come out to the wood pile with you. And she will tell you what she knows. Are you listening?

Yes, ma'am. You tell her this. "My father was Silas Reed. And my father died in a fever year and I am his boy. And Miss Carter is sending me.

Because on the night of the 22nd, a good woman is going to be burned in her own house. And a Carter gave my father his grave when nobody else in this valley would. " You say it exactly like that, Ethan. Not one word different. Yes, ma'am. Ride.

He rode. While he rode, Silas sat on the porch with a tin plate of beans and did not eat. Naomi came out with the coffee pot and poured his cup without asking. And she sat down beside him on the step. And for a long minute, neither of them said anything.

Then Silas said, "You are sending that boy alone into a killer's kitchen. " I am. "If Pike catches him on the place, that boy is dead before sunup. " I know it. Miss Carter. Mr. Boone.

I have thought of every way to keep that boy out of Pike's yard tonight. And every one of them ends with me standing in my burning parlor on the 22nd not knowing who the inside man is. I need to know who is with Pike in that house. I need a name. I need a face.

I need it tonight because tomorrow is too late. And Ethan Reed is the only person in this valley who can walk up to that kitchen door without Pike's riders shooting him on sight because his own blood works the stove. Silas set his plate down. You are harder than I thought you were, ma'am. I am harder than I thought I was, Mr.

Boone. Does it feel good? No, sir, it does not. He nodded. Good.

They did not speak again for a while. 2 hours past midnight, Ethan came back. He came back at a walk, not a gallop, which Naomi had told him to do because a galloping horse at 2:00 in the morning is a horse running from something, and she did not want Pike's lookouts to hear a horse running in the direction of Carter Ridge. He slid off the grulla in the yard, and his face was wet, and Naomi was off the porch and had her hands on his shoulders before he could get a word out. Are you hurt?

No, ma'am. Did anyone see you? No, ma'am. Did she come out? She came out, Miss Naomi.

Tell me. And the boy told her, and what he told her standing in her yard at 2:00 in the morning with Silas Boone behind him and nine rifles on the porch and the cicadas sawing away in the dark was the piece Naomi had not yet known she was missing. Delphia Reed had come out to the wood pile with a lamp, and she had listened to the sentence Naomi had given Ethan, and she had not said anything for a long half minute. And then she had sat down on a chopping block, and she had started to cry. Quiet.

No sound. Just water running down her face while she looked at a nephew she had not laid eyes on since he was 13. Then she had wiped her face, and she had talked fast because she did not have long before the cook noticed she was gone from the back kitchen. Pike was not riding on Carter Ridge with three men or five men. Pike was riding with 14.

He had hired eight new guns out of Dodge City in the last 10 days, and they had come in two at a time on the afternoon coach, and they were sleeping in the bunkhouse behind the big house, and not one of them had ridden into Red Hollow yet because Pike was keeping them out of sight until the night. Pike was not burning the house first. Pike was hitting the Fuller spread first. At moonrise on the 22nd, six men were riding south to the Fuller gate, and they were going to set fire to Amos Fuller's hay barn, and they were going to draw every rifle on Carter Ridge toward that smoke. And while Naomi's porch was riding to the Fuller's, the other eight men were going to come up the back trail, the same back trail Silas and Ethan had just ridden, and they were going to come in through the bottom pasture, and they were going to hit the house from the blind side, and Pike was not riding with them.

Pike was going to be in Red Hollow that night at Holloway's saloon with Sheriff Mercer playing a hand of cards at the front table in front of 20 witnesses so that when the sun came up on the 23rd and Carter Ridge was ashes, Gideon Pike would have been seen by half the town laughing over whiskey at the hour Naomi Carter died. Naomi listened to all of it without moving. When Ethan finished, she said, Was there anything else? Yes, ma'am. One thing more.

Say it. Delphia said the lead man on the eight riders coming up the back trail is a man called Tom Rucker out of Abilene, and Tom Rucker is the man who shot Silas Boone in Kansas in 1864 and left him for dead in a ditch. Silas did not move. Did not breathe. For one long second, the porch went so still that Naomi could hear the lamp in the kitchen ticking.

Then Silas said very quiet, "Ma'am. " Yes, Mr. Boone. I owe you an apology. For what? For something I have not done yet.

Because when Tom Rucker comes up that back trail tomorrow night, I am going to have to work very hard not to put the first bullet in him before the marshal gets here, and I swore to you on your father's name that I would not draw, and I am telling you now I am going to have trouble keeping that oath. Mr. Boone. Yes? I am releasing you from that oath.

Ma'am, I am releasing you from it tonight on this porch in front of Ethan Reed as a witness. If Tom Rucker rides up my back trail tomorrow, you put him down, Mr. Boone. You put him down fast, and you put him down for good, and you do not carry him in your head for another 15 years. Do you hear me?

I hear you. Swear it. I swear it, Miss Carter. Good. She turned to Ethan.

Eat. Sleep. 4 hours. Then wake every rifle on this porch and every rifle at the Fuller's and every rifle in a 10-mile ring because the plan we have been holding for 3 days is not the plan we are running tomorrow night. The plan has changed.

Yes, ma'am. Mr. Boone. Yes. Come inside.

