"You've been carrying this since Pyle's."
"I've been carrying it since I knelt by a dead man and read my own road written out before I drove it." Gid's voice stayed level, which cost him something, and she could see it cost him, which was perhaps why she did not look away. "So now I'll ask freight its business, once, because the freight talked first. What was in the envelope, Anna?"
"A report," she said. "Coded. Names, dates, the pattern of the robberies, two stations I believe are watched and one I believe is bought. It went into the pouch because the pouch goes to Las Cruces, and in Las Cruces it comes into the hands of Marshal Tom Weaver, who is the one man on this line I am certain is clean. That is the whole of it. I would have thought a dead man with a waybill in his vest would have told you the important thing about this road, Gid. It isn't me."
"You used my wagon for a post office," he said, "and me for the stamp."
"Yes."
The plainness of it hit harder than any excuse. She sat with her hands around her cup and her eyes on his and let the word stand in the sun between them.
"You don't deny it. You don't dress it. You don't even say you're sorry, and this morning you told me you were sorry for the choosing of me. There's a difference between the two sorrows, I notice."
"There is," she said. "I am sorry I had to pick a man blind. I am not sorry for the letter, and I won't say I am, because I'd mail it again. I'd mail it off your own hat if it stopped the killing on this road. Men have died, Gid — drivers, guards, men with families — died on schedule, because the schedule was sold. My letter is two pages long and it is the first true thing that has ridden this road in a year that wasn't a strongbox. If using your good name as its envelope is the price, I pay it, and I'd pay it with my own name if I had one I could spend."
"You have a name. You just keep it sewn up like everything else about you."
That landed. He saw it land. Her jaw set, and she looked away first — the first time she had ever done it — away across the shimmering flats toward the pass behind them, where a cairn of red stones stood beside a road with a young man under it.
"I have buried people too," she said quietly. "On this line. That's all the biography you get today."
"Then get this much of mine." Gid picked up the stub and put it back against his heart. "Ask me next time. Whatever it is — a letter, a lie, a loaded wagon — ask me. I might say yes. I might even say yes to all of it. But a man who is asked is a partner, and a man who isn't is a tool, and I have been tools for other men's work before, madam, and I did not care for the fit of it."
She was silent a long while. The mules stamped at the flies. The coffee went cold in both their cups.
"All right," she said at last. "Ask, next time. It's a poor bargain for you and you drive a hard one anyway. But hear the end of it: the rider you heard leaving Pyle's — he wasn't carrying my letter. The pouch rides the morning stage. Whatever that man carried into the dark, it went the other direction, toward the office. Toward the desk where the routes are written. Think on that, freighter."
Gid thought on it all afternoon, driving into the falling light with the barrel patched and weeping, and the thought was not a comfortable traveling companion. She rode hidden as always, and at the evening camp they ate in a silence that had changed its nature — not the silence of strangers anymore, but the first silence of people who had quarreled and not finished, which is a louder kind. Neither of them apologized. After supper he mended the barrel's hole with a whittled pine plug and a strip of rawhide, working half by feel, and she held the lantern for him without being asked and without a word — and the light and the work together were a kind of truce that neither of them had signed. The stars came out over the road to the far station, and the stub ticked in his pocket, and he did not sleep until late.
Chapter 15 — The Badge in the Lining
The far station was little more than a mud-walled yard, a well with a windlass, and a barn that leaned like a tired man — but its yard was full of freight outfits camped for water, and yards breed the boredom that ends in somebody bleeding.
Gid had just backed his wagon to the well trough when the noise started — two teamsters from a Santa Fe outfit arguing over a harness trace, graduating the way such arguments do, from words to a shove to a bottle raised. The bottle man was young, thoroughly drunk, and losing, and losing men reach for equalizers: he swung wide, caught the edge of Gid's wagon with his shoulder, and then — drunkards have a genius for the worst available decision — grabbed at the canvas and started to climb the wheel, shouting that Mercer hauled company gold and kept it under a blanket like a miser with a mistress, and wouldn't a look just settle it.