Far Bright Star by Robert Olmstead

ammunition. A braided leather quirt dangled from her wrist.
    This was one of the recurring women riders he’d seen through the field glasses. He could see that she was an accomplished horsewoman and the horse bearing her was perhaps the finest he’d ever seen. The horse stood sixteen hands with a massive chest. It had a slightly convex face and large oval eyes. It wore a broad forehead and carried a long heavy neck, an abundant mane, and a thick low-set tail. Its saddle was embroidered with silver and there were silver cheek plates in the form of conchas on the harness. The horse was further adorned with a silvered face piece and breastplate. The tapaderas covering the stirrups were intricately silvered as well. It was an Andalusian, a purebred Spanish horse.
    The woman’s dress and manners and beauty, as well as the horse’s, were high born. Napoleon took her to be from the wealthiest class and existing at a distance from the world, a distance that went beyond money and possession. In this land there were haciendas as big as a million acres. These were people with their own private kingdoms, their own private countries, and their own private armies.
    Two Yaqui rode beside her in full war paint. They rode matched golden duns with tiger eyes. They were hard beasts with dead eyes in their faces, the horses and the Yaquis. The Yaqui were tall and broad shouldered and they wore two bandoleers around their waists and two more across their naked chests. Riderless ponies dallied behind them with rotting heads impaled on the saddle horns. The heads wore long hair and in death their faces were crumpled with pain and their mouths shriveled and unmistakable smiles. Close by there was another woman who rode with them. This must have been the other woman he’d seen. Except this woman was a window manikin held upright in the saddle by a thin frame of steel. She too rode a fine white horse and was dressed similarly to the actual woman, a slant parasol puppeting above her head.
    There was another who rode behind her. He wore a broad sombrero, silver-studded trousers, and a goatskin jacket. He was the one with the .45, its grips inlaid with mother-of-pearl and there were others in her party, their mounts gaunt, rough animals, with visible ribs and hip bones, but they were armed to the teeth and possessed the air of assassins. These other men had no politics. They were in loyal service only to the woman.
    The boy came to them again.
    “This is against the law,” Preston said. It was a fatal part of his character not to bend at times, not to be pushed around.
    “You want me tell her that?” the boy said.
    “Yes,” he said.
    The boy went to her side and spoke to her. Then he returned to where they kneeled.
    “She says she is the law,” the boy said.
    Before Preston could respond, the woman gave a signal and two men approached and dragged Napoleon and Preston onto their knees and roughly blindfolded them. He could hear Preston beside him, protesting his treatment. Then he felt the muzzle of a gun barrel at the back of his head. He tried to imagine another world where none of this was happening, but he could not. Preston went silent and there was silence at the ground and in the air. Then there was the sound of two triggers being cocked, one and then the other.
    When the threat of death became imminent, Napoleon, like some men, extended an invitation. He felt daring, even hungry for it. He fell in love with the thought of it and wanted it as much as he wanted to live.
    He could hear Preston again. He was whimpering.
    Napoleon waited for his life to pass before him, not because he was afraid but because he was curious what it had all been about and also because he expected it. He expected the parade of his life, its events in quick succession to pass through his mind as complete and silent as a whisper. He felt the muzzle drag against his scalp, the result of a hard trigger or a weak hand.
    “It’s all right,” he told the gunman.