"Gideon Mercer. I got a warrant here, sworn out of Las Cruces, to search your personal effects on suspicion of freight theft." He held the paper up and did not offer it. "Step away from your gear, please. Boys, bring his bag here into the light where it's fair."
A quiet went out across the freighters' row the way cold goes out across water. Gid set down the currycomb he was holding. He set it down carefully, in its place, because his hands wanted work and he would not give these men the sight of them shaking. He thought of the wagon twenty feet behind him and the gray blanket in it, and he did not look toward it, not once, not with any part of his face. Whatever else this day took, it would not take her with it.
"You've known me nine years, Hart," he said.
"That's why it grieves me." The deputy nodded at the two yard men. "Open it. Fair and open. Everything out on the tarp, item by item, so no man can say a thing was palmed."
It was thorough theater and Gid watched it like a man watching weather come over a ridge — his shirts, his razor, Sam's old harmonica, a book of routes in his own hand, tobacco, a tin of salve — laid out in a row for the yard to read like print. The bag had a sewn pocket inside the lining, flat against the back, where he kept his company's license and a spare teamster's needle. His fingers knew it the way they knew the reins.
"Nothing in the pocket," one of the men said, and Hart said, "Look again. Properly."
The man's hand went in a second time, deeper, hunting, and Gid saw it in his face before he spoke — the small startled triumph of a man finding what he had not left there a moment before and choosing, in front of witnesses, not to know it.
"Deputy." The hand came out with a folded paper, oilcloth-stained, and something small and gold that caught the sun. "Waybill, looks like. And a coin."
Hart unfolded the paper with the reverence of a hangman reading a sentence. "Wells Fargo waybill," he announced, "for the June payroll coach. Stolen out of the Las Cruces office in the spring — there's the office mark on the theft list, and here's the paper, in this man's bag." He held up the coin between finger and thumb. "Twenty dollars gold, and the number on it —" he squinted, reciting what he'd been fed like a lesson — "the number on it is on the company's marked list, off the June coach that was robbed at the pass. The coach Sam Mercer's brother —" he caught himself, and let the yard do it for him.
The yard did it. Gid heard his brother's name go through the men like wind through dry grass, and under it the uglier sound underneath, the sound of suspicion finding its shape: the loads never taken, the routes always known, the brother dead in a robbed coach, and here at last was the sense of it, all of it, folded neat as a waybill in a sewn pocket.
"Somebody sewed my bag a present on the road, Hart," Gid said, level as a plumb line. "Or in this yard, while my employer's superintendent was welcoming me with a cigar. I never laid eyes on either item. I never opened a sealed freight in my life, and there's not a man on this line will tell you different."
"Then they'll tell it to the judge," Hart said, and there was relief in him now, the worst part done. "Gideon Mercer, I arrest you for theft of company property and complicity in the road robberies. You'll be held for the Marshal." The irons came out. They went on in front of everyone, in the fair daylight Pruitt had promised, and the click of them was very loud in the quiet yard.
Twenty feet away, in the parked wagon, beneath a folded canvas and a plain gray blanket, Jo Hartley lay with her badge against her ribs under the coat lining and her pistol in her hand and her teeth set so hard her jaw ached, and watched through a seam's width of light as they took him. Every part of her training and every serial number in her memory said: not yet. The waybill was Pruitt's tell — it proved the frame but not the ring; the marked coin proved June but not the hand that fed Riggs's men; if she rose now, the yard would get a scandal and a freed freighter, and the men who had sold Sam Mercer would scatter into the hills by dark and be selling routes again by Christmas. Her moment was the vault, and the money moving, and the Marshal riding in on the strength of it — and so she held, and held, and let them march Gideon Mercer past the wagon at irons' length, close enough that she heard the chains, close enough that she saw him keep his eyes straight ahead like a man hauling through weather, and the holding cost her more than any shot she had ever taken.
Chapter 21 — The Cell
The cell was adobe and iron and eight feet by ten, and Gid had measured it with his eyes so many times since morning that he knew where every shadow fell before it fell. There was a cot. There was a bucket. There was a window high in the back wall with bars thick as a man's thumb, and through it, all afternoon, had come the sounds of Cerro Blanco getting drunk on his name.