"How many?" she said from the bed, low, through the canvas, at the noon halt.
"Can't say riders. It's one dust. Could be two men, could be four, riding close or wide. Whoever it is, they're not coming on and they're not dropping back. They're keeping us the way you'd keep a cow in a pasture — in sight, and in no hurry."
"Waiting for ground," she said.
It was what he had been thinking since the second halt, in nearly those words, and he did not enjoy hearing it arrive from beneath a blanket in a voice that had supposedly never seen this country. "If a man meant to take this wagon," he said, "there's a pass a day ahead where the road goes through rock and a wagon can't turn. He wouldn't waste himself in the open against a man awake. He'd wait for the rock, where the wagon does half his work for him."
"Then we mustn't arrive when he expects us," she said.
"No," Gid said. "We mustn't."
He rested the team through the hot hours in a mesquite bosque where the dust could not see him rest, and he let Anna out to stretch her legs and take the air in the deep shade, and she walked around the wagon twice like a creature measuring a cage it intended to respect. Then, in the last light, he hitched up by lantern with the lantern hooded, and they rolled out onto the road under a field of stars so thick the sky looked sugared, and the mules' ears went forward into the dark like it was a place they knew.
Night running is a trade of its own. The road goes from a thing you see to a thing you remember and believe in. The mules followed their own memory and the smell of the stations ahead; Gid drove by the poles of the telegraph line when they showed against the sky and by the seat of his trousers the rest of the time, and the wagon's iron sang quiet against the stone. No dust can follow a wagon at night. Behind them the road was only dark, and the dark was only empty, and for the first time in two days Gid felt the skin between his shoulders unknot itself.
She rode uncovered in the bed, sitting up against a crate with the blanket over her knees, her face turned up like a woman drinking weather.
"I rode a coach once, at night, in country like this," she said, after a long while. "On business for—" She stopped. The stars went on being stars. "For the family I was with, then. I remember thinking the dark out here isn't empty. It's just full of things that aren't looking at you."
"A coach," Gid said mildly. "Fleeing brides mostly ride coaches, I guess."
"Mostly," she agreed, and there was something in her voice that might have been a smile deciding against itself. "Gid. When this run is over—" She stopped again, longer this time. "When this run is over, there are things I'll owe you the telling of. I want you to know I know that."
"There's a pass a day ahead," he said. "You can owe me on the other side of it."
"Fair," she said. "On the other side of it, then."
The mules took the road in their long, unhurried rhythm, six sets of ears making six small judgments about the night. Somewhere off in the black a coyote tried out a note and thought better of it. Gid drove with the lines loose in his hands and his rifle across his knees, and he thought about how the woman behind him had said coach and business and then caught herself — one more stone for the pile he was building, against his will and against his rule, out of rasp and hame strap and bore held to the light. He did not know what she was. He was coming to know she was exactly the size of the trouble behind them, and that whatever she was, it was honest trouble. A man can haul freight for thirty years and learn to tell honest loads from light ones by the way they ride.
"Rest when you can," he said over his shoulder. "Tomorrow's going to ask a lot of the team. And of us."
Behind the seat, in the dark, he heard her settle down — not under the blanket, he thought, but on top of it, like a sentry who has decided the watch is hers too.
Chapter 10 — The Dry Camp
The seep at Las Palmas was supposed to be the sure water between the middle station and the pass — a rock basin under cottonwoods where the water came up sweet through gravel, known to every teamster on the line. Gid saw the cottonwoods from a mile out, green against the white pan, and felt the team smell it and lean into the collars. Then he saw the second thing, the thing that lives in a freighter's stomach: no birds. A living water in that country wears birds like a hat. Las Palmas wore none.
The basin was there, and there was water in it — a foot of it, still and shining. But the rim of it was crusted white as a salt lick, and a dead oriole lay at the edge with its beak open, and the water smelled of lye and old ashes. Somewhere in the season the seep had turned. Alkali. It would blister a mule's gut and kill a thirsty one that drank deep before a man could stop it.