Riggs was doing the talking. Gid could not make out most of the words through two walls, but he knew the tune of it — that loud, easy voice out of the saloon across the yard, rising and falling, and other voices rising with it, and now and then a laugh that ended too quick. A man telling a story often enough starts to believe the story is the town's own idea. By dark there were more boots on the saloon porch than there had been at noon, and a lantern had been lit out there, which meant the drinking meant to run late.
He sat on the cot with his scarred hands loose between his knees and did the arithmetic a freighter does. The waybill and the marked coin had been found in his kit bag, sewn-pocket and all, and half the yard had watched them found, which was the point of them. Pruitt had everything set and liked his paperwork in order; a rope in the dark was untidy, and untidy things got written down wrong. Weaver was a day out, if the woman's word was good. The deputy who had arrested him was bought and knew it and was drinking against the knowing. Gid reckoned he had the night, anyway. Maybe less of it than Riggs's crowd intended to leave him, if somebody's courage got wet enough to climb the jail steps.
"Mercer." The deputy's voice at the door, thick at the edges. "Woman here with your supper. Company sends it. Ain't that Christian."
Keys. The door opened on lamplight and a woman in a gray dress with a shawl over her hair, carrying a tray in both hands and a folded laundry bundle under one arm, eyes down like the floor owed her money. The deputy held the lamp and watched her the way a lazy man watches weather — without interest, because she was only the laundress.
She set the tray on the cot. Beans, coffee, a heel of bread. Her hands were steady and her sleeves were pushed up, and when she leaned to move the cup, the shawl slipped enough that he saw the line of her jaw.
"Eat it while it's hot," Jo Hartley said, very low. "And listen the same way."
Gid picked up the spoon. "I figured you'd be on a horse."
"I was. Now I'm doing laundry." She straightened the cup an inch, a woman arranging a tray. "Weaver got the reports. All of them. He's riding with six men and he's a day out — no more than that, whatever they tell you in here. He comes when the evidence can stand up in front of him, Gid, and not before, so we have to be the evidence standing. Hold on till then."
"Riggs is buying drinks."
"I know. I folded his shirt this afternoon." Her mouth barely moved. "Let him buy. A crowd that's been bought drinks is loud, not brave, and Pruitt doesn't want a rope — a rope asks questions afterward. He wants it clean and official." She glanced toward the door. The deputy had stepped back to the porch edge, lamp in hand, watching the saloon. "There's a route book in his office. Schedules, cargo, his own hand in the margins. I'm going to read it tonight."
"Alone."
"It reads better alone." She picked up the laundry bundle and held it against her like a shield of plain cloth. "Listen to me. Whatever they do tomorrow, don't run and don't swing. A dead man can't testify and a running man looks guilty from any window. Stand still and let it come to you. Promise me that the way you'd promise about freight."
He looked at her over the spoon. "I haul what's loaded," he said. "I don't ask it its business. And I don't set it down before the end of the road."
Something in her face eased a fraction. "That's the most romantic thing a man ever said to me, and we're both going to pretend you didn't." She turned for the door, then stopped. "Eat the beans too. You'll want the strength."
The deputy took the tray out an hour later, still warm from Gid's hands, and locked the door with more care than he'd shown all day, as if care now could be entered on his side of the ledger. Gid got up once in the dark and set his shoulder against the barred window and looked out at what the glass would show him: the yard gone to shadow, the office dark, one lamp in the saloon and the men around it passing a bottle hand to hand like a collection plate. Somebody out there said his name and somebody else laughed, and he stood and listened until the lamp went out and the porch emptied into the night, one pair of boots at a time.
Then he lay back on the cot and listened to the quiet that was left, and thought about a wagon standing in a dark yard with a gray blanket folded in it, and a woman reading another man's book by a stolen candle, and a slow-spoken marshal a day out on the Las Cruces road.
He slept the way he had slept on the trail for twenty years: all at once, and ready to wake.
Chapter 22 — The Yard at Night
The yard past midnight belonged to cats, mules, and Jo Hartley.
She crossed it in her dark dress with her hair pinned flat and her short pistol left behind the wagon seat, where it would do her no good at all if she was taken in an office holding it. Pick a lock and you're a thief with a story. Pick a lock carrying a gun and you're a headline. She went with a hairpin, a candle-end, a stub of tallow in a saucer, and the patience Wells Fargo had paid good money to train into her.