We have to get away. Josiah stared into the swirling, rushing waters of the thaw-swollen river, unable to pull his eyes away. I can make myself do this. But his feet remained firmly stuck to the muddy riverbank, and the fragile promise of security offered by the slender rope stretched above the hungry torrent was not something he could bring himself to believe in. Far back in the trees, he could hear the pack of outlaws that had turned the tables on them crashing in their direction…but he still couldn't move.
Chris gave Buck a hand up the far bank as the ladies' man pulled himself out of the water and then glared across the river at Josiah. "Why the hell isn't he in the water already?" the gunslinger swore. "Dammit, he'd better not be waiting for Standish…"
As if on cue, they saw the gambler come flying out of the trees and skid down the bank, almost running into the big ex-preacher. But Josiah didn't move, he just kept staring at the water. Vin came up beside Chris and Buck, and the three men saw Ezra circle around the bigger man, shake him, even try to pull him toward the rope. He might as well have been trying to move one of the surrounding trees. They saw Josiah shake his head and make a gesture that the gambler should get into the water. Ezra's response was obviously not affirmative; the watching men couldn't help but smile when he stamped his foot in frustration, the size difference between he and Josiah making him look from that distance like a child about to throw a tantrum.
Nathan came up behind Buck and stared out across the rushing river with a scowl. "What's he doin' over there? Josiah!" he yelled. "Just leave him, Josiah! Get yourself over here!"
Buck and Vin shot irritated looks at the healer. "You've got it backwards," Buck told him. "Ez is tryin' to get Josiah into the water, not the other way around."
"Looks like Josiah froze on him," Vin added with a troubled frown. "And Ez ain't big enough to move him if'n he ain't wantin' to be moved."
"That would take two or three of us," Buck agreed. "Dammit, what the sam-hill is the matter with him? He's gonna get ‘em both killed!"
+ + + + + + +
Ezra was thinking the same thing. He looked across the raging river at Larabee's impatient glare and the worried faces of the other men and then up at the fear-filled face of the big man beside him. His green eyes hardened and his jaw set. "We'll see you back in town, Mr. Larabee!" he yelled over the roar of the rushing water, then grabbed the ex-preacher's arm and dragged him back up the bank and into the trees, ignoring the protesting calls of the others and just feeling deeply relieved that Josiah seemed willing to move away from the water. Just before vanishing from sight the gambler turned and drew his gun. There was one more thing to take care of.
+ + + + + + +
The four men on the far bank jumped when the sound of a single gunshot boomed out over the noise of the water; the other end of the rope, severed from its hard knot by Ezra's bullet, slithered down the bank and into the river. Vin quickly went to their end and began to haul the rope in. "Well, now no one can follow us," Buck observed with a sigh.
"Yeah, including Josiah and Ezra," Chris said grimly, anger already darkening his eyes. "Vin, once you've got that rope coiled up we need to get moving; I don't want to still be standing here if those outlaws come down to the river."
"If? What do you mean, if?" Nathan exclaimed. "And we can't just leave Josiah…"
"He's the one who didn't follow us," Larabee snapped. "And after that gunshot, it's damn likely those outlaws are gonna figure we're still over there with them, so if they're smart they'll scatter out to look for us."
"But if we stay here and let them see us they won't go after…"
"Maybe," Chris interrupted implacably. "But what they're gonna do then is ride back to Four Corners; that what you want, Buck?"
The ladies' man blanched; JD was in town by himself, watching over a prisoner in the jail. "Vin, let me give you a hand with that rope, we gotta get a move on…"
+ + + + + + +
Josiah finally came back to himself an indefinite amount of time later when Ezra tried to stuff him through a small space between some rocks; his indignant exclamation was cut short by a smooth hand that quickly covered his mouth. "Shh," the gambler said, standing on tiptoe to look him in the eye. "Mr. Sanchez, not a word! Now get in there before they catch us!"
