Tomorrow was the pass. Gid had been turning it over since noon the way you turn a stone in your pocket. The road to Cerro Blanco had exactly one place where a wagon could be killed in private, and it was six miles ahead: a cut through red rock where the walls leaned close and the track narrowed to the width of one wagon, and whatever happened there stayed there until the buzzards filed their report.
"You ought to know what tomorrow is," he said.
"I know the road," she said. "I've ridden it."
"In a coach."
"In a coach." She turned her tin plate in her hands. The fire was small — he kept it small on this stretch, always — and it lit the underside of her face and left the rest in shadow. "Gid."
He waited. She did not often begin with his name.
"Anna isn't my name."
The fire ticked. Somewhere out in the dark a mule stamped and blew, and the harness chains answered, small and far.
"I'm obliged for the news," Gid said at last. "It's the first true thing you've shipped on this wagon. Everything else has been freight I wasn't allowed to inspect."
"Don't make it harder than it is."
"I haul what's loaded," he said. "I don't ask freight its business. You've heard me say it. But freight doesn't generally look back at me over a fire and correct its own billing."
She set the plate down flat on the ground between her boots, careful, the way people set down a thing they do not trust their hands with.
"Last spring I rode the Cerro Blanco coach as a passenger," she said. "Three men stopped it on the far side of the pass you're so worried about. They weren't road trash, Gid. They had the strongbox open before the driver finished setting his brake, and they called the guard by his first name, and the guard — God rest him — answered like a man greeting cousins. I was inside the coach with a shawl over my face and a pistol in my lap under a book, and I saw all of it. Faces. Voices. One of them laughed about the office. About the man who writes the routes."
"You were a passenger who happened to see it."
"I was a passenger who saw it, yes." She looked at the fire. "And men have been hunting me since, because I am the only soul who did. I got out of Las Cruces the only way left that they wouldn't watch — under a blanket, in a wagon whose driver never loses a load and never asks questions. I picked you the way you'd pick a wall to lean on. I'm sorry for that part. I'm not sorry for the rest."
"The marriage," Gid said.
"There was a marriage arranged, once, when I was nineteen, to a mine manager with hands like shovels. I refused it, and it cost me my family, such as it was. That part of the story was true." A thin smile, gone quick. "The best cover is mostly true. It wears better."
"And the name."
"You don't get the name." She said it flat, not cruel. "A name is a rope, Gid. Men can follow a rope. If they take you and ask — and men like these ask with tools — you can't give them what you don't hold. It's a kindness, though it won't feel like one."
He poked the fire with a stick and watched the sparks go up and die against the dark. He thought about the weight that breathed in his wagon bed, the water gone lower than it should have been, the pistol leveled steady out of the blankets that first night. He thought about the pass, and the walls leaning close, and a laugh about the man who writes the routes.
"Tomorrow," he said, "when we're in the cut, you stay under that blanket whatever you hear. A hidden thing is only worth what it costs if it stays hidden."
"And if they stop the wagon?"
"They won't stop it."
"You can't know that."
"No," he said. "I can't." He poured the last of the coffee onto the ground, a black thread in the firelight. "But I've hauled this road eleven years, and I know how I'd stop me. I'd do it in the cut, from the high side, with the sun behind the rim. So I'll drive it at first light, fast, with the team fresh and the reins in my teeth if I have to. You keep that short pistol of yours where your hand already is. If the day goes ordinary, you'll never touch it."
She studied him a long moment. "You don't ask anything else. You never do. It's the strangest thing about you, and I've decided it's the best one."
"Asking never lightened a load," Gid said, and stood to check the team.
Chapter 12 — The Canyon Pass
They rolled into the cut at first light with frost still blue in the shadow of the walls.
The pass was a wound in the red rock, a quarter mile of narrow track with the cliffs going up sixty feet on the off side and forty on the near, close enough that the wagon's canvas brushed stone in the tightest place. Gid drove standing, reins in both hands, his rifle across the footboard where his knee could find it. Behind him, under the gray blanket among the crates, there was a shape that did not move and barely breathed, and he had told her once and once only: whatever you hear.
The mules knew the place. They went ears-forward and quick, picking their footing on the scree, and the wagon sang its road song — iron and wood and leather, the water barrel sloshing its steady note. Halfway through, where the cut bent and the far light showed as a pale gate at the end, Gid saw the thing he had been seeing in his sleep for two nights: a scatter of fresh rock on the track that had not fallen by itself, and above it, on the rim, the wink of light on metal that was not stone.