Walking back across the yard, Weaver fell in beside him. "That boy Emilio," the marshal said, "the one who came over the old mule trail with the wire cut and the road blocked — he's waiting at the station with my spare horses, eating everything the station keeper's wife puts in front of him. Which, this morning, is considerable."
"He earned the meal," Gid said.
"He earned more than the meal. I expect you'll see to the payroll end of it, now you're a security man." Weaver's mouth moved, which on him was a grin. "Hauling evidence and hiring heroes. Company work suits you, Gideon."
Jo stood by the wagon at the yard's edge, badge bright, watching the crowd thin — a woman entirely visible at last, and entirely alone in the middle of her own victory. Gid went and stood with her, and said nothing, which was the tribute he knew how to pay.
Chapter 29 — The Blanket
She was leaving the next morning. Gid knew it the way he knew weather — not because anyone told him, but because the signs were all in their usual places. Her horse was curried to a shine at the station corral. Her saddlebags were packed and buckled and set by the office door, and the coat with the badge in it — pinned outside now, a fact of daylight — hung ready over a chair. A special agent's work did not end because one line was cleaned. It just moved on down the road to the next dirty one, and wrote reports about it in code.
He was greasing his wagon's axles in the yard at evening, getting ready for the back-haul to Las Cruces, when she came across with her arms full of folded gray wool.
She had the freight blanket — the plain gray wool blanket off his own wagon bed, the one she had ridden under for three days across the desert, among the crates, with a pistol and a memorized list of numbers for company. She had washed it. In a year of hauling, Gid could not remember anyone washing anything of his, and the blanket had come back from the hotel laundry stiff and clean and smelling faintly of other people's soap. She folded it as she walked — neat, practiced folds, the way you'd fold a flag or a letter you meant to keep.
"You're returning my freight," he said.
"I'm leaving it," she said. "There's a difference, and I expect you to observe it." She set it on the wagon's edge, square and exact, and put her hand on it a moment, the way a person steadies a thing they have set down carefully. "Three days I rode under that, Gideon. I lay there listening to you talk to your mules and sing — you do sing, don't deny it, a man under a blanket hears everything — and I learned more about this line from underneath your load than the company learned in a year of reports. It's the best education I ever got, and the worst accommodations, and I wouldn't trade either."
"High praise from Wells Fargo," Gid said.
"Don't let it swell you." But she was quieter than the words. "I'm leaving it because a wagon ought to carry some weight that isn't freight and isn't trouble. Ballast." She looked at him then, direct as ever. "So you don't haul ghosts."
The yard was making its evening noises around them — harness chains, a farrier's hammer two sheds down, somebody laughing in the station doorway — and none of it reached the place where the two of them stood. Gid thought about the word ghosts. He had hauled a fair cargo of them up and down this line: a brother two years in the ground on it, and every mile of the road marked off in things he did not say. She had ridden three days in the dark of his wagon and come out knowing the inventory better than he did. That was the uncomfortable thing about Josephine Hartley. She saw the load plain, and she did not flinch off it, and she did not make a parade of not flinching.
He took the blanket. It was heavier than a blanket ought to be, the way things are when they've been given instead of loaded. "Ballast," he said. "All right."
"Your new contract starts with the month," she said, practical again, because she was safer there and so, if he was honest, was he. "Two books, two offices. I wrote it into my report before the superintendent had finished agreeing to it — he'll find it harder to forget than he expects."
"And you?"
"Las Cruces first. Then wherever the company's troubles are ripest. It's a growth industry, dishonesty." She held out her hand, and he took it, and her grip was what it had been the first night with a pistol in the other one — sure. "You were good cover, Gideon Mercer. And better company, which wasn't in the arrangement."
He stood there with the blanket over his arm and asked the question that had been riding in the wagon with him since the canyon, since the dry camp, since a voice first spoke to him out of his own freight in the dark. "Would you ever ride on top of a load?" he said. "Up on the seat. In the open. Like freight that doesn't have to hide."
She considered it with the whole of her attention, which was her way, and the evening light was on the side of her face and the badge both. "That would depend," she said, "on where the load was going. And on the driver." She picked up her saddlebags. "Ask me again sometime, when you're not standing in axle grease."
"I might," he said.