The green eyes were wide and worried, and Josiah did as he was told. He found himself standing in a very small enclosed space that had evidently been created by repeated rockfalls descending on a small grove of close-grown trees. Ezra dragged several smaller rocks in front of the crack they had entered through and used them to wedge two saplings into the opening, then pulled the larger man down to sit on the ground off to one side of the camouflage and motioned for him to remain silent. The gambler then took up a position opposite him and ejected his derringer from its rigging, holding the small gun aimed at the approximate place where someone overly curious might stick his head through.
After sitting like that for a good five minutes Josiah was about to ask Ezra if perhaps they had lost their pursuers when he heard harsh voices almost just outside their hiding place. "Shit, we lost ‘em."
"We better go back and tell the boss…"
A snort. "You can - me, I'd like to live."
The other man sighed. "Yeah, he ain't gonna be too happy we lost that damn gambler, that's fer damn sure. Said since the little bastard kilt his horse he had somethin' special in mind for him, wanted him brought back all in one piece."
"Well if'n we go back there without him it's damn likely one of us is gonna be takin' his place - ol' Mort he likes his nightly entertainment." There was a pause. "I'm lightin' a shuck, you wanna come?"
"He'll hunt us…"
"Not if we've got a big enough head start. Now you comin' with me or what?"
Another sigh. "Yeah, I'm in - I ain't facin' that crazy bastard alone, no way no how. Let's get the hell out of here."
Ezra and Josiah stayed frozen in place even after they'd heard the men leave, just in case the other outlaws came looking. Ezra finally broke the silence when the sky above them began to darken. "I believe we have escaped them for the time bein', Mr. Sanchez," he said, but just barely loud enough to carry. "We should probably make ourselves comfortable for the night with a view to making our way back to town at first light."
Josiah looked around the tiny space they were sitting in. They had no food, no water, no blankets - and even if they'd had the means, he knew they couldn't risk lighting a fire. It was going to be a long, cold night. "I'm sorry, Ezra," he rumbled softly. "You shouldn't be here."
"I do not believe you have heard me complain, Mr. Sanchez," was the gambler's reply. "We are most likely in better straits than our companions; I have no doubt Mr. Larabee will insist on walking through the night to return to town, whereas you and I will be able to make the journey tomorrow with a full night's rest behind us. We are reasonably sheltered from both wind and wildlife and there will be no need for either of us to keep watch. I should say that, except for the lack of sustenance, our situation given the current circumstances is quite satisfactory."
For once the Southerner's overuse of the language failed to make Josiah smile. "We're in this situation because I couldn't make myself cross the river and you had to stay behind and endanger your life to save mine," he insisted unhappily. "You heard those two; if they'd caught us, you'd be…"
"Everyone has a limit, Mr. Sanchez," Ezra interrupted quietly, shifting around on the auspices of getting more comfortable. "There is no shame in havin' reached yours."
Josiah looked down at the bent head with a thoughtful frown. He recognized the voice of experience when he heard it, and that surprised him; Ezra usually didn't give anything away. "That go for you, too?"
"Ah found mine a long time ago. It is in the past now…and therefore unimportant, as it cannot occur again." The gambler curled in on himself just a little tighter. "Good night, Mr. Sanchez."
"Good night, Ezra," the older man replied, recognizing the polite withdrawal from the conversation for what it was. He hadn't really expected as much of an answer as Ezra had given him, at that. He leaned back against the cool stone and watched the stars come out in the little circle of sky above them, the sound of the hungry water still roaring and gibbering in his head, and knew that for him sleep would be a long time in coming.
+ + + + + + +
Ezra awoke hours later and opened his eyes to find their tiny hiding place flooded with cold light from the waxing moon above them. At first he wasn't sure what had awakened him, and then a low cry from his companion solved the mystery. Ezra sat the rest of the way up and shivered a little, wiping traces of moisture off his face; he'd been dreaming as well. Cautiously he moved to the older man's side and put a hand on his shoulder, shaking him lightly. "Mr. Sanchez!" he called softly. "Josiah, wake up."
After a few more shakes Josiah gasped and his eyes snapped open, staring up at the gambler in shock. "Ezra?"
