"There's your trouble, Tobe," Gid said. "You kept trying to get around. All you ever had to do was come through the gate and ask."
They took him away then, two deputies and a spare horse, with his hands tied to the saddle in front of a crowd that did not jeer — which surprised Gid until he understood it. Cerro Blanco had been afraid of this man for a year. Silence was the sound of it ending.
Chapter 28 — The Badge in Daylight
By noon the whole camp had turned out, which in Cerro Blanco meant miners off shift standing in their underground pallor, merchants in aprons, the assayer, the priest, two women from the hotel with a parasol between them, and every freighter on the line who had wheels under him. Weaver stood on the freight platform with the oilcloth of marked money weighted down by a pistol at each corner, and he read the names out slow, the way a man reads a roll he intends to be remembered.
August Pruitt, superintendent, arrested for conspiracy, theft, and the paying of road agents with company funds. Tobe Riggs and four others, arrested for the robberies on the Cerro Blanco line and for murder — Weaver said the word murder flat and plain, and let it stand in the sun a moment, and Gid thought of a grave on this same line with no name read over it in any yard. The bought deputy, arrested. The station keeper Enoch Pyle, to be arrested at his station when the law got there, which would not be long.
Then Weaver said, "And the charge against Gideon Mercer is dismissed, here, in front of the men it was made in front of, because that's where a lie ought to die. The waybill and the coin in his kit were planted there by the men who've just heard their own names. He's owed an apology by this camp and he'll get paperwork instead, which is the usual exchange rate."
Before the laugh had finished moving through the crowd, Jo came down the office steps.
She had her coat on despite the noon warmth, and the badge was pinned on the outside of it, in the daylight, where the sun could get at it — the Wells Fargo shield, catching the light every time she moved. Under the blanket and in the dark of a wagon bed it had been a secret. In the open, in front of Cerro Blanco, it was a fact, and Gid watched men who had talked loosely about the stowaway all morning find somewhere else to look.
"Josephine Hartley," she said, in a voice that carried the length of the yard without being raised. "Special agent, Wells Fargo and Company. I've ridden this line under cover since September, because every honest report sent openly was read by the men it was written about. The bait box on Mr. Mercer's wagon was mine. The marked money was mine. Mr. Mercer knew none of it until the middle of the road, and when he knew all of it he finished the run anyway — at the risk of a rope, which some of you were discussing last night in the saloon." She let that sit. "The company keeps its accounts. So do I."
The district superintendent of the express company had come up from the mine office during the arrests — a brisk man in a town suit, out of his element among the wagons and making up for it with volume. He offered Gid the line's security contract on the platform, in public, which was shrewd of him: chief of escorts and schedules for the whole Cerro Blanco run, a salary figure named out loud that made the freighters whistle, authority over every guard the company hired.
Gid let the whistle die down before he answered. "I'll take it," he said, "on terms. And the terms get read out here too, so there's no forgetting them in an office."
"Name them," the superintendent said, wary.
"First: the routes get kept in two books, in two offices, by two men who don't drink together. One man holding the routes is how we got here — one man holding the routes and selling them. Second: no driver or freighter on this line gets accused on evidence one other man carried in his pocket. He gets a hearing, with the yard to hear it, like today. Third: the escort money gets spread — every man hauling company freight gets the guard fund, not just the loads rich enough to ask. And fourth—" Gid paused, because this was the one that mattered and he was not a man who spent words on what mattered without aiming them. "There's two graves on this line from the last two years, drivers the company let be blamed for their own murders until it was convenient to forget them. Their families get their back pay and a pension, and the company writes the letters. Or there's no contract, and you can hire August Pruitt back when the territory's done with him."
The superintendent looked at Weaver. Weaver looked at the sky, a man studying weather that was none of his concern. "The company accepts," the superintendent said at last, a little stiffly, "and will confirm in writing."
"Then I'll confirm the same way," Gid said, and they shook on the platform like men signing with their hands, and the freighters cheered — for the terms, Gid understood, more than for him, which was exactly right. A bargain that only covered Gideon Mercer would have been just another kind of the old arrangement.