She came off the far side of the wagon like weather. One moment a drunk was climbing his wheel; the next the woman stood between him and the canvas, one hand on his chest, saying something low and reasonable — and the man, who outweighed her by a mule, swung at her with the bottle. She took the swing on her raised forearm, turned inside it the way a door turns on a hinge, and put him down in the yard dust with an economy that made the whole camp go quiet. But as he fell he grabbed at her coat, and his weight did the rest: a ripping sound, loud in the sudden silence, and the coat tore from collar to pocket and swung open as she straightened, breathing hard, over a groaning man in the dust, with thirty freighters watching.
Gid was standing close. Gid was the only one close enough.
Inside the torn lining, against her ribs where a seamstress's neat stitches had hidden it for a year of hard travel, hung a badge. Not pinned — sewn, flat and clever, the metal dulled with a wash of something dark so it would not wink in the light. A shield. An eagle. Letters around the rim Gid could have read upside down and backward in his sleep — every freighter in the territories knew that shield the way sailors know a lighthouse: Wells Fargo & Co. — Special Agent.
She saw him see it. There was no performance in what happened to her face — just a long, tired acceptance, like a woman watching weather arrive she'd tracked for days.
"Help me with the harness," she said to the yard at large, "before this fool's friends sober up enough to be brave." She walked to the barn, coat held shut in one fist, and Gid followed — there was nothing else in the world he was going to do.
In the barn's dimness she let the coat fall open and took the badge out of the lining the way you'd take a letter out of a book — carefully, by two fingers, as if it might tear.
"Josephine Hartley," she said. "Special Agent, Wells Fargo and Company, second year on this line and first year under a blanket. The coach robbery I told you about was my case, Gid, not my misfortune. I rode that coach to watch the money, saw the guard greet his cousins, and I've been a dead woman walking ever since — because the ring knows a witness lived and doesn't know her name, and a name is the one thing I have spent a year not having. I ride hidden because every station and stage on this road has the ring's ears in it, and a woman traveling openly travels three days and no more."
Gid looked at the badge a long time. "Anna," he said.
"Jo." Her mouth did something that wasn't quite a smile. "My mother called me Josephine when I was in trouble, which was often, and the company calls me Hartley when it's pleased with me, which is seldom. You may call me Jo, since you've earned the shorter word at some expense."
"At some expense." He nodded slowly, and felt the anger of the noon halt settle into something older and heavier and less hot. "You could have shown me this at Pyle's. At the pass. On the road an hour ago."
"I could have shown it to the first man who tore my coat," she said, "which is why it lives in a lining. It isn't you I was hiding it from. It's everyone you'll ever be drunk with. A secret told is a secret halved, and halved again, and somewhere down the halving is a man like Pyle, listening with his whole face." She folded the badge back into the torn cloth with terrible gentleness. "But I'll tell you what I told no one, because you asked to be asked. I am sorry I used your wagon blind, Gid Mercer. I picked you because you're the one man on this line the company itself trusts. Your name is in their books in a clerk's hand, and the word beside it is reliable. I read it before I ever saw your face."
He stood with his scarred hands hanging empty, a freighter who asked no questions, looking at the freight — which had a name, and a badge, and a year of dead men behind its eyes.
"One question," he said. "Partner's question, asked plain, so answer it plain. What else is riding on my wagon that I don't know about?"
For the first time since he'd known her — in a standoff, an ambush, a quarrel and a torn coat — Josephine Hartley looked away from him and did not answer. The silence in the barn was the loudest thing on the road to Cerro Blanco.
"Ask me at the camp," she said at last. "When we arrive. And Gid — " She held the ruined coat together and stepped past him into the yard's hard light, a traveler with a torn coat and nothing else remarkable about her. "Thank you for seeing it and saying nothing in front of thirty men. That's the second time you've saved my life this week. I'm keeping count, even if you won't."
Chapter 16 — The Bait Box
They made camp two miles past the station, in a stand of mesquite where the road bent away from the river, and Gid did his chores the way he always did them — mules first, water, feed, harness hung in order — while the woman who was not Anna sat on the wagon tongue with her torn coat over her knees and a needle in her hand, sewing at the lining as if the day had been ordinary.