"He'll come out to meet the wagon."
"He'll have to. The superintendent welcomes the payroll in person, or the whole camp asks why. He'll shake your hand, he'll call for the box to be carried to his vault for safekeeping, and he'll do it all smiling, because that's his armor — being seen to do everything properly." She fed a stick into the fire with care. "That's when it starts, whatever it is. When the box goes into his vault, the clock starts on his greed. The ring believes that money is real and spendable. Sooner or later — a night, two nights — he'll open it and pay his people out of it. And those bills are named, Gid. I carry their names in my head. The day one of them shows up in Riggs's fist in a saloon, this whole rotten year ends."
"And if he doesn't open it?"
"Then the Marshal opens it in front of him, with witnesses, and asks him to explain the sealed list inside. Either way the box is a snare and Cerro Blanco is where it shuts." Her mouth did something that was not quite a smile. "What I don't know is what he has planned for you. A man who sets a trap usually sets two."
They had been over it and over it. What she knew, she told him: that the ring had informants at the stations; that the ambush at the pass had been a probe gone wrong for them the moment she fired from the wagon bed; that Marshal Weaver waited in Las Cruces for a word that could not come by telegraph, because telegraphs, on this line, had ears. What she did not know — who in Cerro Blanco, besides the man who set the routes, would move and how — she said so plainly, and Gid respected the plainness the way he respected a true gauge.
"One more thing," she said at last, and her voice changed on it. "Tomorrow I ride under the blanket again."
He looked up. "We're three days past needing that. Any man on this road who's going to report you has had his chances."
"Not for the road." She shook out the gray wool freight blanket, plain as a shroud, the one that had hidden her since the first night, and folded it over her arm. "For the yard. Listen to me, because this is the part you'll hate. Whatever Pruitt does, he'll do it with you standing in the open and no friend near. If I'm seen — if the camp learns there's an agent inside this business — every man in the ring scatters before the Marshal ever leaves Las Cruces, and the proof scatters with them. My whole value is that nobody knows I exist. So I go in the way I came: freight. Under this. And I stay under it while you unload, and after, in the parked wagon, until the moment there's something worth more than my secret. That's my choice, Gid. Not your order and not your burden."
He was quiet a long while. The fire settled. Somewhere above them the wind worried the mesquite.
"You'll bake under canvas at noon," he said.
"I've been practicing all week."
They settled the signals last, because signals were where good plans went to die. No whistle, no knock — sounds carried in yards. She would know the box was vaulted by the iron door's clang, which carried further than any voice. If men came for Gid, she would hear that too, and she would do nothing. "If they take you," she said, "they take you to a cell, not a grave. Pruitt needs you tried, not murdered; a murdered freighter raises questions a hanged one answers. I can work with a cell. Give me the nights, Gid. The nights are when his kind does its real business, and nights are when I'll do mine."
"And if he hangs his case on me before the Marshal ever hears?"
"He can't hang it fast enough. Territory law wants a magistrate, a hearing, a record — and records take days, and days are all I need." She reached out and closed his hand around the edge of the blanket, the way a person seals a bargain with the only cloth that mattered. "Under this I go, and out from under it I come when the money moves. Not before. Whatever you hear, whatever they say to you in that yard — you haul your part of the road and I'll haul mine."
"Partners, then," Gid said, to hear how it sounded.
"Partners," she said, "would have split the water fairer in the dry camp." And that was as close as either of them came to laughing that night.
"And if what he does to me happens faster than your moment?"
"Then I'll choose faster," she said, and there was that in her tone which had faced him down over a pistol in the dark and had not wavered since, and he nodded and let it lie, because a man does not argue with a partner about her own ground. Partner. The word had arrived somewhere on the road without asking his leave, and he let that lie too.
They broke camp in the blue hour. She took her place in the wagon bed among the crates, the blanket drawn over her, the short-barreled pistol at her hand and invisible, and Gid climbed to the seat and took up the lines with the strongbox chained at his boots and three days of dust on his hat, and the six mules leaned into the collars, and the last miles began to unspool under the wheels like a fuse laid toward powder.
Chapter 19 — Cerro Blanco