She picked up her sticks again, and her eyes — old, filmed, missing nothing — rested on the folded shape of the envelope inside his shirt where his coat hung open, and Wade felt the whole morning tilt, because of course she knew; she knew everything, by watching where men's hands went when they thought no one was counting.
"Third," Weshka said. "The man who wrote that paper" — she did not point; she did not need to — "counted your horses before he counted you, and found you cheaper. Before this sun is down, decide what you find yourself to be. That is the only one of the three questions that is truly yours: whatever you do with the door, and whatever you do with the debt." She turned back toward the camp, gathering sticks as she went, as though the conversation had been a minor errand on the way to breakfast. "Come and eat. Deciding is heavy work, and no man in this valley does it on an empty stomach and keeps my respect."
Wade stood a while longer on the gravel bar where he had almost ended, with the river talking its small talk over the stones and the unsigned draft against his ribs and the sun climbing down the canyon wall toward him. Then he put his hat on, and mounted the borrowed mare, and rode back up the valley to breakfast, with one day left of his three — and the arithmetic done, if the answer was not yet spoken.
Chapter 16 — The Answer Postponed
Wade had his answer ready before the sun was fully over the canyon rim.
He had spent the last of the night turning it over the way a man turns a stone in his pocket, until it was smooth and he knew its weight. He would stand at the council fire and say what a man should say, and not leave Tali to carry his silence the way she had carried other men's cowardice before him. Weshka's words at the gravel bar had settled something in him. He washed at the spring run in the cold dawn, put on his least-ruined shirt, and walked toward the council ground with his hat in his hand and the answer plain in his mind.
He never got to give it.
The rider came in from the north pass at a hard lope, his horse blowing and white at the mouth, and the camp rose around him before he was out of the saddle. He was one of the band's young men, the one they called Swift Otter, and he had ridden through the night from the agency road with news that emptied the council ground of every other matter.
The soldiers were coming. A patrol out of the fort, two days out, maybe less. A courier had changed horses at the agency and talked the way couriers talk, with a bottle in him. The patrol was not a supply escort and it was not a surveying party. It rode because a report had reached the fort — a report of an attack on white miners in this canyon, of stolen stock and shots fired, of a band arming itself. The lieutenant had orders to investigate and authority, if the report proved true, to remove the band to the agency under guard.
The council ground went very quiet. Wade stood with his hat in his hands and felt his answer go useless in his chest, not wrong, not unwanted, simply belonging to a world that had ended an hour ago. A marriage spoken into a valley about to be emptied would be a stone tied to a drowning man. He understood it before the chief said anything, and he was grateful, later, that he had not had to learn it the other way.
Chief Tazlo listened to the rider with his face like carved wood, and when the young man had finished and led his horse away, the old chief stood a long while looking at the ground where the fire would be laid. Then he raised his head and found Wade in the crowd, the way a man finds a landmark.
"White man," he said, and the camp stilled to hear it. "You came to this fire to speak your answer. I know it. Your face has carried it since the spring. But an answer given over a grave is no answer, and this valley may be a grave in two days if we speak of weddings while soldiers ride toward us with a liar's paper in their saddlebags."
He came a step closer, and his voice lowered, though every ear in the camp heard him.
"So I hold your answer," Tazlo said. "Not refused. Not forgotten. Held, the way a man holds a coal in ash until the wind dies. When the valley's fate is spoken — if we still stand in it — you will stand at this fire again and the question will be asked again, whole, as it was asked the first time. Until then, the traders' moon can wait on the soldiers. Go and be useful. That is the only answer this camp needs from any man today."
Wade put his hat on. "Then I'll be useful," he said.
What followed had the order of a camp that had survived a hundred years of greater powers deciding its fate. Tazlo set the old men to council, the women to the lodges and the drying racks and the children, the young men to the horses and the high passes. No one wailed. No one argued. The band went about the work of being ready the way a family goes about the work of a storm already visible on the horizon, and Wade, watching it, understood that the ultimatum had never been cruelty. It was the same law as this: a people that could not afford waste, of men or of mornings.
Tali found him at the horse herd, where he had gone because horses were the thing he knew. She had a rope in her hands and dust on her skirt and no more fear in her face than there had been any day since she pulled him out of the water.