She drank the way the thirsty drink when they are disciplined: in sips, stopping, breathing, sipping again, fighting the urge to drown herself in it. He respected that more than the steady pistol hand. Any fool could hold a gun. It took a particular kind of person to ration water at the edge of collapse.
"Now," Gid said, and pulled a crate around and sat down on it in the arroyo dust, easy as a man at his own table, "suppose you tell me what in God's name you're doing in my freight."
Chapter 4 — Anna
She told it sitting in the tailgate with her legs drawn under her and the canteen held in both hands like something borrowed and breakable, and the fire he'd built up between them put light and shadow on her face by turns, so he never once saw all of it at once.
"My name is Anna," she said. "I'm twenty-nine years old and I'm running from a wedding."
"A wedding's a poor thing to stow away from," Gid said. "Most folks just say no."
"Most folks get asked by men who accept answers." She turned the canteen a quarter turn in her hands. "His name doesn't matter. He has a mine, and money, and a foreman with a scar, and he decided last winter that what his house was missing was a wife to run it, and he picked me the way a man picks a horse — by the teeth and the temper. My father owes him money, which in his arithmetic made me part of the settlement. I said no in the spring, and no in the summer, and in the fall men started calling at the house to explain to me that the wedding was set for October and my opinion had been noted and filed. So I filed myself." The ghost of something crossed her face that was almost a smile. "Into your wagon. It was the only door out of Las Cruces that nobody was watching."
Gid turned his bean tin in his hands and considered her the way he considered a sky before a crossing: for what it promised and what it hid. It was a good story. He believed perhaps half of it, the half with the bones in it — there had been a man, there had been a debt, there had been a door closing — and the rest of it had the lacquered shine of a thing polished by rehearsal. But he had hauled freight for twenty years without asking it its business, and he had long since learned that people's stories were freight too: what a man was owed was the carrying of them, not the opening.
"Why my wagon?" he said.
"Because your name is the one they say in the yards." She said it plainly, without flattery's oil on it. "Never lost a load. Never opened a sealed box. Never talked about what he carried or who. I asked in a kitchen where the freighters eat, and three different men said Mercer before they'd finished their coffee. If I was going to fold myself into a box for three days, I meant to fold myself into yours."
"And the pistol?"
"The pistol is because a woman traveling alone is a paragraph everybody thinks they can finish." She said it without heat. "I've never shot a man with it. I'd rather keep the record clean. But I won't be carried off your wagon by station hands or handed over at some way stop to a foreman with a scar, and that's the whole of its purpose."
He was quiet a while. The fire worked down into its coals. Somewhere out in the dark a mule stamped and sighed.
"Here's my rule," Gid said at last, "and it's the only one I've got, so hear it once. I haul what's loaded, and I don't ask freight its business. As of Las Cruces you are freight — unbilled, unbilled freight rides rough, but it rides. I don't know your name beyond what you've told me, I don't know your story beyond what you've said, and if men ask me at Cerro Blanco whether I carried a woman, I will look them in the eye and say I carried lamp oil, flour, and company instruments, sealed. That's not kindness. That's just the rule, and it's the same rule that keeps that strongbox shut and keeps me fed."
She studied him over the fire with an attentiveness that felt heavier than gratitude. "You'd lie for freight you never agreed to carry."
"I'd lie for the rule," he said. "You're just standing near it." He stood up and kicked dirt over the fire's heart. "By day you stay under the blanket and you don't move, and you don't drink except what I leave where you can reach it. By night you can stretch in the wagon bed when we're camped — not out of it. Anybody sees you, your story ends and maybe mine too. And Anna—"
"Yes?"
"If you're lying about the shape of the trouble behind you — not the details, the shape of it — now is when it costs the least to say so."
She held his gaze across the dead fire. "The shape is true," she said. "Men are behind me who mean me harm, and I won't be taken back. The rest—" her mouth did something complicated — "the rest is my business. The way freight's business is freight's."
He nodded slowly, because it was his own rule handed back to him, and a man cannot argue with his own rule without losing something. "Then ride," he said. "And drink your water by day when I set it. By the inch is fine. I keep a marked stick, but I'll not begrudge the measurement."
That night she slept in her burrow among the flour sacks, and Gid slept under the wagon with one ear open, and it seemed to him, drowsing, that the wagon above him breathed differently now — less like a secret and more like a passenger.