It had not been ordinary. A teamster in the station yard, drunk and showing off, had grabbed at her sleeve; the seam had gone with a sound like tearing paper, and there it had been, in the gray light, for half a second before she snatched it closed: a Wells Fargo badge, sewn into the lining of her coat.
She had told him the rest while the mules ate. Josephine Hartley. Special agent. The name she had given him at gunpoint was a dead woman's name and a live woman's lie, and she was sorry for the shape of it, though not, she said, for the necessity.
Now the needle went in and out, patient as rain, and Gid stood with his hat in his hands and looked at the wagon bed where the strongbox sat chained and sealed under canvas, and he asked the question he should have asked at Las Cruces.
"What's in the box, Jo?"
She did not answer at once. Then she set the sewing down.
"Bait," she said. "That's what's in the box."
She told it flat, the way a person reads a bill of lading. The bills inside were real money and marked money both — a company issue, recorded, every serial number written twice: once on a sealed list inside the box itself, and once in her memory, where no searcher could find it and no fire could burn it. The payroll the Cerro Blanco miners were waiting on had never been in that box at all. It had gone north by rail and come down the far side with a cavalry escort, quiet as snowfall, and been paid out two days ago.
"The box is a hook," she said. "The ring has taken every fat load on this line for a year, Gid. They know the routes, they know the values, they know them before the wheels roll. So the company built them a load worth taking, and put it on the one wagon on this road that has never lost one." She looked at him steadily. "Yours."
"And put you in it."
"And put me in it. To see who came for it, and where it went, and whose hands it ended in."
The fire ticked. Out in the dark a mule stamped and blew. Gid thought about the water barrel riding low on the first day, and the weight that breathed under his canvas, and all the small wrong signs he had catalogued and kept to himself, the way he kept everything.
"I was bait too," he said. "Say it plain."
"You were the hook's barbs," she said. "I'm sorry for that part more than the rest. You were never supposed to know, and you were never supposed to be hurt. If they'd taken the box on the road, I'd have ridden the trail of it. If it gets to Cerro Blanco whole —" she nodded toward the wagon — "then it goes into the hands it's meant for, and I watch whose hands they are."
"And if the hands belong to a friend of mine?"
"Then you'll know what kind of friend he was."
He was angry, and he let himself be angry, standing there with his hat crushed in his scarred hands — angry at the company, at her, at the easy use that had been made of his good name, which was the only capital he owned in the world. But underneath the anger, older and heavier, there was the thing he had not said to any living soul in two years, and it came up out of him now like water out of a cracked barrel, because she had finally dealt him the truth and a man pays debts in kind.
"My brother Sam drove stage on this line," he said. "Two years ago last spring. They hit his coach at the pass yonder, the far side of it, where the walls come close. The guard lived long enough to say they knew the strongbox key was in the driver's boot. Knew it. Sam never told a soul that but me, years before, drunk at Christmas." His voice went rough and he let it. "Somebody in an office sold that, Jo. Sold it for drinking money, maybe. I have hauled this road since with my teeth shut, waiting to learn whose handwriting was on it."
Jo had gone very still. "I didn't know," she said. "The file said a brother. It didn't say — I would have told you sooner."
"No," Gid said. "You'd have done your job. So would I." He put his hat back on, and that was the end of the anger, spent like powder smoke. "We finish the run. The box rides to Cerro Blanco on my wagon, sealed as it left, and you ride under my blanket, and whatever hand reaches for it — we'll both be watching. That's the whole of it."
"That's the whole of it," she said, and picked up her needle again, and the small sound of the sewing went on into the dark like something being mended that might, with care, hold.
Chapter 17 — What Pruitt Wants
August Pruitt believed a town could be read like a ledger, and Cerro Blanco, from the window of his office above the freight yard, read exactly as he liked: every entry in its place, every debt quietly owed to him.
The camp was silver-rich and money-hungry and entirely dependent on the road to Las Cruces, and the road ran through his office the way a river runs through a millrace. He set the routes. He sealed the values. He knew which wagon carried powder, which carried payroll, which carried nothing worth a dead man's trouble, and for a year now that knowledge had been leaving his desk at night in other men's saddlebags, and coming back to him in coin that asked no questions.