He was fifty-five, stout, clean-shaved, with a laugh the miners trusted and a memory like a bank vault, and he had never once, in thirty years of climbing, left a mark of himself on anything that could hang him. That was the whole art of it. Other men robbed. Other men shot. Pruitt only knew things, and knowing, in his experience, had never yet been indicted.
On his desk this morning lay the last piece of the autumn's work, folded in oilcloth: a Wells Fargo waybill, stolen from the Las Cruces office in the spring and kept against this need, and a single coin — a twenty-dollar gold piece, its number in the company's marked list, taken from a coach his men had lifted in June and held back when the rest was divided. He had kept it the way a careful man keeps a spare key.
The deputy came in with the dust still on him. Hart was the camp deputy's name, a man Pruitt had carried through two elections and one disgrace, and he did not sit until he was told.
"Mercer's wagon comes in today," Pruitt said. "Noon, if the road's been kind. He's hauling the payroll box." He said it with the grave air of a man discharging a trust. "There's talk — I don't credit it, Hart, you know I don't credit talk — but there's talk on the Las Cruces road that Gideon Mercer has been opening what he hauls and helping himself these two years. That his brother's crowd never disbanded. That the road agents leave his loads alone for a reason."
Hart's face worked. "Folks like Gid Mercer here, Mr. Pruitt."
"Folks liked his brother," Pruitt said gently. "Folks are not a jury. You'll do it by the book, in daylight, where everyone can see it's fair. When his rig's in the yard and the box is off it — safe in my vault, mind, the company will want it under lock the moment it arrives — you search his kit. Every freighter carries his personal bag by the wagon box. If there's nothing, there's nothing, and I'll shake his hand myself and stand him a dinner." He slid the oilcloth across the desk without seeming to. "But if there should be, say, a stolen waybill in the sewn pocket of that bag — company paper, Hart, stolen paper — and a marked coin off a robbed coach… well. Then the camp will know what its road agents have been feeding on, and it won't be August Pruitt's office, it'll be the man who hauled for them all along."
"You want me to put it there." Hart said it to the floor.
"I want," Pruitt said, "the search to find whatever it finds. How it comes to be findable is a detail I leave to conscience and opportunity, and I find, Hart, that opportunity favors a man while a wagon is being unloaded and its driver is being welcomed by his employer's superintendent with a cigar in front of the whole yard." He stood and came around the desk and put his hand on the deputy's shoulder, warm as a father's. "You've a boy coming. Sergeants on the territorial force are chosen from men who've closed cases. Big cases."
When Hart had gone — with the oilcloth inside his coat, walking like a man carrying a coal — Pruitt poured himself the good brandy he kept for closures and stood a while at the window, watching the yard wake: wagons, mules, his clerk Sikes unlocking the vault room, the assay office spilling miners into the street.
By nightfall the box would be in his vault, the bills would be company's marked money that no honest audit could ever trace to anything but a sealed payroll — and what a vault gave up in the dark, split among men who could not read serial numbers, was nobody's evidence at all. Riggs would be paid. Hart would be promoted grateful. Mercer would hang or rot in Santa Fe, either way finished, either way the line's robberies would end with him — Pruitt would see to that too; a ring that had served its turn was just another debt to close.
He finished the brandy and went down to walk the yard the way he walked it every morning, so that no man would mark this morning as different. He praised a harness mender. He asked after Sikes's mother's cough. He stood in the vault room doorway while the clerk swept, and looked at the iron door and the stone floor where the box would sit by two o'clock, and felt nothing in his chest but the pleasant weight of a thing arranged. On the way back he passed the freighter row and counted the empty slots at the fence where the parked wagons waited for Mercer's rig.
Riggs worried him, a little, the way a cracked rung worries a man who owns the ladder. Riggs spent loudly and talked in saloons, and money that talks has ended better men than August Pruitt. But Riggs would be paid last and paid from the box itself, in the dark, and a man paid in full is a man halfway gone already. The hills would take the rest of him, in time, the way the hills took everything Pruitt was finished with.
"Every entry in its place," he said to the empty office, and drank.
Chapter 18 — The Last Miles
They laid the plan the way Gid laid out a harness, piece by piece, nothing assumed, nothing left to luck, in the last hour of the last night camp, with Cerro Blanco lying invisible beyond the hills and the mules breathing steam into the cold.
"Noon," Jo said. "Not morning, not dusk. Noon, when the yard's full and the street's full and every act has witnesses. Pruitt deals in private arrangements. So we give him none."