"Road gives everybody trouble, Enoch. That's its job."
Pyle walked the team with a keeper's eye while Gid unhitched, and his eye did not stop at the team. It went over the wagon the way a man's eye goes over a letter addressed to somebody else — seals, canvas ties, the strongbox shape beneath the tarp amid the crates, the water barrel, and back to the seals again.
"You'll have heard," Pyle said, "about the company's new circular. Whiskey running to the camps. Rifles, too, they say, hid in freight. Every wagon on the line's to be opened at the middle station and the cargo checked against the waybill. Nothing personal in it. Orders."
"Orders from who?"
"From the office. From Cerro Blanco." Pyle's smile did its work in two stages again. "It'll take ten minutes, Gid. I'll want to see in the bed, that's all. Standard now, for everybody."
Under the canvas, in the dark among the crates, something did not move at all — which is a kind of movement, to a man listening for it. Gid stepped to the wagon and set his hand flat on the tailgate, casual as a man leaning on his own fence.
"Then everybody's cargo gets opened but mine," he said, pleasantly. "You know the seal on that box, Enoch. Company seal, unbroken since Las Cruces, and the waybill says what it says — sealed freight, no hand to touch it short of Cerro Blanco. You break that seal, you buy the load. Every dollar of it, on your name, in the book. And when the office asks why their sealed box came in with a station keeper's knife work on the wax, what'll you tell them? That you were curious on company time?"
"It ain't curiosity, it's—"
"It's a fine line, and you're standing on it." Gid let the pleasantness thin out. "You've known me twelve years. Have I ever come in light, or short, or with a seal cut?"
"No," Pyle admitted. "No, you have not."
"Then you're not opening this wagon for the same reason the office trusts you with a well in a dry country. We are known men, you and me. Let's stay known."
Pyle looked at the wagon a moment longer than the conversation required. His dog had come around from the house — a yellow, ribby animal — and stood with its nose up, working the air at the wagon's side, deeply interested in something the wind was telling it. Gid saw it. He also saw Pyle see it. He reached without hurry into the grub box and came out with the rib bone from last night's supper, good meat still on it, and tossed it well wide toward the corral. The dog went after it like a debt collected.
"Fool dog scents every traveler's dinner and thinks it's his," Gid said.
Pyle laughed, a beat late, and the moment rolled past them and was gone. But Gid filed the whole shape of it away — the dog, the question, the asking of the question — the way he filed weather.
While the buckets were going down at the trough, Pyle tried the other door, the hospitable one. "That box of yours rides heavy, I expect. Office freight, sealed and all. Some drivers like it locked in the iron room nights, for safety. I've the room and the key, if you'd sleep easier."
"Sealed freight sleeps under my wagon, Enoch," Gid said. "Where it sleeps, I sleep. The office knows my habits, and by now so do you."
"Only the kindness of the house," Pyle said, and shrugged, and smiled — and Gid marked that too: a man who wants a box moved at night is a man who wants to know where the box will be at an hour of his own choosing.
They watered, and Pyle turned generous as a bishop: grain for the team at company measure, coffee for the driver, news for whoever's listening. The news came with the coffee, casual as salt. "They say in Las Cruces a woman run off from a marriage her people arranged — a mining man, money in it. Her people's got a reward out, private. You ain't seen a lone woman on the road, Gid? Walking, maybe. Riding with some freighter who didn't know what he'd picked up?"
"Road's empty as a church on Monday," Gid said. "I've hauled beans, bar iron, and a box I ain't opened. That's my whole cargo and my whole conversation."
"Beans and bar iron," Pyle repeated, and smiled, and wrote nothing down anywhere that Gid could see. But when Gid paid for the grain and the water — coin out of his own pocket, receipt in the station book, everything ordinary, everything by the line — he could feel the keeper's attention on the wagon's canvas ties like a hand that hadn't quite decided to lift.
He took supper at the station table with his back to the wall, out of old habit, and he mentioned, in the hearing of the room, that he'd be rolling at first light. Then he went out and made his bed beneath the wagon, in the one place a man could not approach it from any side without stepping over Gideon Mercer.
Chapter 8 — The Telegram
She came to him after the station was dark, picking her way around the sleeping yard without a sound, and found him awake under the wagon where he'd meant to be found.
"You don't sleep," she said.
"I sleep when the freight does."
She crouched in the shadow of the wheel, where the moonlight off the white pan couldn't find her, and held out an envelope. It was plain, and sealed, and had no name on it that he could see by starlight — just a direction, written small in the corner.