Chapter 5 — The First Water Stop
The first water stop on the Cerro Blanco road was a place called Aguaje Seco, which was a liar's name, since the water there had outlasted every man who'd ever named it: a seep under a shelf of red rock, fenced off with a rough corral, a trough of hollowed cottonwood black with age and algae, and a wind-bent mesquite that gave shade the size of a tablecloth. Gid rolled in at midmorning with the dust of ten miles on everything and set his brake where he always set it, in the open, in plain view, because a freighter who parked his wagon like a secret invited the whole world to ask what the secret was.
The riders were already there.
Four of them, watering their horses at the trough, and Gid read them the way he read a waybill — numbers first, then details. Four horses, good ones, fed better than the men who rode them. Four men, road-worn in the particular, expensive way of men who are paid to be road-worn: leather that cost money, rifles in saddle boots that cost more, and none of the ordinary untidiness of freight hands or ranch trash. One of them, lean as a whippet and twice as restless, had a way of smiling at nothing that Gid had seen before on men who enjoyed their work when their work was other people's misfortune.
He went about his business in the open, unhurried. Unhitched nothing. Set the nose bags on the mules, drew water for the barrel with the bucket, and let his eyes do their work sideways, the way a man looks at the sun. The lean one stopped with his horse's reins in his hand and watched the wagon a beat too long — not the curious glance of a traveler at freight, but the measuring look of a man counting something, canvas to wheel, wheel to box, and Gid felt the hair on his forearms go up the way it did before lightning.
"Freight for Cerro Blanco?" the lean man said, friendly as a tax notice.
"Freight for Cerro Blanco," Gid said.
"Heavy load."
"Road makes 'em all heavy." Gid poured the bucket into the barrel bung, easy, letting the water talk. "You boys prospecting?"
"Some." The smile widened and showed nothing behind it. "Road's been lively, I hear. Stagelines getting robbed right and left. A freighter alone —" he let it hang there, neighborly as poison.
"A freighter alone is a freighter working," Gid said. "I don't haul coin, friend. I haul lamp oil and flour and nails, and the only payroll on this wagon is mine, and it's spent." He capped the bung. "Still. A man hears things. If you're riding the road for your health, ride it healthy."
Inside the wagon, under the canvas, under the plain gray wool freight blanket in the burrow between the flour sacks, Anna lay with her pistol in her hand and her breathing stopped down to a thread, and Gid knew it the way he knew the load had shifted — by attention, not by sight. He could feel the whole wagon holding still around her. He made his voice big and ordinary and let it cover her like canvas.
"There's coffee in it for men who water my mules," he said, loud enough to be a host, loud enough to be a fool. "I've a pot and no company worth the name since Las Cruces."
They declined the coffee, all four, in the manner of men declining a thing they had never for one second considered accepting, and the lean one swung up into his saddle and touched his hat brim with two fingers — a gesture that on another man would have been courtesy.
"Road's long," he said. "Mind it, freighter."
"I always do."
They rode out north, which was the direction of Cerro Blanco, and Gid stood in the thin shade of the mesquite and watched their dust for a long time after the men themselves were gone, and he did not like the shape of the watching they had done. Probing, he thought. That was the word. They hadn't come for water. Horses water fast when men are thirsty for something else. They'd come to look at his wagon the way a man looks at a fence he means to test later, in the dark, with time to work.
Behind him, from inside the load, so low that only a man listening with his whole skin would have heard it, Anna's voice came through the canvas: "They've gone?"
"Gone north," he said, without turning around, and went on watching the dust settle on the empty road. "Rest easy. And Anna—"
"Yes?"
"If those boys come back," he said, "they come back to a freighter who carries lamp oil, flour, and company instruments, sealed. Not a pound more. You hear me?"
"I hear you," she said, after a moment, and there was something in her voice he hadn't heard there before, not gratitude and not fear — something closer to surprise, the kind a person keeps having around him, as if she had memorized a description of men and he kept failing to match it. "Whatever comes, then. Freight, is it?"
"Freight," he said. "Ride quiet."
He watered the mules a second time, unhurried as Sunday, and rolled out at the pace of a man with nothing in the world to hide and nowhere in the world to be but Cerro Blanco, three days on.
Chapter 6 — What She Knew About Guns