He climbed on his horse thinking that it was a bad business for an Indian to get mixed up in white men's quarrels. He knew of only one white man who would believe him when he told what he had seen. Tesno, as far as he knew, was still with the boiler—or maybe on his way to Tunneltown in response to Vickers' message. Charlie headed his horse eastward—toward Ellensburg—and rode away.
Prodding a tired horse, Tesno heard the shots distantly. He kicked the animal into a lope, couldn't hold him there, settled for a wobbly trot. A few minutes later, he met a riderless horse jogging along toward Tunneltown, head held high to keep dragging reins from underfoot. He waved an arm, turning the horse, and hazed it ahead of him. Almost at once, two more horses appeared with empty saddles. With a sense of disaster gnawing at him, he turned these, too.
He had an instant of hope when he first saw Willie stretched out beside the road; but even before he dismounted and knelt beside the boy, this faded. Willie was dead. Mr. Jay and Madrid had planned it. Persia might have stopped it and didn't....
He had seen his share of death; mostly, he had turned away from it with a shrug and maybe a muttered prayer, as a man must. Now he remembered the first he had seen, that of a childhood playmate, how he couldn't believe it, and this was like that. He brushed mud from Willie's face with his fingers; he looked around at the road and the forest and the sky. Willie was gone; but the world that he was a part of went on, and he was not gone. It seemed as if the cloak of Time were lifted momentarily and the illusion of past, present, and future dispelled.
Nobody ever dies, he thought. Everything we are, everything we do, everything we've ever done, good and bad, goes on forever.
This struck him sharply, fleetingly. The cloak fell again, and he was angry.
He searched the ground, examined the guns. It looked as if one of the prisoners had had a hidden gun. He had pulled it and shot Willie, who had lived long enough to kill them both. That was how it looked, Tesno thought, but that wasn't how it was. There were three empty shells in the two guns. He had heard six shots.
He spent another half hour at the scene, studying it, learning little from the hodgepodge of tracks but fixing every detail in his mind. A train of freight wagons came lumbering along the road then, bound for Tunneltown. The crew found tarpaulins in which to wrap the bodies and stowed them on top of their loads.
When Tesno asked if they had met anyone within the last few miles, several of the drivers shook their heads. Then one remembered.