They came into Dos Rios with the freight wagons, in the gray hour when mist stood in the street and the way station chimney smoked first. In that dust and harness bells, a quiet man on a bay gelding and a veiled woman on a dark mare were hardly remarkable.
The way station stood where the two rivers met: a long adobe building, a stable yard behind a high fence, and a well whose windlass squeaked loudly enough to announce every bucket drawn within a quarter mile.
Marisol Vega came onto the porch with a coffeepot and looked at them like weather she had expected but not invited. She was spare and straight, with iron in her hair and a scarred left hand she did not hide. Her eyes went to Willa's veil, then measured Jonas and found him familiar.
"You'll be wanting water and feed," she said, "and wanting it quick, and no one to remember the wanting. That's three things; most travelers settle for two." Jonas smiled. "We'll settle for the truth, if it's for sale. Coffee first, if it isn't."
"It isn't for sale, which is why it's worth drinking." She poured on the porch, without asking them to dismount. "You're Hale," she said. "The other one. The brother that lived." "Your face came here ahead of you, in a description, with Harrow money behind it. Enough to buy eyes, not good ones."
"We're looking for a man named Tobias," Willa said from behind the veil, first in Spanish, then English. "A clerk. A bookkeeper. He was working for his keep here, under your roof."
"Was," she said. "You have the tense right, señora. Tobias Renner ate at my table for four months and kept my books better than my husband ever kept them, God rest that careless man. He was frightened of one particular thing. He slept in the stable loft, with the ladder drawn up after him."
"Three days ago, in the hour before dawn, riders came off the Prescott road without bells or lights. Six of them. They knew which stable. They knew about the ladder, which means someone told them, and only three people in Dos Rios knew." Her voice never rose; it grew quieter, like deep water. "They bound him, put him on a led horse like a sack of meal, and went out the south track at a walk, saving the animals."
"South," Jonas said. "Toward Fort San Rey."
"Toward the old fort, yes. There is nothing else south worth six riders. The fort has been empty since the army left it in sixty-eight — empty of everything but owls and Harrow's business, which has used it these two years for purposes no one here asks about twice. Wagons go there heavy with timber and iron, for a ruin."
"Was he hurt?" Willa asked.
"He was walking. Bound, but walking. He looked at my window as they passed it; he knew I was awake behind the curtain, and he did not call out. A man who does not call out is saving his breath for a use he has chosen." She picked up the coffeepot. "I have kept his plate on the shelf. Superstition is a tax the poor pay on hope."
Jonas set his empty cup on the rail, and then Marisol's eyes changed, going past him to the street, the way a room alters when a door opens somewhere in the house.
"Do not turn," she said pleasantly, as a woman discusses weather with guests. "At the farrier's shed across the street, a man has stood this ten minutes with a hoof pick in his hand and no hoof. He came in yesterday and draws no wage here. He watches my porch the way a cat watches a hole. He has seen a veiled woman, which is nothing. He has not yet seen her face, or yours clearly — and the mist is burning off."
"What do you advise?" Jonas asked, in the same pleasant voice.
"That you finish being a painting." She gathered the cups. "Ride out the north gate now, at a traveler's pace, toward Prescott, in the open, and wave at the farrier if your religion permits it. Let him report it. Then take the old mail cut behind the first ridge, which he does not know, double south through the cedar break, and water at the seep above the fort road, where you can watch the south track unwatched. If you stay here one minute longer, he will have your faces as a gift."
Then she went inside, and they rode out the north gate at a traveler's pace, in the burning mist, like people with somewhere ordinary to be.
The saddle they passed on the way out stood on a rail by the stable gate, weathered gray, its stirrups crossed over the seat. Jonas did not know it for Renner's; he did not need to. An empty saddle, in a yard where a man had slept above horses for fear of the ground, told its own plain story.
Chapter 15
: Fort San Rey
They watched Fort San Rey from the seep above the fort road all afternoon, lying in cedar shade, the horses picketed below the ridge. By dark, Jonas knew the ruin well enough to move through it, not well enough to trust.