The sound of somebody shifting their weight, slow as syrup, the way a person moves when they are trying with everything in them to move without a sound at all.
Gid smiled a little, alone in the dark. "Well," he said, too low for anyone but the mules. "Ride easy, then. It'll keep till morning."
He slept the way he always slept on the road, which is to say with one ear open like a door on a latch, and all night the wagon above him kept its secret, and the secret, once or twice, breathed.
Chapter 3 — Beneath the Blanket
The second night he made camp in a shallow arroyo where a cottonwood had found something to live on, and he chose the place the way he chose all his camps — water near enough, ground high enough, and one way in that a man could watch without appearing to. He watered the mules at the seep, a dark eye of water in the rocks that he had known for ten years, and picketed them close. He ate standing, looking at nothing. He made a show of spreading his bed under the wagon, loud with it, boot-scrapes and blanket-snaps, a performance of a man settling in for the night.
Then he lay down, and he waited, and waiting was a thing Gid Mercer could do better than any man on the Cerro Blanco line.
The dark deepened. The desert cooled by the minute. Somewhere an owl was working the arroyo, and the mules dozed and stamped, and the canvas of the wagon top sighed in the little wind. An hour went by, the way hours do when a man is counting them by heartbeats. Then two.
And then, from inside the wagon bed, soft as a breath through teeth — movement. Not the settle of freight. The deliberate, unfolding motion of a creature uncramping itself by fractions, joint by joint, the way a man moves when he has been folded into a box built for crates and has decided, finally, that the cramp is worse than the risk.
Gid was already standing. He had come out from under the wagon on the far side without a sound — twenty years of road camps had taught him to rise like smoke — and he came around the back of the wagon in the black shadow of the cottonwood with his rifle in his hand but carried low, the way a man carries a thing he does not yet intend to use. He put his left hand on the tailgate chain and lifted it clear of its hook without letting it chime. He raised the canvas with the barrel of the rifle.
The smell came first — hot canvas, crate wood, lamp oil, dust — and underneath it, faint and unmistakable, the smell of a human being who has lain two days in freight.
The barrel of a pistol came up out of the dark between the crates, short-barreled, held in a hand that did not shake at all, and leveled itself at the middle of him with professional steadiness.
"That's far enough," said the voice behind it, and it was a woman's voice, low and hoarse with dryness and absolutely calm. "Put the rifle down slow, friend. I'd rather not make this noise."
Gid stood very still. His eyes were adjusting — the starlight through the lifted canvas picked out a shape among the crates: a figure half up from the bedding of sacks, the plain gray wool freight blanket fallen away from a shoulder, hair dark and coming loose from its pins, a face all bones and resolve in the thin light. She had made herself a den back there, he could see now, a burrow between the flour sacks and the crate wall, lined with his own blanket — stolen from over the aft crates, which explained the re-tied lacing. Smart. Patient. Two days of cramp and thirst and silence, and her hand on that pistol did not shake.
He set the rifle down against the wheel, slow, one-handed, the way she'd asked.
"You're the weight that breathes," he said.
"I suppose I am."
"You've been drinking my water by the inch."
"I paid it back in silence," she said. "Two days of it. That's the dearest currency I've got." She swallowed; he heard it click in her dry throat, and some part of him that was older than caution and had nothing to do with the pistol did the arithmetic of that thirst and filed it away. "There's a way we both walk out of this wagon, driver. I mean to talk you into it."
"Name's Mercer," he said. "Gideon Mercer. And you can start talking whenever your throat allows, miss. But I'll tell you plain — you're going to drink before you talk. A person dries out two days in a freight bed doesn't make speeches worth a damn, and I don't parley with ghosts."
He saw the surprise cross her face like weather crossing a ridge — quick, and gone. The pistol wavered for the first time, not with fear but with the simple, disorienting force of an expected threat failing to arrive.
"You'd give me water," she said, "with a gun on you."
"The gun's your business," Gid said. "The water's mine, and I know what it's for." He reached, slow and in plain sight, for his canteen hung on the wagon side, and he held it out into the dark of the wagon bed, and after a long moment the pistol lowered — not away, but lowered — and a hand came out of the shadows and took it.