Josiah had seen that bite before. Three days earlier, on the trail east of Ben's cut fence, among the unshod prints laid down to tell a story about Apache raiders, there had been shod prints half-brushed and careless — and one of them, pressed deep where a rider had dismounted by the gate, carried the same notch at the heel.
He stayed kneeling a long time, with the heat coming up off the ground into his face. Then he stood, brushed the sand from his knees, and went in to tell Ben that the man who had stolen his herd had just ridden up to ask after Clara.
Chapter 13
: The Ledger of Debts
The town lay twelve miles north, where the Cienega bent and false-front stores faced each other across a street of pale dust. Josiah rode in at noon with his list folded in his shirt pocket and his money, what there was of it, counted twice. Flour, salt, coffee, lamp oil, cartridges he hoped not to use. Calico, if the price allowed, because he had seen Pearl mend the same dress at the same seam. He tied his horse in the shade of the bank's awning, because the bank, being stone, threw the only true shade on the street.
The bank clerk was a young man named Elias Cobb, twenty-three and already careful in the way of men who handle other men's ruin in columns. He had known Josiah since the war years had still been fresh, and when Josiah came in to ask after a small draft from his sister in Missouri, Cobb answered the question and then, after a glance at the empty office behind him, kept talking.
"You did not hear it from my desk, Mr. Merritt," he said, low. "But if you have any paper out — any note at all — you should know whose hands it is traveling toward. Colonel Voss has been buying. Not lending. Buying. Store accounts, ranch notes, mortgages where the ink is barely dry. Quiet as snowfall, one piece at a time, through an agent in Tucson so his name stays off the first page."
Josiah thought of Micah Trent, who for fifteen years had weighed Josiah's flour with a thumb of generosity on the scale, and who in the past two months had begun to look through him at the store counter as if Josiah were a man already gone. Micah, who no longer let him run a tab past the week. Micah, whose eldest boy no longer rode out to Arroyo Seco on Sundays.
"Trent?" Josiah asked.
Cobb's silence was answer enough, but the young man, having started, seemed compelled to be exact. "The store mortgage, the warehouse note, even the loan on his house. All of it sold on in June. Mr. Trent found out after the fact, same as the others. Half the valley, Mr. Merritt, if you count it by acres and by debt together. Folks who think they owe the bank owe him now. And a man who owes Colonel Voss—" He stopped, aware he had gone as far as his courage allowed. "He does not sleep easy, is all I am saying. It is not always hatred that makes a man go cold. Sometimes it is a letter he is afraid will come due."
Josiah thanked him without pressing for more, and carried the knowledge out into the street like something breakable. He saw the town differently now: the blacksmith who had stopped meeting his eye; the widow Ortega, who had sold her freight wagon too low and too quick; the note Ben had signed in spring for seed and wire. All of them beads on a string he had not known was being pulled.
At Trent's store he laid his list on the counter. Micah came from the back with his apron on and his ledger under one arm, and for an instant, seeing Josiah alone in the empty store, the old friendship showed plainly in his face — and then was put away, carefully, the way a man puts away a photograph when company comes.
"Josiah," he said.
"Micah." Josiah asked for his goods one item at a time, and paid in coin as each was set down, though they had not done business so in twenty years. Micah wrapped the cartridges with particular slowness. His hands, Josiah noticed, were not steady.
"You are short on the coffee," Micah said at last, not looking up. "I can make up the difference Friday, when the wagon comes." It was the language of credit, offered sideways, deniable. A kindness with its face turned away so Voss's ledgers could not see it.
"I will be obliged Friday, then," Josiah said, just as sideways, and understood that they were speaking the only dialect left to them. He wanted to say the rest aloud — that he knew about the mortgage, that fear was no shame between friends, that a debt held by Voss was a bridle and not a verdict. But the store had ears made of other men's paper, and Micah's boy was sweeping in the back, and some mercies had to be left unspoken to remain mercies at all. He settled for resting his hand flat on the counter a moment, near his friend's, not touching, and letting the nearness say it.