"You were dreaming," the younger man told him. "Ah didn't want to…ah was afraid you might give away our position."
Josiah sat up slowly, nodding even though he didn't believe it. "Sorry I woke you."
Ezra shrugged. "No need to apologize, it happens." He quickly scooted back to his own spot and started going through the motions of making himself comfortable again. But once settled he didn't immediately close his eyes. "If you wish to converse a while, Mr. Sanchez, ah am disinclined to venture back into the realm of Morpheus at the moment."
Josiah didn't really feel like talking, but he felt he owed Ezra some sort of explanation for what had happened at the river even though the gambler hadn't directly asked him for one. "I won't say no to some conversation - gonna be hard to go back to sleep with the moon this bright, anyway."
A soft chuckle. "I would have to agree - but this brightness that we find so inconvenient is most likely a blessin' to our compatriots as they make their way home."
"They should be almost there by now," Josiah agreed. Then he frowned. "Do you think any of the outlaws are chasing them? Once they saw that rope…"
"I took care of that before we made our exit," Ezra reassured him. "Rest assured, if any of the miscreants did look to the river there was nothin' there for them to see."
Josiah just stared at him for a moment. "You cut the rope? The only way to cross the river?"
The gambler released an almost inaudible sigh and shut his eyes, adjusting his hat to cover his face. "Ah am certain ah shall hear all about it when we return to town, howevah at the time it seemed the right thing to do for several reasons."
The ex-preacher shook his head. He'd only known Ezra little more than a month, but one facet of the gambler's personality had already become glaringly obvious; the man might be almost ridiculously fussy about his physical comfort, but he seemed shockingly unconcerned when it came to risking his own life. "Bet Chris ain't gonna be happy."
"He would have been less happy had our pursuers seen the rope and ridden back to Four Corners to cut us off," Ezra drawled. "Ah am certain the good townspeople would have been less than inclined to interfere in such a situation, seein' as how it is far less dangerous to bury another sheriff than it would be to stand beside the one they have."
Josiah wanted to protest that, to say that of course someone would stand up with JD…but he knew they wouldn't. Most of the townsfolk held no loyalty whatsoever toward their seven peacekeepers, and considering that the town had already lost half a dozen sheriffs before they'd come along the ex-preacher couldn't honestly blame them. "Yep, you're right. I'm sure Chris will see that as well."
A dry humorless chuckle came from underneath the brim of the black hat. "You care to make a wager on that, Mr. Sanchez? And perhaps we could also place a side bet on the degree of Mr. Larabee's ire due to us not following him across the river in the first place."
The older man winced; Chris wasn't going to be very happy about that either. And he was doubtless going to demand a complete explanation, something Josiah wasn't sure he wanted to give him. "I'll have to tell him something," he muttered unhappily.
"You don't have to do anything," Ezra drawled. "Aquaphobia is a rather commonplace affliction, Mr. Larabee and company have no need to know how you came to acquire it."
"He's gonna ask, though - and I'm not afraid of water."
A dry chuckle. "Could have fooled me."
Josiah sighed. "I'm not afraid of the water; it's been a while, but I can swim and when it's hot out I even like to. It's just…the river. When it's swollen like that…"
"It reminds you of what those rushin' waters took from you," the gambler finished for him. Startled silence. "Ah make my livin' readin' people, Mr. Sanchez," Ezra quietly answered the unasked question. "There on the riverbank you were quite obviously caught in the grips of a truly terrible recollection. As ah said earlier, it happens - and barin' your soul to the others should not be necessary, a simple explanation of the situation to be avoided should suffice."
"You mean just tell them I can't deal with a flooded river?" The ex-preacher snorted softly. "They ain't gonna accept that, Ezra."
"Then that is their problem." Ezra rolled up onto one elbow, pushing back his hat and fixing Josiah with a surprisingly firm green gaze. "You do not owe anyone access to such a painful part of your past, nor does anyone have the right to demand such a confidence from you. All they are entitled to are the specific conditions to be avoided; if Mr. Tanner's abhorrence of confinement can be accommodated by our little band without lengthy explanation then surely your inability to cross a rushing river should not be seen as requirin' one either."