We need paper. They spent the rest of the night at the kitchen table with the ledger open and the lamp low, and by the time the first gray came into the window, Naomi Carter had drawn a map of her own land in her own careful hand with every fence line and every gully and every cottonwood and every blind rise marked in ink, and she had put a small cross at seven places on the map, and beside each cross, she had written a name, and by the time the roosters started up, she knew where every one of her nine rifles was going to be standing at moonrise on the 22nd, and Gideon Pike did not know any of it. The 22nd came in hot, hotter than any day that summer, hot enough that the air above the south pasture shook like water, hot enough that by noon, the rifles on the porch had rolled up their sleeves and moved into the shade of the barn, and Naomi had made a second pot of coffee and then a third because coffee was the only thing that kept a man awake past a third day without sleep, and nobody on Carter Ridge had slept proper since the night before last. At 2:00 in the afternoon, a lone rider came up the track. Every rifle on the place came up.

Naomi stepped out onto the porch with her hand on the Winchester, and she did not raise it, and she squinted into the sun, and she said almost to herself, "That is not a Pike rider. " How do you know, Miss Carter? Because Pike riders do not come up a track in daylight with their hands where you can see them. The rider came closer, and then Silas, who was standing by the barn, said very quietly, "Ma'am, that is Doyle Mercer. " It was. Mercer rode up to the porch at a walk, his hat already in his hand, his face the color of chalk, and before Naomi could say a word, he said, "Miss Carter, I am not supposed to be here. Pike sent one of his men to my office an hour ago and told me that tonight I am to stay at Holloway's front table from moonrise to midnight and not step outside for any reason, and the man who told me that is going to ride back by my office at 4:00 to check that I am still there.

I have got 90 minutes, ma'am, and then I have got to be back at my desk. " Sheriff? Yes. Why are you on my porch? Because I came to tell you something my wife would not let me carry another hour. I came to tell you that in 1868, Gideon Pike killed your mother.

The porch stopped. Every rifle, every head, every Naomi did not move. Sheriff, your mother died in a fall from a buggy on the Bent Fork Road in the spring of '68. That is the story. That is what the coroner wrote.

That is what your father was told. I signed that paper, Miss Carter. I was 29 years old, and I was 3 months in this badge, and Gideon Pike walked into my office, and he put his hand on my shoulder, and he told me your mother had refused to sign a water rights paper he needed, and he told me the horse had spooked on its own, and he told me to sign the coroner's finding, and I signed it, and I have carried that signature in my gut for 18 years. Naomi did not speak. She could not.

The horse did not spook, Miss Carter. The horse was cut across the shoulder with a whip while your mother was sitting in the buggy. Pike's man did it. The buggy went down a grade your mother could not pull out of because the reins were wet. Your mother did not die in the fall.

Your mother died of a broken neck 3 hours later in a ditch alone because nobody went looking for her until evening, and your father was told it was the horse. Silas had not moved from the barn, but his hand, Naomi noticed, had come to rest on the grip of his pistol without him seeming to know he had put it there. Sheriff? Yes. Why are you telling me this on the day Pike is coming to burn my house?

Because if you die tonight, Miss Carter, that story dies with me. And I have decided sitting at my desk this morning with a man watching me through my own window that I would rather die tonight in my office with the truth on my table than live another 20 years in that chair with it in my gut. I wrote it down, ma'am. Every word of it. Signed, dated, sealed.

I gave it to my wife this morning. She is riding for Bent Fork tomorrow at first light with that paper in her coat whether I am alive in that office or dead in it. My wife is a harder woman than any man in this county guessed. Naomi still had not moved. Then very slow, she stepped off the porch.

She walked up to the stirrup of Mercer's horse. She put her hand on the sheriff's knee, and she looked up at him, and she said, "Doyle, yes? You are going to live through tonight. Do you hear me? Miss Carter.

You are going to live, Doyle, because a federal marshal is coming down that road at moonrise tonight with six deputies, and he is going to walk into Holloway's saloon at the exact hour Gideon Pike is playing his hand of cards, and he is going to arrest Gideon Pike in front of 20 witnesses for the murder of my mother and for the conspiracy to murder me, and you are going to stand up from that table, Doyle Mercer, and you are going to walk across that room, and you are going to put the cuffs on Pike yourself. Do you hear me? Mercer's eyes filled. Miss Carter. Do you hear me?

I hear you. Then ride back to your office, and you sit in that chair, and you wait. That is all. You wait. He rode.

When he was gone, Silas came up from the barn, and he stood at the foot of the porch, and he did not say anything, because there was nothing to say. Naomi sat down on the step. After a long minute, she said, "Mr. Boone? " Yes, ma'am. I never knew my mother past the age of eight.

No, ma'am. I have spent 18 years thinking a horse did that to her. Yes, ma'am. Mr. Boone.

Yes. Tonight, when Tom Rucker comes up my back trail, I do not want you to kill him. Silas went very still. Ma'am, I want you to take his knees out from under him, Mr. Boone, and I want him alive, and I want him cuffed, and I want him on a wagon to Wichita by sunup, because Tom Rucker has ridden for Gideon Pike for 12 years, and Tom Rucker knows where the bodies are, and Tom Rucker is going to be the man who hangs Gideon Pike in a federal court 6 months from now.