Asto nodded slowly, and something in his face eased, as if a weight he had not mentioned had been set down. "Leave it," he agreed. "It is a true thing where it lies."
They swung the lid down and Caleb was reaching to drag the first flat stone back into its place when his fingers, combing the seam where stone met earth, found leather.
He drew it out hand over hand from the grit. A hatband. Studded along its length with silver conchos, bright even dulled with sand — the leather snapped short, one concho bent double where it had torn against the stone.
Asto went entirely still. "His," he said. "The man on watch, when I ran. I came over this cairn in the dark with his knife already at my arm, and I caught his hat brim going past—" he lifted his bound forearm a little "—and it tore, and I heard the stones ring with it as I fell. I did not know it stayed. I thought it was in the sand somewhere, or nowhere."
"Sutter's worn silver conchos on his hat since I've known him," Caleb said. "He was smiling in San Miguel two days ago, in a plain band." He wrapped the hatband around the oilcloth parcel, conchos outward, like a belt on a bundle. "He's been missing this. He just doesn't know where he left it."
The third stone still lay aside and the cairn stood open like a mouth when the pebble clicked against the rock at Caleb's boot — Tomás's signal, thrown, not spoken.
An instant later it came up the black throat of the canyon, unhurried and certain: the clink of shod hooves on stone, and a lantern's glow swinging low between the walls, still far off, coming on.
"They have come early," Asto said.
"Then we've kept them waiting long enough." Caleb stood, the sack in his fist, the iron bar forgotten in the sand. "Leave the stones as they are. Go."
Chapter 18 — The Chase
They were halfway to the boulders when the lantern party saw the cairn.
Six riders and a pack mule, strung out along the canyon floor, and the man in front reined up so hard his horse sat back on its haunches. The lantern swung wild in his hand. "The stones—" his voice rang off the walls "—the stones are dug, the box is open—"
Then he saw them, or saw the shapes of them against the rocks, and the shout turned into something else. The first shot came from the canyon, not from Caleb's party — a lance of flame and the crack of a carbine, the ball striking sparks off the boulder above Tomás's head. The second came a breath later and tore the air between Caleb and Asto.
"Mount!" Caleb roared, and fired once — not at the men. At the lantern. The glass went with a small bright death and the canyon fell into moonlight and confusion, horses plunging, a man cursing in the dark. It was all the mercy any of them were going to get, and Caleb spent it running.
Asto was already in the saddle, hauled up by Tomás with a hand under his elbow, and Tomás swung onto his own horse firing backward one-handed — over their heads, at the canyon mouth, balls cracking into the rock face above the riders to bring dust and splinters down and make them duck and check. Breaking contact. That was all. Caleb came out of the boulders last with the grain sack tied hard to his saddle strings, and they went up the switchback in a clatter of stone with the shouts rising behind them, and burst over the rim onto the flats with the whole moonlit desert spread out north like a parade ground — nowhere to hide, nothing to do but run.
So they ran. The flats were hardpan and scattered brush, and the three of them stretched out in a line, Tomás on the left with his hat gone, Caleb on the right where he could watch Asto between them. Behind, the pursuit sorted itself out of the canyon mouth and came on in earnest — six men who knew that what rode in Caleb's grain sack was worth more than the strongbox, because it was the difference between a story told in San Miguel and a rope at Fort Alvord.
The firing settled into the rhythm of a running fight, shots at the top of a gallop's stride, most of them wasted on the dark. Caleb fired twice at the lead rider's horse — not the man — and saw the horse check and swerve at the muzzle flash and the ball's strike in the dirt before its chest, and the rider behind it pile up and slew sideways. Tomás put a ball through the shoulder of a horse on the left and the animal went down rolling in a storm of dust; its rider came loose and tumbled clear into the brush, and two more men hauled up to fish him out of the dark. That was four accounted for and two still coming, and the horses under Caleb's party were beginning to blow.
Asto was failing. Caleb saw it before Asto would say it: the young man's back, straight for the first mile, had begun to fold by inches, and his right hand — the bound one — had lost the reins entirely. His shirt was dark along his left side, black in the moonlight, the graze torn open by the climbing and the riding, soaking through Sihas's careful bandage.
"Stay with me," Caleb called, and rode in close on Asto's left and got a hand flat against his back, holding him in the saddle the way you'd hold a fence post true while the wire was strung. He took Asto's reins up over the horn with his other hand.
"The seal—" Asto's voice was shredded thin.
"I've got the seal. I've got the book. All you've got to keep is the saddle, and I'm keeping that for you too. Lean on my hand and ride."