"I need this to go in the station mail pouch tonight," she said. "It's a freight claim, nothing more. A man in Las Cruces holds a trunk of mine against a debt I don't owe. The claim lapses if it isn't posted by a date, and the date is nearly on us. I'd put it in myself—" she stopped. "I'd put it in myself, if I were a person who existed."
"A freight claim," Gid said.
"A freight claim," she said steadily. "That's all it is, and that's all I'm asking you to know about it."
He took it. It weighed what paper weighs. There was a wax seal at the flap and nothing written that he read, because he made a point — a point he could feel her watching him make — of not turning it toward the light.
"In Las Cruces you told me you don't ask freight its business," she said. "I'm holding you to your own rule, Gid Mercer."
"Then you can stop holding. It was never a rule for your benefit."
He got up in the dark and went up the steps into the station office, where the mail pouch hung by the desk against the wall, half full, waiting for the morning rider to Cerro Blanco. The office smelled of kerosene and paper and Pyle's supper. The telegraph key sat under its wooden cover on the desk, dumb and patient. Gid dropped the envelope through the pouch's mouth without ceremony, among the bills of lading and the station's own letters, and stood a moment with his hand still on the leather, listening to the house. A clock ticked. Somewhere a man turned in his sleep and the bed ropes complained. Nothing else.
"Much obliged," Pyle said from the doorway behind him, and Gid's heart knocked once, hard, before his face got itself arranged.
"Mail pouch," Gid said. "Sending a claim of my own down the line. A man in Las Cruces still owes me for a set of wagon bows from spring. Figured the pouch was going anyway."
"Figured right," Pyle said. He was in his shirtsleeves, and if he had been asleep it hadn't rumpled him. "Coffee'll be at four. You're rolling early, you said."
"Early," Gid agreed, and went past him into the yard, and did not hurry, which took more doing than hurrying would have.
He lay under the wagon a long while with his eyes open. He was thinking about envelopes with no names on them, and about claims that lapse, and about how a woman who could not write her own direction on a letter had nonetheless written one small. He was also thinking about Pyle standing in a doorway in his shirtsleeves at an hour when honest men are only awake by accident, and how long a man has to be awake before his shirtsleeves are on him neat as morning.
The rider left at two by the stars. Gid heard the horse come out of the corral easy and careful, no lantern, and take the Cerro Blanco road at a lope that settled into a run. Mail does not ride at two in the morning. Mail rides at the hour printed on the schedule, with the pouch sealed and the horn sounding for whoever cares. Whatever rode out of Enoch Pyle's yard in the dark was not mail, and it was going the same direction Gid's wagon was going, only faster.
He had known the horse, too, crossing the yard in the wash of moonlight — Pyle's own bay, the grain-fed one the keeper rode into town on and bragged about at table, and no mail contractor's animal at all. And the road it took climbs toward Cerro Blanco, toward the pass and the camp beyond it. Whatever Enoch Pyle had to say in the dark, he was saying it ahead of the wagon, into country the wagon had still to cross. Word travels the way water does: it finds the low places first, and it gets there before a man does. And somewhere behind that word, riding the other way in a canvas pouch, went a sealed envelope with no name on it — answering the word, or the cause of it. Gid could not yet tell which, and the not-telling itched worse than any answer he could think of.
He got up, quiet, and checked the team where they stood in the corral, and checked the canvas ties one by one by touch, and the seals after them. All fast. All honest. Then he went back to his bedroll and lay looking up at the bottom of the wagon bed, and at the shape of nothing above it, and slept the way a dog sleeps on a grave — one ear open to the road.
At four the coffee was on, and Pyle was pleasant as Sunday. But Gid had already decided the thing he did not say aloud until the wagon was rolling: first light or no first light, they would not be sleeping where Enoch Pyle could count the ties again.
Chapter 9 — Riders Behind
The dust showed at midmorning, well back on their trail — a low, tan smudge on the road where the road fell away behind them, keeping its distance the way weather keeps its distance. Gid watched it in the glass and said nothing for an hour. Dust can be a wagon, a herd, a wind with opinions. But dust does not stop when you stop.
He tested it the way you test a rope: by degrees. He halted the team at an hour when no freighter halts, in a place with no water and no reason, and sat on the wheel hub in the sun with his hat off, mending a strap that was not broken. The dust thinned, hung, and settled down to nothing a mile back. When he rolled again, it rose again, patient as a creditor.