He walked away up the meadow in the blue dusk, unhurried, whistling very softly something that might have been a hymn.
Wade stood a long time with the hoof pick in his hand and the mare breathing warm against his shoulder. Then he picked up the envelope from the rock, because leaving evidence on a rock for any passerby was a fool's move and because it was addressed, in a sense, to him. He did not open it. He put it inside his shirt, against his ribs, where it sat the rest of the evening like a second and colder heartbeat, and he finished the mare's feet, and went up to Weshka's lodge for his supper, and ate it, and answered the old woman's one dry question about his day with a courtesy that fooled neither of them, and lay down in the doorway with his three days burned to one and a thief's draft unsigned against his heart, and gave no answer to anyone about anything.
Not to Vane. Not yet to the chief. The custom said three days. He would use them all, and the using, he was beginning to understand, was the answer's truest part.
Chapter 15 — The Third Day Begins
The third day began the way the first one had: before the light, with the stone. But the stone had changed in the night, or Wade had, because what he woke carrying was no longer whether but how much it would cost him to be the man he'd been raised to be, and he lay in the lodge doorway in the grey hour and did the arithmetic of his life honestly, the way his father had taught him to do accounts — every figure entered, nothing prettied.
Asset: one life, owed entire to a woman who had pulled it out of a river for no reason but that he was drowning. Debt: the same, and it could not be paid in horses, for she had not asked horses for it, and a debt a man can only repay by being worthy of it is the heaviest kind there is.
Asset: twenty-eight horses in the lower meadow. Liability: twelve horses in a promoter's pen up-canyon, hostage to a signature. Asset: a name, Mercer, that banks in two territories had never had cause to write down twice. It was not a large estate, but it was everything, and he had noticed — doing the column in the dark — that every honest figure in it pointed the same way, and the one figure that pointed the other way was Vane's, and it was written in another man's hand on a draft inside his shirt.
He rose before the camp and saddled the borrowed mare in the half-dark, and rode down-canyon, not up. Down, toward the mouth of the valley, where the wash spread out into gravel. He told himself it was to think; it was to stand in the spot and hold his own life up against the light, and he knew it even as he lied about it.
The gravel bar lay as the flood had left it: a long pale fan of stone and silt, cottonwood limbs pointing downstream like the arms of drowned men, the river already shrunk back to its honest size and running clear and shallow over the shingle, as if it had never in its life raised a hand to anyone. Wade stood at the bar's edge with his boots in the wet gravel, in the place — near enough, a body's length near enough — where a half-drowned Texan had woken coughing mud three days before the chief's daughter found him here and decided he was worth the hauling.
"You were further up," said a voice behind him, dry as a twig snapping. "By the big root. I remember because the root took your hat off, and I thought: the river has dressed him down to just a man. It is a good way to meet a person."
Weshka stood there in the dawn light with a bundle of gathered sticks under one arm and her shawl over her head, having arrived as old women do — from nowhere, without sound, at the exact moment she was needed — and whether she had followed him or foreseen him, Wade knew she would not care to say.
"Grandmother," Wade said, and took his hat off, and could not have said why except that the place asked it.
"You have come to ask the river," Weshka said, "whether you are the man who signs, or the man who stays, or the man who runs. The river will not answer. It only tells you what you weigh, by whether you float." She set her sticks down with care on the dry stone, one by one, like a woman setting out cups. "So I will tell you three things, trader, because I am old and my days are not yours. Listen as you would listen to weather."
Wade waited. The sun was on the canyon rim now, and the first light laid itself along the water.
"First," Weshka said. "A man who must be forced to a thing has already answered it. The chief's law is a door, not a chain — I made the law's beginning myself when I said bring him in. Tazlo growls because growling is a father's whole vocabulary when he is afraid for his child. Do not mistake the door for the man. And do not mistake the growling for my granddaughter's worth, or yours."
"Second. My granddaughter did not pull a husband out of the river. She pulled out a drowning man, because that is what her hands are for. If you stay, let it be for the staying, not for the owing — a marriage built on a debt is a corral, and nothing good has ever been kept in one. If you go, go owing, and pay the owing some other way. She will survive either. She has survived worse than your deciding."