First light lay on the freight yard in long blue bars. The transfer wagon stood by the gate with a team hitched and fretting. Half the camp had turned out in coats and hats and Sunday faces — teamsters, merchants, the blacksmith with his apron still on, women in the office doorway. Men who had buried friends off this road stood among them, and Gid marked their faces without meaning to, the way you mark weather.
The deputy walked him to the wagon with a hand on his elbow and his own face working like a horse that smells smoke. Gid's wrists were bound in front with rawhide, snug and not cruel. Somebody had thought hard about how it would all look, and it wasn't the deputy.
Then the office door opened, and the yard went quiet in the wrong way.
Two of Riggs's men brought Jo out between them. Her dress was the dark one from the night, her hair down and pinned rough, her wrists bound like his, and there was a dried cut at the corner of her mouth that she wore like part of the evidence. She looked once across the yard — not for him; for the crowd — measuring it the way she had measured everything since the first night under the blanket, and Gid saw her find what she needed in it and file it away.
"Morning, all." Pruitt on the office steps, hat in hand, a citizen grieved by necessity. "I won't keep you. These two are to be transferred to Las Cruces for trial, under guard, papers in order. The company regrets—" he let it sit a moment, "—the whole business. Wagons will roll by Friday. The line runs."
"Let's get it done," the deputy said, too loud.
They walked them toward the wagon. It was twenty paces of packed dirt, and Gid spent them counting rifles: Riggs by the trough with his thumb hooked in his belt and his face arranged in sympathy; one man at the gate; one at the alley mouth holding a horse ready — because an escape, to be believed, needs somewhere to escape to. At the wagon's wheel the deputy bent, to a strap, to something on the ground, to nothing, and Gid felt the rawhide at his own wrists go slack where a knife's edge had kissed it in the night — cut near through, meant to part the moment he ran.
Beside him, Jo Hartley drew one breath of open air, and spent it.
"WELLS FARGO MARKED MONEY!"
It went off the yard walls like a bell. Every head came up. She was not looking at Pruitt, and not at Gid — she was looking at the crowd, and she gave them the numbers like a roll call at a graveside, clear and unhurried and loud enough for the women in the doorway:
"Eighty-one two-oh-four! Eighty-one two-seventeen! Eighty-one two-thirty-three! Eighty-one two-forty-six! Eighty-one two-fifty-nine! Marked bills, out of the sealed box that rode the Las Cruces wagon into this camp — opened last night in August Pruitt's own vault and paid out in the dark to the men who earn their money on this road!" Her bound hands came up and pointed, steady as a fence line, toward the trough. "Ask Tobe Riggs what's in his vest. He took his pay not six hours ago."
The yard made a sound then that Gid had heard twice in his life — once in a mining camp, once at a hanging that turned out to be the wrong man — the sound of a crowd changing its mind all at the same time, which is a sound like a roof deciding.
Riggs laughed. It was a good laugh, loud and easy, and it went nowhere at all. "She's mad," he said. "The woman's clean mad — it's the—" and his right hand moved, smooth as water, inside his vest.
The blacksmith took that wrist. Two freighters took the rest of him — Gid knew both men; one had driven a wagon back from the pass in the spring with his dead partner's boots tied to the saddle horn — and they put Riggs down in the dust of the yard he had owned for a year, not gently, and held him there while the blacksmith, with the air of a man shoeing something that bites, turned the vest pockets out onto an upturned crate.
Bills. New ones, in a flat oilskin fold. The yard boy — fourteen, all elbows — snatched the top one before anybody could tell him not to, and read it the way the young read everything, out loud and by the piece:
"Eight— one— two— five— nine."
"Eighty-one two-fifty-nine," Jo said into the new quiet, hoarse and clear. "The last of them. Count the rest against my word, gentlemen. I'll wait."
Nobody ran. That was the thing Gid would remember afterward: nobody ran, and nobody reached for a gun, and the rifles that had been held so ready a minute before went down all over the yard like a tide going out off a beach. Men stepped back — not from Riggs, but from Pruitt. A pace. Two paces. The way men step back from a wagon they no longer intend to help push.
From the office doorway a woman's voice, not young, said it for all of them: "Somebody open that vault."
August Pruitt stood on his own steps with his hat in both hands and his famous smile still on his face, fixed there like paint on a board, and under it, for the first time since Gid Mercer had known him, nothing at all — a man watching forty witnesses rewrite his story in the dust, with the morning coming up fast and a long way yet to fall.