He lay on the cot and listened to the silence behave. A voice at the depot, raised. Another. Boots at a run. Then the town taking its news the way towns do, door to door, under its breath: the wire was down. Cut, somebody said, out beyond the pass, the poles chopped through like cordwood. A rider came in later with his horse blown and foam on the bit: the Las Cruces road was blocked at the narrows, a loaded freight wagon slewed across it hub to hub with a "broken axle," and armed men taking their ease in the rocks above it, in no hurry to let a living soul through either way.
Through the high window Gid listened to the depot men argue about what it meant, and heard them land, one by one, where Pruitt needed them to land: a gang bold enough to cut wires was a gang still on the road, and a town with no wire and no road was a town that settled its own business its own way, quick, before Friday. Somebody mentioned the saloon. Somebody else mentioned rope, in the tone of a man mentioning weather he expects by noon. The voices thinned out as men went off to be part of the settling, and the jail wall went back to ticks and silence, and Gid lay in the dark and understood that the cut wire had never been meant to keep Weaver out. It had been meant to let Cerro Blanco in.
The deputy came to the cell door near morning with coffee he hadn't been ordered to bring and a grin he couldn't keep holstered.
"Thought you'd want the news, Mercer, you being a man of business." He set the cup through the bars. "No wire. No road. Your marshal friend — if he exists, which the company doubts — is a rumor on the far side of a blocked pass. Mr. Pruitt says the transfer's at first light regardless. He hates a schedule slipped."
"Thoughtful of him," Gid said. "Give him my regards."
The grin widened and went. Gid drank the coffee standing at the bars and did the arithmetic again, slower. A day out, Jo had said. Weaver was already on the road when the wire died — that was the whole of the hope, and it wasn't nothing. But a marshal riding careful into a blocked narrows, against rifles in the rocks, would come late, and first light was not a late hour. Unless somebody reached him first and told him what the morning was scheduled to hold.
He thought of Emilio the way you think of a tool left hanging in plain sight. Sixteen years old, yard-bred, mule-wise, with a memory for ground like a surveyor's chain. The old mule trail — the one the freight road had run before the narrows were blasted, climbing behind the cerro and down by the dry falls to meet the Las Cruces road ten miles out — was washed out at the bottom, everybody said, and everybody was right, and its top half was sound as a roof beam. Gid had walked the boy up that top half one spring morning a year gone, fetching a strayed lead mule, and shown him the notch in the rocks where one rider could pass a blocked road the way a rumor passes a wall.
If the boy had heard what the yard was hearing — and a yard boy hears everything; it is the whole of his education — then somewhere out in the dark past the freight sheds a mule was doing what mules were made for, unhurried and sure of its feet, with a sixteen-year-old sitting straight up in the saddle and the biggest errand of his life in his mouth. The boy's mother would be standing in a doorway in Las Cruces by now, watching a door that had not opened, and the boy would be past the dry falls already and climbing, because Gid had taught him the one thing the road bosses never teach anybody: that the slow way over the top beats the fast way into a rifle, every time it is tried. And at the end of the trail a campfire, and a slow-spoken man of fifty-odd rising out of his blankets to listen, and not wasting one word of what he heard.
Gid could not know it. He set the empty cup down and chose to believe it the way he had chosen to believe a woman in a wagon bed with a pistol — on the evidence of the character in front of him.
He washed his face in the bucket water and combed his beard straight with his fingers. He ate the cold meat and bread that came at first gray, all of it, the way you feed a team before a pull. He pulled his boots on and stamped them settled. Through the high window the sky over the yard went the color of a whetstone, then the color of pearl. Harness bells tried a note out in the dark, and stopped, and tried again.
Somewhere beyond the cerro, hooves on stone, or not. Somewhere across the yard, a route book squared like a place setting, and a woman saying numbers to a wall. Here, a key turning in his door, and the deputy outside it with his hand not quite steady on the ring.
"Time, Mercer," the deputy said.
Gid stood up out of the cell's shadow like a man rising from his own table. "Then let's not slip the schedule," he said.
Chapter 25 — The Freight Yard at Dawn
They brought him out into a yard already full of people, and Gid understood the last of Pruitt's mind at a glance: a thing done in front of forty witnesses wasn't a murder, it was a story, and the story was already written.