They loaded the evidence the way river men load a boat that must not swamp: the deed and the contract copy flat against Jonas's chest inside his shirt, the letters in oilcloth at Willa's back, the smallest and damningest of the ledgers in a grain sack that Renner insisted on carrying himself, hugged to his ribs like an infant. They left the strongroom door standing wide. That had been Renner's counsel too, and Jonas had understood it at once: a closed door buys minutes, but an open one tells the finder instantly that the thing is already done and gone. The only question was how much darkness they would own before it ended, and the aqueduct answered that: four minutes of crawling with a half-starved man between them, Willa ahead hauling by the arms, Jonas behind with his shoulder under Renner's hips, whispering him forward over the wet stone like a muleteer coaxing a frightened horse across a bridge.
The alarm came as Renner's boots cleared the grate. A shot first, which struck Jonas as wasteful, and then the bell, the old mission bell Harrow's men had hung in the ruined chapel tower for exactly this purpose, rolling out over the Rio Sombra flat and ugly in the night. The fort poured light the way a kicked anthill pours ants. Jonas got Renner up onto the mare behind Willa, where the old man clung and cursed in a whisper with the grain sack thumping his ribs, and then they were running, Jonas afoot beside the stirrup for the first fifty yards with his rifle in his hand, and the first shots came wild and high behind them.
The ground fell toward the river in a long shale slope scattered with creosote and the white bones of old floods. Willa rode it like water finding its course, the mare gathering and leaping the arroyos while Jonas cut the corners on foot, turning twice to fire from the knee, not to hit but to make the pursuit remember the price of crowding. One man came on too eagerly, and Jonas put a bullet through the crown of his hat and watched him haul up hard; after that the others kept a respectful distance and shot from farther off, which was what he had intended, though their lead still sang past close and unmusical. Renner made a small, surprised sound above him, and Jonas saw the old man's hand come away from his upper arm dark.
"Through the sleeve," Renner said, with a clerk's indignation at an untidy entry. "It has spoiled the coat and not the man, I believe. Ride on, madam, I am not cargo to be set down at the first inconvenience." But blood came steadily between his fingers, and at the river's edge, in the cottonwoods, Jonas made the mare halt long enough to bind the arm tight with a strip torn from his own shirt, while Willa stood in the stirrups and fired twice, unhurried, at muzzle flashes on the slope, and the flashes stopped altogether after her second shot in a way that suggested the night had made its point to the other side. The wound was a clean passage through the flesh of the arm, angry but honest. Then the river took them.
The Rio Sombra in October ran low and cold and black as slate, braided among gravel bars, and it was Willa who knew where the deep channels ran in the dark, because her people had crossed it in every season since before the fort had stones. She put the mare in at the cottonwoods and Jonas waded beside the horse's head with the evidence held high and his teeth set against the current's patient, grinding pull. Twice the bottom fell away and he swam, one-handed, the cold going through him like a blade drawn slowly. Behind them the torches came down to the bank and stopped, and could not follow, because a torch shows the man who follows it exactly where the water is not. The river carried their scent and their track away downstream and erased the account entirely, the way running water settles all debts of sign. They came out a half mile below the ford, in a willow thicket on the valley side, with the ledgers dry inside their oilcloth and the moon going down.
Dawn found them in a side canyon above the river, alive, which had not been a promised thing at midnight. Willa built a fire no bigger than a hat in a pit of stones and dressed Renner's arm properly with yarrow and clean linen, while Jonas sat with the deed spread on his knee in the growing light, reading his father's stolen name over and over. The old clerk lay back against a saddle with his arm in a sling, gray-faced, triumphant, and more alive than he had looked in the cellar. "We are ahead," he said. "For the first time in six years, the paper is ahead of the men with guns. Husband it, Hale. It is a crop like any other, and Harrow will come to burn the field."
Chapter 19
: The Informant