"You might get an answer." She went across the yard toward the station without looking back — she would not, it wasn't her style — and Gid stood watching until the doorway took her, and then he climbed up onto his wagon and slid the gray blanket, fold by fold, into the space beneath the seat board, where a man keeps the things that have to ride every mile and not be in the way. It fit like it had been measured. He supposed, in a manner of speaking, it had.
Chapter 30 — Riding on Top
A month later the word came down the line the way all word came to Las Cruces, in pieces and out of order: Pruitt indicted by the grand jury and gone gray waiting on his trial, Riggs held at Las Cruces under a guard who did not drink, and the Cerro Blanco run — the run that had eaten freighters for a year — gone quiet as a church. Two books, two offices. The escorts rode in the open now, and the routes were worth nothing to sell, because everybody already knew them, which turned out to be the cheapest lock the company ever bought.
Gid loaded at dawn, as he had loaded a thousand dawns, in the yard at Las Cruces with the frost still on the canvas and the mules blowing white. It was company freight again, but ordinary freight this time — mining machinery crated and stenciled, mail sacks, a sealed box that was only a sealed box, worth what the waybill said and not a secret more. He was chief of the line's security now, with papers in an office to prove it, and the company had offered him a desk to go with the papers. He had declined the desk. A man could not keep a road honest from a chair, and besides, the road was where he kept his own accounts, and some of those were not finished being settled.
The loads went on the way loads should, seal by seal, with the yard clerk reading the waybills aloud and Gid checking every crate against the list, because a habit that has kept a man alive is not retired just because the times improve. And as he took the lines up and tested the brake, settling his boots against the footboard, he saw a rider coming through the yard gate at the walk, in the first of the light.
She rode like she did everything, straight and unhurried, in a dark traveling coat with the badge pinned on the outside of it in plain sight, and a carpetbag behind the saddle, and she brought the horse up alongside the wagon and looked the load over with a professional eye — crates, canvas, water barrel, seals — before she looked at him at all.
"Josephine," he said.
"Gideon." She dismounted and tied her horse to the wagon's rear standard, businesslike as a woman signing a register. "The company has decided the Cerro Blanco line warrants a resident agent. Somebody who knows the road and the people on it, to keep the two books honest and the schedules boring." She untied the carpetbag. "It's a desk, mostly. In Las Cruces. With a chair. I have declined the chair."
"Seems to be going around," Gid said.
"It does." She stood by the wagon with her bag in her hand, and for a moment neither of them spoke of the seat, though the seat was the whole of what remained unsaid, and they both knew it, and the mules knew it and stamped about it in the frost. Then Jo Hartley set her carpetbag in the wagon bed — on top of the crates, in the open, where freight rides when it has nothing to hide — and put her boot on the wheel hub and climbed.
She settled onto the seat beside him like a woman who had measured the distance a month ago and been waiting to take it. The seat board creaked. Underneath it, folded in the dark where a man keeps what has to ride every mile, was a plain gray wool freight blanket, and her heel found the board over it and rested there as if it had a right.
"Ballast riding well?" she asked.
"Hasn't shifted an inch," Gid said. "Best load on the wagon."
"Then haul it," she said, and faced the road. "It's a fine morning and the line's quiet and I have reports to write at the far end of it that will bore the company to tears. That's what winning looks like, Gideon. Boring reports."
He gathered the lines. Six mules leaned into the collars the way they had at every dawn of his working life, and the wagon came alive under them, chain and leather and iron finding their order, and rolled out of the Las Cruces yard into a desert going gold at the edges. The road to Cerro Blanco ran north through the cold bright morning with the way stations strung along it like beads, every one of them honest now or watched, and Jo Hartley rode beside him on top of the load with the wind in her face and her coat open to the badge and the sun — not hidden, not cargo, not a secret in anybody's wagon — riding where she could see the whole road coming, which was where, Gid reflected, she had been trying to get to all along.
He did not sing. A man has some consideration. But going down the long grade out of the yard, with the light coming up and the team settled into their mile-eating walk, he said, mostly to the mules and partly to her, "I haul what's loaded."
"And what's loaded?" she said.
"Freight," he said. "And one agent, in the open, at the going rate."
"Which is?"
He considered. "Reports, bored to tears. And ballast, so I don't haul ghosts."
"Fair rates," said Jo Hartley, and rode on beside him into the morning.
The End