Lee sat, stiffening with pain, with one gun that didn't work and yards from another that did, in the deepening stench of fish oil. Somebody's bullet—probably his— had punctured one of the barrels, and not far away from where he'd fallen a steady trickle of the stuff was leaking down from the top rack and spreading slowly across the floor. In another five minutes he'd be sitting right in it.
Hester sat crouched tightly against his side. She was hurt by his wounds, but she wouldn't complain.
'Scoresby,' came a voice from the other side of the rack of barrels.
Lee said nothing.
'I know you're there, you cheap son of a bitch, and I know I got you,' the slow grinding voice went on. 'Course I don't know if you're dead yet, but you will be soon, you bastard. You think I didn't know who you were soon's I saw you? Ain't nobody I forgit once I seen 'em. You was next on my list back there in the Dakota country, you better believe it. You shoulda seen them two marshals when I finished with 'em, whoo, man. One of 'em had a serpent-daemon and he took his eyes off me and I picked her up by the tail and cracked her like a goddamn whip. You ain't never seen a man so surprised to be dead. That was by the Cheyenne River. And it left the other man on his own against Pierre McConville. That ain't good odds, Scoresby, you think of that. I can stay awake longer'n anyone. He tried to out-wake me but in the end he fell into the sweet arms of slumber, and the sucker thought he'd tied me safe, but ain't nothing can hold me down. I got a trick for that. I snuck out of my bonds and I lashed that son of a whore's feet and hands together and then I just picked up his daemon and tied her to his horse and unhobbled the horse. Man! That was funny. He woke up and he saw the terrible fix he was in. He kept saying, 'Here, Sunshine, good horse, don't go 'way now, come on, you dumb critter, please please now don't move.' As long as that horse didn't move too far he could just about live, but if something was to startle her so she ran off, well, bang, thassit. Like a hand coming up inside your ribs and feeling your heart still beating and pulling and pulling it till the strings and the veins all pop and it comes away in your hand. Man, you're dead then all right. In the end I took his gun and I fired it in the air and off ol' Sunshine took like a cannonball. You ain't never heard a scream like that marshal screamed.
'Well, I'm gone do that to you, Scoresby. There's that big hoist outside the doors there with a rope on it. I'm gone play a trick with that, you bet. I'm gone play with you and that scrawny jackrabbit for a
The pool of fish oil had spread. It was close enough now for Lee to reach out and touch it, and then he saw Hester look that way too, and then at him, and then at his pistol, and he knew at once what she meant.
McConville was still talking, but Lee blanked out his voice and with infinite care reached for the pistol at his waist. Holding it on his lap, he touched a finger to the pool of oil and brought a drop to the pivot of the hammer, and another to the trigger mechanism, and another to the bearing of the cylinder. With his weakened left hand holding the barrel as firmly as he could, he turned the cylinder with his right, very slowly, and felt it loosen. He pulled back the hammer: it moved stiffly at first, and then freely. He made sure there was a cartridge in the chamber, and sat with the pistol cocked, waiting for McConville's deep grating voice to stop.
'Well, Scoresby, I'm gone start killing you now. This is your end a-coming. It's gone be a hard one and a long one. I made that other marshal's end last a good half-hour by his pretty watch, which I took. I think I might let you stick around a mite longer'n that. Depends how much you scream.'
Lee heard the sound of a man getting to his feet and coughing slightly as if to cover a grunt of pain. So he had been hit!
And Hester pricked up her ears, tensing suddenly, as she and Lee heard another sound: the slither of a serpent body along a wooden floor, and the faint dry clicking of a rattle. McConville's daemon, impatient to get the torture started, was moving ahead of him.
And then, not six feet away at the end of the rack of barrels, the snake head appeared—and Hester sprang, and seized it.
She gripped the daemon just behind the head, and bit down hard. Lee felt every quiver of her muscles, and clenched his teeth in sympathy with hers.
McConville uttered a great cry of rage and pain and fell to the floor behind the barrels. Unable to move, Lee watched the furious struggle between the lashing, coiling, whipping snake and the tense little form of Hester, her claws slipping as she scrabbled on the floor. There was nothing for her to get any purchase on— no good turf, no springy twigs of sage—nothing but smooth boards, and the little rabbit had only half the weight of the snake; and Lee could feel with his daemon the furious power of the twisting, writhing form of McConville's as she flung herself left, right, left, trying to tear her neck out from be Hester's teeth.
'Keep going, gal,' Lee whispered. 'Hold tight there, sweetheart...' And she dug in, she tightened her trembling jaw, she scrabbled and slipped but she dug in again and tugged, and dragged, and hauled, and little by little pulled McConville's daemon away from him.
McConville's cries were hideous. He scrambled across the floor—Lee could hear his boots slipping, his fingernails scratching—his grunts and roars echoed around the warehouse till the air was full of the noise, and then helplessly he stumbled round the end of the rack of barrels, and Lee shot him.
McConville crashed backwards against the window and slid to the floor. In Hester's mouth his daemon sagged and loosened, but Hester kept on tugging, and it was easier now, and McConville sobbed, 'No—no— don't do it— goddamn bitch rabbit—'
His face was the color of dirty paper. His mouth was a sagging red hole and his eyes were bulging.
'McConville,' said Lee, 'you shot Mike Martinez and Broadus Vinson from a hiding place, like a coward, and then you made little Jimmy Partlett fight you because he didn't want you to think he was a coward. You're a dirty piece of work, and this is the end of you.'
And he shot the man through the heart. His daemon vanished, and Hester tumbled back towards Lee, who scooped her up and kissed her and held her close till she stopped trembling.
'You better move, Lee,' she whispered. 'You got about ten seconds before you're sitting in a pool of fish oil.'
'And now our troubles begin, Hester,' Lee muttered, struggling to pull himself upright, and just in time too.
Gingerly he moved his left arm and found, at least, that he could. He put his pistol back in the holster and went to pick up the rifle.
Then he looked out of the window and saw the ship's crew at work covering the forward hatch, so they must have loaded the cargo. But one man lay dead on the deck, under a sheet of canvas, and nearby on the quay a crowd
