Chapter 1 — The Load at Las Cruces
The yard was still blue with morning when Gid Mercer backed his wagon to the loading platform, and the mules stood in their harness breathing steam into the cold. Las Cruces woke the way freight towns always woke — with iron. A hammer rang somewhere off the yard, steady and unhurried, and the cook at the company mess was dragging a crate across the boards, and the smell of coal smoke and mule sweat and dust already ground fine by a thousand wheels hung over everything like a held breath.
Gid worked the way he worked everything: from the front of the wagon to the back, and no step taken twice. Crates of lamp oil. Sacks of flour, milled close and double-bagged against the road. A keg of nails. Two spools of wire for the new fence line at Cerro Blanco, a crate of tinned peaches in syrup that would arrive tasting of tin no matter what a man did, a plowshare wrapped in sacking, three cases of blasting powder that he set apart and bedded in straw with his own hands, because powder was the one freight that punished a man for other people's carelessness. He chalked each piece as it went in. He marked the weights in his head and then in the little oilcloth book he kept in his coat, because a freighter's memory was a fine thing until the day it wasn't.
"Señor Gid." Emilio was already up on the platform, skinny as a lathe, sixteen years old and made entirely of eagerness. The boy had attached himself to the yard the way burrs attach to a sock, and to Gid in particular, for reasons Gid had never asked after. "The big man says the rest comes now."
"The big man can bring it at a walk," Gid said. "Nothing goes on this wagon at a run."
August Pruitt came out of the office with his coat over his arm and his smile already fitted for the day. He was the superintendent of the Cerro Blanco office and he had the kind of face that made men want to be agreed with. He watched the last of the crates go in with an approving nod, the way a man watches a horse he owns run well.
"You're a careful man, Mercer," he said. "That's why this load is yours."
"I haul what's loaded," Gid said.
"Yes." Pruitt's smile widened a fraction. "And you don't ask freight its business. The whole line knows it. It's why you're trusted." He gestured, and two men came out of the office carrying a strongbox between them on a pole sling, the way men carry a coffin or a sleeping child. Iron-bound oak, double-locked, and across the lid a seal of red wax big as a man's palm, unbroken. They set it in the wagon bed amidships, and Gid bedded it in sacking himself and wedged it so it would not walk an inch in three days of road.
"That goes to my vault at Cerro Blanco," Pruitt said. "No other hands. Not at the stations, not for any reason. If a station keeper tells you there's an inspection, you tell him to ride to Cerro Blanco and inspect it there."
"Somebody always wants to inspect something," Gid said.
"Then you'll enjoy telling them no." Pruitt handed him the waybill. Gid read it the way he read weather, front to back and then once more for what it didn't say. The strongbox was listed as company instruments, sealed, weight eighty pounds, value declared at nothing at all, which was a lie of a particular and deliberate kind — men declared nothing on paper for things worth everything. He folded the bill and put it in his book and said nothing, because asking was not his trade and never had been.
Emilio helped him stretch the canvas and lace it down, and the boy worked the knots twice, showing off, and Gid let him. The boy's hero-worship was a weight on a young back but it was an honest one.
"When my papers come I will drive a stage," Emilio announced, cinching. "Fast horses. Not mules that argue."
"Mules argue because they're right half the time," Gid said. "You'll learn the difference at your own expense, same as me."
He checked the water barrel last, the way he checked it every run — hoops sound, bung tight, filled to the mark he'd cut inside the rim with his knife years ago. Full. He swung up to the seat and took the lines and the six mules leaned into the collars together, and the big wagon rolled out of the Las Cruces yard into the red first light with the dust rising behind it like something being remembered.
At the gate he stopped the team once, the way he always stopped at the start of a run, and walked the six mules nose to tail with his hand on every collar and his eye on every hoof. The lead mare had a stone bruise coming on the off fore and he made a note of it in the book, not because he would forget it but because writing a thing down made it behave. The swing team was fresh and foolish and would need watching the first day. The wheelers were old professionals who regarded him, the load, and the whole enterprise with the deep, earned indifference of mules who had seen it all twice. He scratched the near wheeler behind the ear, where the harness had polished the hair away years ago, and got a sigh for his trouble that smelled of hay and dust.
"All right, then," he told them. "You've hauled worse for worse men. Show me the same courtesy."