"I remember it's longer at night," Caleb said.
"It is longer every year. That is not the ground." Tomás looked up at the moon. "Box Canyon, by your old reckoning?"
"An hour. Less, the way the moon rides." Caleb swung back up into the saddle. "It's the coming back that'll be long, if they've got a watch on the mouth."
Asto had been listening with his head down. Now he lifted it. "They will not watch the mouth," he said. "Delgado told it plain. They come on the second night to move the box. They are not afraid of the canyon. They are only afraid of being late to it." He gathered his reins with his bound hand and winced as the movement pulled at his side. "We must not be late either."
The last mile they led the horses, walking on the soft sand at the wash's edge, and came up the long talus shoulder to the rim above Box Canyon with the moon standing over the far wall. Below them the canyon ran black and silver, narrow as a street, its floor a pale ribbon of sand between walls that fell a hundred feet. The mouth opened southward, wide enough for a wagon, choked with fallen rock and shadow.
Asto pointed with his good arm, down and to the left of the mouth, where the wall had shed a fan of broken stone.
"There," he said. "Where the wall came down. Three flat stones together, set like a table." He was breathing hard from the climb and holding his side, but his eyes were on the canyon floor, and they were certain. "Under them. I lay on the rim and watched them dig."
Caleb looked down a long time. The moonlight lay on the stones like frost. Nothing moved in the canyon. Nothing had moved there in two days, he guessed, except lizards and the wind.
"All right," he said quietly. "Let's go down and borrow the truth."
Chapter 17 — Box Canyon
The way down was a crack in the rim that deer had made and men had improved, marked by three small stones piled at its head. Caleb went first, sideways, one hand on the rock; Asto came behind him slow, sliding where he had to, his jaw set against every jolt; and Tomás waited at the top with the horses until Caleb whistled once, low, and then he brought them down the long switchback to the boulders at the trail's foot, big as wagons, where a man could hold three horses in black shadow and hear the whole canyon mouth.
"Go on," Tomás breathed. "If trouble comes, it comes up the mouth. I'll hear it before you do."
The canyon floor was cold sand and the smell of stone that never sees the sun. Asto led the last hundred yards, limping a little now that he could afford to, and stopped at the fan of fallen rock where the three flat stones lay edge to edge, too even to be an accident of the wall.
"Two men to a stone," he said. "I counted their curses while they set them."
Caleb got his fingers under the first stone and heaved. It grated aside with a sound like a tooth being drawn. The second went harder, and Asto put his good shoulder to it beside him, both of them straining, the stone rocking and then toppling flat into the sand. Underneath was earth that had been dug and tamped — darker than the ground around it, and softer under Caleb's knife. They worked it loose with their hands and the knife, passing the dirt back between their knees like animals digging, until Caleb's knuckles struck wood.
The strongbox was iron-bound oak, heavy-shouldered, with a stencil on its lid worn to a ghost: a few letters, a number, the broad stamp of the United States Army half scoured away by one burial. The hasp was new. Caleb had brought a short iron bar from the barn wrapped in his bedroll, against just this; he set its chisel edge under the hasp and leaned his weight on it slow, so the screws drew out of the wood with a sigh instead of a crack, and the lid came up on its hinges without a sound worth hearing.
Inside, packed tight as a drawer, lay canvas money sacks, tied and wax-sealed, row on row — Army pay, coin and scrip together, enough to run a regiment or ruin a valley. On top of the sacks lay a parcel wrapped in oilcloth and tied with twine.
Caleb lifted the parcel out and undid the twine with his teeth. The oilcloth fell open on a book: the paymaster's ledger, bound in marbled boards, its pages ruled in a clerk's fine hand — names, ranks, sums, month upon month of them, each line a man who had been owed and a few who now never would be. Under the book, heavy as a pistol in his palm, lay the paymaster's brass seal on its turned wooden handle, the die cut deep and clean.
Caleb turned it to the moonlight. "That's the Army's own hand," he said. "That says who had this box last, and it wasn't any Kahlin. A thief melts a seal or buries it in a river. He doesn't leave it lying on the money like a name on a gate."
Asto was looking down at the sacks. "It would feed my people all winter," he said, not greedy, only stating it, the way a man states the weather. "All winter, and horses besides."
"It would hang them first." Caleb rewrapped the ledger and the seal in their oilcloth and tied the parcel into the grain sack he had brought. "This is the money they say your people stole, Asto. The day we touch one sack of it, we stop being witnesses and we become Sutter's story, with the ending already wrote. Let it lie. It's a true thing where it lies."