Cerro Blanco announced itself the way silver camps do, by noise and smell before sight: the stamp mill's iron thunder rolling down the canyon, woodsmoke and sulfur and mule dung on the wind, and then the road tipped over the last rise and there it was, tents and false-fronts and mine scaffolding climbing the hillsides, and a crowd already gathering at the freight yard gate because word of the payroll wagon had run ahead of it, as word on that road always did.
Gid drove in at noon under a white sky, slow, giving the mules their dignity, and the camp turned out the way camps turn out for money: miners off shift, merchants in aprons, boys running alongside the wheels, and August Pruitt coming down the office steps with both hands out and his good laugh already going, like a man greeting a brother at a depot.
"Gideon Mercer!" he called. "Three days on that road and not a seal broken, I'll wager my house on it. Gentlemen, look at this man. This is what the company means by a carrier."
Hands slapped Gid's shoulders as he climbed down. Somebody put a cigar in his shirt pocket. Pruitt took his hand in both of his and pumped it for the crowd, and if there was anything under the warmth, it was buried deeper than any mine in the territory.
"The box, Gid," Pruitt said, pitching it for the nearest ears, kind and responsible. "Straight into the vault, before God and everybody. The camp sleeps better and so do I." He raised his voice. "Sikes! Bring the hand truck. The payroll goes under lock this minute, and Mr. Mercer witnesses the door shut on it."
It was done in the open, exactly as Jo had said it would be: the strongbox unchained, carried by two yard men with Gid walking beside it like an honor guard, through the office, past the counter, into the vault room where the iron door stood wide. Gid watched it set down on the stone floor. He watched the door swing and the wheel spin and the lock take hold with a sound like a coffin nail. He had hauled that box three days, slept within arm's reach of it, bled near it, and never once put a tool to its seals, and now it sat in the dark behind iron, doing its real work at last, and he felt the strange grief a man feels handing over any load that has cost him something.
"Your receipt," Pruitt said, and signed the paper with a flourish and pressed it into Gid's hand. "And a drink, and dinner tonight at my table — the boys'll see to your team." He clapped Gid's arm. "You look rode hard, friend. Rest. The camp's grateful."
The crowd used the receipt-signing as permission to celebrate itself. The assayer's clerk announced the payroll was in and the camp's credit good again; the storekeeper from the big mercantile caught Gid's sleeve and told him his account, such as it was, stood open through Christmas on the strength of this run alone. Two miners he had hauled for in the spring insisted on standing him a noon drink he did not want, and he drank it standing at the yard rail with the sun hammering his hat brim, and made the jokes the part required, and all the while some back room of his mind went on doing the arithmetic Jo had taught him without meaning to: who stood where, whose eyes stayed on him a beat too long, whose hands were busy at tasks that didn't need doing. Hart the deputy stood by the office steps with his thumbs in his belt, watching the yard the way a man watches a pot he has set to boil. A yard hand Gid didn't know — new since spring, Pruitt's hiring — kept finding work near the wagon box, coiling and recoiling the same rope, and twice his attention crossed Gid's gear where it sat in the shade of the wagon, patient as tide coming in.
Gid noted it and put it away. If a man was going to be framed, the framing would not be stopped by a freighter glaring at ropes.
Gid thanked Pruitt the way the part required, and went back out into the yard to his wagon. The unloading went on around him — crates and barrels, the trailer unhitched, yard men he'd known for years calling jokes across the beds. His own gear came last, as always: bedroll, saddlebags, his kit bag with his name burned into the leather by Sam, years back, with a hot nail and bad spelling — and the wagon itself, empty at last, canvas folded back, rolled by a yard hand to the parking row along the fence with the others.
Beneath the folded canvas in the wagon bed, under a plain gray blanket that every man in that yard had walked past a dozen times without a glance, Jo Hartley lay in the noon heat with her pistol across her stomach and listened to her whole case unpack itself around her, and did not move, and was not seen.
Gid fed and watered his mules in their yard corral, curried the lead pair, and settled his gear by the wagon in the freighters' row — and it was there, with his back to the fence and the long afternoon going gold, that he saw Deputy Hart come down the office steps with two men at his back and a paper in his hand, walking the way men walk when the paper is already signed.
Chapter 20 — The Frame
Hart stopped three paces off, where the whole yard could hear, and put on the voice of the law, which in a bought man sounds like a borrowed coat.