Theo didn't try to stop them.
He stood aside from the door, smiling, and when Dana took his arm and pulled, he let her pull, and then he stopped moving, and her hand slid off his sleeve. "Theo, please," she said. "Please come with me." He smiled at her. He followed them across the yard and down the side of the smokehouse with his hands in his pockets, humming something tuneless, a few steps behind. Hassan had the hatchet in his hand. He couldn't think what he would do with it. There was the doubled click of Theo's steps on the hard ground behind them, and Hassan told himself it was the boots.
They came round the corner of the general store onto the main street and stopped.
The town was out.
They stood in the street in the moonlight, all of them, the twenty-five from supper and more besides, people Hassan hadn't seen in the daylight. The old man with his cane, the young mother with her baby in its sling. They stood in a loose crowd between the church and the diner with their arms at their sides, not talking, not moving, every face turned toward Hassan and Dana as they came round the corner. Their faces were very calm.
The diner's porch was lit by a single bulb. Kurt was standing on it with a bottle in his hand, looking out at the street with his mouth open.
"Dana?" he said. "What the hell is this? They all just came out. They just came out and stood there."
Upstairs, at the back of the diner, somebody knocked on the door of Hassan's room.
Two knocks. Then Hassan's voice. "Wes. It's me. Open the door. Adam."
Wes looked at the boy. Adam was sitting on the iron bed with his knees up and his face white.
"He said he'd say your name," Wes said, low. "Didn't he? Knock twice and say your name."
"That's his voice," Adam whispered. "That's my dad's voice."
"Wes," said the voice outside the door, patient and kind. "Come on. Let me in." Then, in Arabic: "Adam, my darling. Open the door for me."
Adam opened his mouth.
Wes put his hand over it. Not hard. He looked at the boy over his hand and shook his head once, slowly, and Adam looked back at him with his eyes wet and nodded.
"Adam," the voice said. "Adam. Why won't you answer me?"
Wes took his hand away and went to the window and opened it. It gave onto the slope of the porch roof, and below that the street, and the moonlight. He looked out and saw the crowd, and the back of Kurt's head on the porch, and Dana and Hassan at the corner of the store.
"Out," he whispered. "Now."
On the street Kurt came down off the porch, and Dana met him at the bottom of the steps.
"They've got the Swedish woman chained in the barn," she said, all in one breath, her voice very high and very clear. "Two men with her. There are skulls in the smokehouse, Kurt. And they've done something to Theo."
Kurt looked at her. Hassan watched the drink go out of his face. It went out all at once, the way water goes out of a sink. Then Kurt looked past her at the crowd, slowly, face by face, the way he had looked at the elk.
"Well," said Mae.
She came down the diner steps behind him in her blue dress and her apron with a dish towel in her hands. She didn't look at the barn or the smokehouse. She looked at Hassan, and she looked tired, like a woman at the end of a cattle sale who wants the papers signed.
"You've been out back," she said. "All right. Nobody's going to pretend tonight." "Here's how it is, hon. Everybody's tired. Nobody has to go anywhere tonight. The road's dark and it's forty miles of washboard." "Sit down. Have some coffee. We'll talk it through in the morning like people."
While she talked, the street filled. A man came out from between the church and the feed store. Two women from the dark behind the diner. The young mother with her baby, closer than she had been. Each time he looked back at a gap in the crowd, the gap had someone in it. The talk was there to keep them standing still.
"What's in your barn?" Kurt said.
"Hon."
"I walked past it before supper. Doors chained. Nobody chains a barn door on calves." "What's in your smokehouse? I've hung elk thirty years. There's not a hide on a fence in this whole town."
Mae smiled at him. "Come inside, Kurt."
The man who'd painted the trim was beside Dana. Hassan hadn't seen him move. One moment he was in the crowd and the next he was at her elbow, and he took her wrist in his hand very gently, the way you'd take a child's wrist to cross a road. "Come on inside, miss," he said.
Dana screamed and pulled and couldn't pull free. It was like pulling against a post.
Kurt shot him.
The rifle was so loud that for a moment there was no other sound in the world. The man let go of Dana's wrist and sat down in the dirt with a hole in the middle of his shirt. He looked down at himself with a puzzled expression. Then he lay back slowly in the road.
A woman stepped out of the crowd. Gray-haired, in a housedress; Hassan had passed her the bread at supper. She walked to the man in the road, bent, and slapped him once on the back of the head, flat-handed, the way you'd cuff a boy who had sworn at the table.
The man drew in a breath. He sat up from the hips, without his hands, his back straight as a board. The hole in his shirt wasn't bleeding. He stood, and he stood faster than he had sat down.
Kurt worked the bolt. The brass case spun away glittering in the moonlight.
"Kurt," Hassan said. "Kurt, wait."
"Twice," Kurt said, "to be sure," and shot the man in the head.
It went down hard this time, flat on its back, one side of its face hanging loose. The old man with the cane was nearest. He reached out without looking and tapped it on the skull with the rubber foot of his cane, once, as if he were knocking on a door.
It was up before the old man had lowered the cane. It was lying down, and then it was standing, and Hassan never saw the part between.
It said, in the painter's voice, very cheerfully, "Thanks."
Then it hit Kurt.
Hassan didn't see the arm move. He heard it, a sound like a fence post breaking, and Kurt left the ground. He went backward across the mouth of the alley, twenty feet, over the hitching rail, and into the smokehouse door, and the door burst inward on its hasp and took him into the dark and swung shut behind him.
The rifle fell where he had been standing. It landed on its butt against the hitching rail and stood there, upright, for a long moment, as if Kurt had leaned it there to light a cigarette. Then it slid down the rail and lay in the dirt.
"Dad!"
Adam was on the porch roof, crouched at the edge, with Wes beside him. Wes dropped first, hit the ground and rolled, and held his arms up, and Adam jumped into them. Wes set the boy on his feet and turned toward the smokehouse.
"Kurt?"
He took a step.
"Kurt!" He was running.
"Kurt!" He was screaming it now, at the shut door, at the crowd, at nothing.
Hassan caught him by the jacket ten feet from the door. Dana got his other arm and threw her whole weight back on it, and between them they turned him, and over his shoulder Hassan saw the crowd coming, not running, filling the street from both sides the way water fills a print in mud.
From inside the smokehouse came one sound. A grunt, the sound a man makes when he's been hit low. Then nothing.
"North!" Hassan shouted. "North! Run!"
They ran.
Out of the end of the street, past the church with no cross, past the picket fence of the cemetery. The graves were open as they passed, every one, black and square in the moonlight, and empty. Then the sage, and the four of them in it, Hassan and Adam and Dana and Wes, running for the dark line of the ridge to the north.
"It went down," Wes said as he ran. He was talking to nobody. "Every time it went down, one of them hit it. That old woman. The cane." "And every time it got up faster."
"Wait!"
Footsteps behind them, running hard. Hassan turned with the hatchet up.
It was Caleb. He came out of the dark at a stumbling run, his bandage gone, his face scratched, holding his ribs. "Wait for me! Please! Don't leave me with them!"
Dana caught his arm and dragged him along.
At the foot of the ridge Hassan looked back once.
The street had emptied. A lantern stood at the smokehouse door. In its light four of them came out carrying something long between them, and carried it across the yard toward the church. It didn't kick. It hung between them the way a sack of feed hangs, and Hassan couldn't tell, at that distance, whether it was a man or what was left of one.
Then, from the sage just ahead of them, between them and the ridge, close enough to touch, Kurt's voice said cheerfully, "Wes. Hey, buddy. Wait up."