Three days to Cerro Blanco. He had made the run forty times. He knew every yard of it the way a man knows his own scars.
He did not know about the weight that was not on the waybill. He would learn about that in his own time, the way he learned everything on the road: by paying attention to small things, and saying nothing, and watching.
Chapter 2 — The Weight That Breathed
A wagon talks to a man who knows how to listen, and on the first day out of Las Cruces, Gid's wagon was saying small wrong things in a low voice.
It began with the load. Freight settles — every freighter knows that — the sacks slump, the crates find their level, and by noon of the first day a load rides different than it rode at dawn. But this load had settled sideways, a thumb's width of list to the left that hadn't been there at the platform, and when he stopped at the midday rest and walked the wagon the way he always walked it, hand on the iron, hand on the wood, he found the canvas lacing at the back pulled through two eyelets differently than he had tied it. Not loose. Re-tied. A good knot, too — a freight knot, not a thief's knot — but not his knot, and Gid Mercer knew his own knots the way he knew his own handwriting.
He stood there a moment with his hand flat on the warm canvas and the mules cropping at the dry grass and the desert going out white and empty in every direction, and he did a thing that had kept him alive and solvent for twenty years: he did nothing at all.
Thieves took. Whatever this was, it hadn't taken — the seals on the strongbox, which he'd checked without appearing to check, were whole, and the powder was undisturbed, and nothing in the load had the lightened feel of a pillaged crate. So it was not theft. It was presence. Something had gotten into his wagon, at Las Cruces, in the dark before dawn or in the bustle of loading when a dozen hands were on his freight, and something — he did the arithmetic the way he did all arithmetic, slowly and twice — something of roughly a person's weight, that shifted when the wagon shifted and settled when the wagon stopped.
The water barrel told the rest of it. He'd filled it to his mark at the yard. At the evening halt he drew the bung and put his marked stick down and found it an inch low. An inch of water is nothing to a barrel. It is a great deal to a man who measures. Mules don't drink from a bunged barrel. Canvas and wood don't drink at all. An inch was one long drink, taken careful so as not to slosh, or two short ones — the drinking of somebody patient and thirsty and trying hard not to be noticed.
And then there was the knot. He came back to it in his mind the way a tongue comes back to a sore tooth. A thief cuts and ties quick, any knot, because a thief is counting seconds. This knot had been tied by someone with time and with training — someone who had worked freight, or worked around it, and cared how a lacing looked from the outside. That narrowed the world some. It also said the someone had expected to stay. You don't dress a wagon pretty for a visit of an hour. Whoever was in his load had bedded down in it for the whole journey, with water stolen by inches and a patience like a held breath, and a person doesn't do that for mischief. A person does that because the road outside the wagon is worse than the box inside it — because they're running from something, or toward something, or lying in wait for something, and Gid intended to know which before Cerro Blanco knew it first.
Gid replaced the bung. He made his fire small, the way he always did, and cooked his beans and salt pork and ate facing the wagon, and he did not stare at it, and he did not search it. The last was the hard part, and he did it on purpose, because there is a discipline to not-knowing that is worth more than knowledge gotten too early. If there was a person in his load, that person was either harmless and frightened or dangerous and waiting, and in neither case was a man improved by blundering at them in the dark with a lantern. In the one case you scared them into something foolish. In the other you gave them the first move and the shape of your silhouette against your own fire.
Better: let the road do what the road does. A wagon bed is a small country, and whoever was in it had water for a day and no more, and sooner or later a small country makes its citizens come to the border.
He unrolled his bed beneath the wagon, as always, where he could hear the mules and feel the iron of a wheel against his back. He hung his hat on the brake lever. He lay there with his hands behind his head and watched the stars come on in their thousands over the desert, and he listened — to the mules settling, to the harness leather ticking as it cooled, to the canvas breathing in the little night wind.
And once, very faint, from inside the load, under the crates, muffled by sacking and board and a plain gray wool freight blanket he'd folded over the aft crates himself at Las Cruces — a sound that was not wood, and not canvas, and not the road settling.