One Came Home Chapter 17 Summary

  • Georgie wakes up feeling heat all around her and in the wounds on her face. That's never a good sign.
  • Billy is still asleep, so she borrows his repeating rifle and goes hunting to try to reestablish some sense of normalcy.
  • She just wants to go back to the way things were before all of this happened.
  • Then she hears a gunshot and a bray from Long Ears.
  • As she creeps up on the camp, Georgie sees that two men have Billy tied to a tree, and it sounds like they've been beating him up—he's lying to them, telling them Georgie has run off.
  • They don't believe him.
  • One of the men, whom she nicknames "Bowler Hat" for his choice in headgear, pretends he's going to shoot Billy with the single-shot.
  • The other man is Mr. Garrow.
  • Georgie works out that if she shoots once, she and the men will immediately be in a shootout.
  • She decides to choose her ground because those men are responsible for Agatha's death, and they're hurting Billy, and they will kill her, too, if they can.
  • She crawls to a concealed place between two boulders and uses her filthy skirt to conceal the glint of the rifle.
  • She waits for a long time, realizing she needs both men in range before she shoots.
  • Bowler Hat is looking for Georgie, but Billy tries to warn him off, telling him she's the best shot in town and she's got a repeating rifle.
  • This makes Bowler Hat a bit skittish, which is understandable.
  • Meanwhile, Georgie decides she doesn't want to kill the men and starts seriously debating what happens after death.
  • She decides to aim at the gun in Bowler Hat's hand, and she manages to shoot both the gun and his thumb off with it.
  • She starts shooting, and once the men get what they came for (the plates Billy took), they hightail it out of there.
  • Georgie runs to Billy and realizes he's in bad shape. She salvages what she can from the camp, including the blue-green ribbon.
  • She wonders why Mr. Garrow didn't take it with him as evidence he had killed Agatha.
  • Because Billy can't get onto Storm, she heaves him onto Long Ears, then she goes back to get her skirt and the gold Bechtler dollars inside it.
  • There's a bullet hole in the skirt, but fortunately she wasn't wearing it when the hole was made.