But in the inside pocket of his vest, folded twice and soft with carrying, there was a paper that had no business being on a dead road agent, and Gid knew it before he had it fully open, the way you know weather.
It was a waybill stub. The company's own printed form — Wells Fargo & Co. across the top in the ornate lettering, the stub torn along the perforated line where the office kept its copy. And on it, in a neat clerk's hand, in ink: the route. Las Cruces to Cerro Blanco by the middle station and the pass. The day — the very day, written in before the fact. And the cargo line, filled out complete and careful as a psalm: One strongbox, sealed, payroll, Cerro Blanco, with the box's number beside it, and under that, a memorandum in smaller writing: no guard riding this run.
The wagon had rolled at dawn three days past. The stub said the man who wrote this had known the road, the day, and the load before the first mule was harnessed.
Gid stood up slowly with the paper in his hand and looked down the cut the way he'd come, at his wagon standing in the open light with the woman upright in the bed watching him, small at that distance and perfectly still.
They had all of them said it in the freight yard for a year, drunk or sober, the way men say a thing they can't prove and can't stop believing: the ring sits where the routes are set. Freighters had been blamed for the robberies on this line. Freighters had been ruined on the word of clerks. Two men Gid knew were in the ground off this road and a third was hauling laundry in El Paso with his name spoiled, and every one of those judgments had rested, at the bottom, on paper that came off an office desk. And all the while the knowledge rode out ahead of the wheels in a neat clerkly hand, folded in a dead man's vest.
He folded the stub once more along its old creases and put it in his own shirt pocket, against his chest, behind the button.
When he got back to the wagon she was down on the ground at the leaders' heads, one hand on the off mule's cheek, talking to it low, and the mule — which bit strangers on principle — stood like a statue being honored. She looked at his face and read it the way she'd read the rim.
"You found something."
"I found the world's whole secret," Gid said, "in a dead man's vest pocket. A waybill stub. Our road, our day, our box — written out in the office before we rolled, down to the note that no guard rode this run. That's how he had me measured up there. He wasn't hunting freight, Anna. He was hunting an appointment."
She was quiet a moment. "They always know," she said at last. "That's the whole of it. That's why —" She stopped herself, visibly, the way a person stops a horse at a cliff's edge, and Gid saw her do it and filed it with the rest of the freight she wouldn't let him inspect.
"We'll cairn him," he said, to spare them both. "There's stone enough. I won't leave a man for the birds in a road I drive, whatever his trade was. Even this one. Especially this one — he's evidence, and I want him found proper when somebody official comes looking, and not scattered."
They built the cairn together on the flat ground beside the cut, stone on stone, her working without a word of complaint and without a word of anything else, her hands quick and sure on the rocks. First they watered the mules, catching the barrel's leak in Gid's hat, a hatful apiece and no more, because the far station was half a day on and the barrel would not live to see it — and neither of them remarked on the strangeness of watering six mules out of a hat beside the hole they were filling with the man who had made it necessary. When it was done Gid stood a moment with his hat in his hands — not for the man's soul, which was God's paperwork, but for the arithmetic of it: a neat hand, an office desk, a stub torn along a line, and a young man under a pile of stones in a canyon who would never spend the money in his wallet.
"Who writes a thing like that," he said, "and sleeps?"
"A man who never has to look at the cairn," she said. "That's the kind that writes them."
They rolled on with the sun high and the water barrel leaking its slow bright thread onto the dust, and the stub in Gid's pocket ticked against his ribs like a second heart.
Chapter 14 — The Mail Pouch
He waited until the noon halt, with the mules picketed in the thin shade of a mesquite flat and the coffee made, and then he took the stub out of his pocket and laid it on the wagon tongue between them like a card played.
"Tell me about the envelope," he said.
She looked at the stub. She looked at him. Nothing in her face changed its arrangement, but she set her cup down.
"At Pyle's station," Gid said. "You asked me to drop a sealed envelope in the mail pouch. A freight claim, you said. Nothing more. I did it without asking — that's my rule, and you knew my rule when you asked, same as you knew my wagon when you hid in it. That night a rider left Pyle's station at a dead run, in the dark, going back toward Las Cruces. I lay in my bedroll and listened to him go and told myself the station's business was the station's business."