Horsepeople

Chapter Twenty-Nine

After cooling and bathing the sweat-drenched Cricket, Jo turned her out to graze the fading summer grass near the Livery. She had well earned it. Nicky, Avery, and Shannae stood on the railings, petting the horses in the herd and recounting the day's events with ever-grander exaggerations. Balancing her saddle on her hip, Jo carried it back to the shade of the barn to set it in the tack room. Her eyes hadn't adjusted to the dim as she stepped in the doorway and she only had time to register that there was movement within. Before she could drop her saddle to protect herself, a rifle stock connected with her face and she felt a crunch, heard a curse, and fell to the ground.

Jo came to a while later, sitting upright with her hands bound behind her back, tied to the post of a hitching rail in front of the Livery. There was blood in her mouth but she couldn't spit it out through the cloth gag in her mouth and her fit worsened as Captain Smith walked into view, looking down at her.

"What happened to her face?" he asked, frowning.

Behind her, the voice of McNeil replied, "Resisted arrest. Sir."

Smith took full advantage of her forced silence, projecting his voice so that it echoed through the town. She could see his militiamen loitering on the boardwalks and between houses. They crowded Harold, Liza, Mary, and Marshall so they couldn't move, standing with their rifles slung over their shoulders or in the crook of their arms.

"Joanna King, I am placing you under arrest for the capital crime of horse theft. As the highest-ranking officer here and, as this country is under martial law, I have the authority and responsibility to administer justice. I will hear a plea on your behalf this evening and deliver my ruling in the morning. You are placed under guard until then. No one," he directed at the townspeople, "may approach."

With that, he turned on his heel and pushed his way past the swinging doors of the Hotel. He thought the suspense of waiting until morning would do wonders for the townsfolk, if the heathens ever decided to come back to town. If they rode in guns blazing, he was sure they would back down seeing their precious leader with a gun to her head.

Harold, Marshall, Mary, and Liza were cowed back into Harold's cabin, their protests silenced by a lowered rifle. Except for one, all the militiamen followed Smith into the Hotel, where she heard plates chinking and the odd shatter. The guard pulled up a stump and leaned against the tie-rail, whistling as he scraped a thick hunting knife over a whetstone.

Sitting in the growing twilight, Jo's mind struggled to process the possibilities of the next morning, along with all the implications of Smith's wording. Capital offense but no trial, she wondered, suspecting he was playing by the rules of a warped western dime novel. And, as sure as a shoot out at the local Saloon, there was always a hanging in those stories. It didn't seem safe to bet he wouldn't; she couldn't help but feel this quarrel had developed a personal nature since the night she shot the bottles.

However, Smith was smart, and murdering her seemed a sure way to turn the whole area against him forever, which was not conducive to the ultimate goal of the Government. She hoped, at least, that the Government had realized they couldn't just murder everyone. A Government, after all, needed people to govern. If he had any sense at all, Jo hypothesized, Smith would be lenient in order to gain the people's trust. But she couldn't let that happen. She could never let her people fall into Smith's hands.

As she sat tied to the rail, staring at her dusty boots, Jo felt the familiar sensation of timelessness, of the past living through her. The decision that so many before her had faced; to give up and be swept along with someone else's current or to fight, risking her life, for the way she lived. When, she asked herself, had someone in her position ever won? It had not gone well for Louis Riel; was her situation much different? Would dying for Sweetwater change the future or should she—could she—live with herself knowing it might have?