There was a fire burning in those emerald eyes, a passion Josiah had never seen in the normally cool and reserved Southerner before…but there was something else, too; the pitiless moonlight had silvered the remnants of tear tracks on the younger man's face, and the ex-preacher suddenly realized that Ezra's offer to stay up and talk might also have been an indirect admission that he wanted to stay awake for a while. "But they're still going to ask."
"Of course they will, human curiosity bein' what it is," Ezra replied. "But it is not your duty to assuage that curiosity unless you find that for some reason you wish to."
That was true…but at the moment he found himself wishing to, even though the younger man had betrayed none of the intrusive curiosity he knew the others would blatantly show. Maybe that was why Josiah wanted to tell him, because Ezra was respecting his privacy; he pushed aside the thought that sprang up sounding like Nathan, insisting that perhaps the gambler just didn't care because it didn't affect him personally. Someone who didn't care wouldn't have saved a man he barely knew or protected a boy he knew no better. Ezra cared, all right, even though he didn't seem to want to show it. "It was my mother," Josiah said in a low voice. "Everyone told my father that we shouldn't try to cross the river, but he…wouldn't listen, he insisted that ‘the Lord's work would not be stayed'. She was last to cross, and a big branch came down with the current and hit her, hurt her. I tried to go back out on the rope to help and Father wouldn't let me, he said if her faith wasn't enough to save her then the Lord's will be done…and that was when she lost her hold on the rope. The look in her eyes when the river took her is one I will never forget."
"A horrible thing for a child to witness," Ezra said softly. "Mah condolences, Mr. Sanchez."
Josiah sighed. "It was a long time ago, and I try not to think about it."
Ezra looked away. "Some remembrances are bettah off avoided," he agreed, rubbing his left hand with his right. "Although at this time of night that sometimes becomes difficult - perhaps the long association of the moon with lunacy was due to precisely this effect."
"Could be." Josiah noted the other man's nervous mannerism and wondered if that, too, had been triggered by the moon shining so full and bright over their heads; Ezra had never in their short acquaintance betrayed his feelings the way he was doing tonight. Protectiveness, sympathy, anger, melancholy, nerves…it was as though the clear silver light had rendered the man's sly, self-contained mask translucent in places, allowing glimpses of a very different person to show through. Josiah found his thoughts turning away from his own unpleasant memories and focussing instead on the newly-discovered enigma before him.
After a few more increasingly desultory exchanges Ezra went back to sleep, and once he was certain that the Southerner was oblivious Josiah took the opportunity to study him in earnest. He saw a man in his late twenties, probably only a year or two older than Vin and not more than ten years JD's senior - although he acted so jaded and world-weary when awake that it would be easy to judge him closer to Nathan or Buck's age. The gambler's right hand was still cradling his left atop his embroidered waistcoat, but as sleep gained more of a grip on him the slender, fine-boned hands slid apart somewhat and a soft gleam of gold caught Josiah's eye. A plain, somewhat worn gold band…a wedding ring? He'd noticed the ring before and not given it much thought, but now closer inspection suggested that the simple piece of jewelry had been worn so long as to have ‘grown' onto Ezra's finger; the ex-preacher doubted from the look of it that the ring could be removed at this point without being cut off. And Ezra had worried at it when talking about bad memories, indicating that the ring was connected to some of them. Maybe the wife had left him…or possibly she had died, maybe in childbed? The Southerner was very much drawn to children and seemed to be very good with them, so it was no stretch of the imagination for Josiah to suspect that he may have been a father as well.
Josiah had always wanted to be a father, but after outliving two wives with no progeny to show for it he had given up on ever having a child of his own. His wives were other pieces of his past he preferred to keep to himself, as was his sister Hannah who lived hidden safely away from the world she was unable to function in behind the sheltering walls of a cloistered nunnery. Another loss he had his father to thank for…and that had left him with an inexpiable burden of guilt much as their mother's death had. Or rather, their mother's murder; there was no doubt in Josiah's mind that the elder Reverend Sanchez had used the river to murder his wife and the unborn child that was such an embarrassment to him - her pregnancy being damning proof, as he saw it, that he could not rise above the desires of the flesh as he frequently exhorted others to do. And Josiah's father had always made it perfectly clear that his duties and reputation as a man of God were far more important than such a secular and therefore unworthy concern as his family.
Perhaps that was why family meant so much to Josiah…and why he'd traveled as far around the world as he could looking for proof that his father's harsh God was not always right. In hindsight he now saw that as an utterly selfish quest, one that had left Hannah alone at the mercy of the monster that was their father, and Josiah had foresworn his right to call himself a man of God for the sin of putting religion ahead of family in his priorities…as his father had. There was no penance great enough to make up for the horrors that had befallen Hannah in his absence…or for self-righteously decrying his father while in the process of emulating him, no matter how unconsciously he'd done it.
He wondered if Ezra's father was still alive - or anyone in his family, for that matter. Josiah had once heard the younger man swear on his mother's grave, but knowing Ezra that might not mean much. And it suddenly struck him that he really didn't know Ezra very well at all - he didn't think any of them did. Vin and Chris had a connection between them that transcended words, Buck had appointed himself JD's protective older brother, he himself had known Nathan for a time and they were friends…but those pairings had left the gambler on the fringes of their developing family of brothers. Josiah mentally kicked himself for allowing that; he enjoyed Ezra's company, had since first meeting him. The diminutive Southerner was intelligent and witty and not at all unfriendly when he wasn't on the defensive.
Of course, Ezra was on the defensive a lot, especially if Chris, Buck or Nathan was around. And that wasn't right either. Certainly Ezra could stand to improve himself, but so could they all; it struck Josiah as unfair that already a certain level of tolerance for personal foibles seemed to have been established among the other peacekeepers but was blatantly not extended to cover the gambler. Although to be fair the ex-preacher didn't really know how Vin felt about it - or about much of anything else, for that matter, the taciturn tracker gave as little away as Ezra did.
Well, Josiah couldn't do much about Vin, but Ezra just might be a different story. Blame it on the moon or the situation or simply on the fact that Ezra had been trying to help him, but tonight a fragile rope of understanding had been stretched across the river of doubt and distrust that separated the Southerner from the rest of the group. He had no doubt that once they got back to town Ezra would try to push him away by flaunting his roguish side or that Nathan would treat him to even more diatribes about the gambler's many faults, but Josiah had made up his mind and their tenuous connection wasn't going to be severed by anyone - not even by Ezra himself.
The ex-preacher knew better than to try to force any confidences out of the younger man, having a feeling that Ezra's passionate defense of a man's right to keep his past to himself had its roots in bitter experience - perhaps even recently. He did need to do something to show the other five men the bridge he was trying to build, though, something subtle that wouldn't drive off the skittish gambler; faith without action, he reminded himself, is a fruitless exercise and an affront to the Creator that gave man free will. His father's words, unfortunately, but still true nonetheless.
Hmm, his father. The Reverend Sanchez might have been lacking in paternal behavior with regards to his own offspring, but Josiah remembered without as much bitterness as usual that the man had possessed an almost uncanny ability to develop a rapport with those he was trying to minister to. He might have been a shouting fire-and-brimstone preacher most of the time, but he'd known when subtlety was called for to get the results he wanted. Words and gestures, that's how he'd done it, constructing bridges of trust with small, gently placed bricks. Josiah smiled at the moon. Of course, what his father had usually done once the bridge was built was not nearly so gentle…but he wasn't his father. At least, not if he could help it.
Josiah looked back down at Ezra, seeing how young he was, seeing how much he wanted to help him, and he sent a silent prayer of thanks to the Lord for providing him the opportunity. "Tomorrow will be the beginning of a new time for both of us," he whispered to the sleeping gambler. "Tomorrow we start building us a bridge…son."
The End
