"You have made an impression, grandson-to-be," she told Wade, shelling beans into a bowl with hands that never stopped. "It is a rare man who impresses this camp by refusing something."
"I didn't refuse," Wade said.
"No. You refused the refusing and the taking both. You handed it to her. That is rarer." She pointed a bean at him. "Mind you keep the habit. A marriage is a long series of questions, trader. Most men answer them all themselves, in advance, and call the silence peace. You have begun correctly. Do not improve."
"I'll try to be exactly this satisfactory forever," Wade said.
"You will not be," Weshka said, comfortably. "But you have begun correctly, and beginnings are the load-bearing part." She went back to her beans. "Tomorrow, the spring. Bring your exactness. The water will want counting too, and my granddaughter counts water the way you count horses."
That night Wade wrote into his own record book, where his accounts lived: the herd, whole, by brands; the valley, safe; the terms, received and agreed, in his trader's hand. Underneath, in the space where he usually totaled a season, he wrote a single line and underlined it once.
Owed: one life. Paid: not in coin. Current arrangement: satisfactory to all parties, her terms governing.
He closed the book on it, and slept the way a man sleeps whose road, for once in a life of roads, has been chosen at both ends — by the man walking it, and by the woman waiting, on ground she had set with her own hands, at the other end of it.
Chapter 26 — The Traders' Moon
The moon came up over the east rim of the canyon the way it had the night it was first named to him — white and whole and in no hurry at all — and nobody in the valley said one word about it.
Wade Mercer noticed. A man notices the date that was set for his own leaving the way he notices the line a flood leaves on a wall. He stood at the lower end of the horse herd with the count slate in his hand and the dust of the evening gather on his boots, and he watched the rim take the light, and let the moment pass the way it wanted to pass — unremarked — and went back to his counting.
Forty Bar M horses. He counted them the way a man counts money he has already counted twice, not out of doubt but out of pleasure. The twelve that had spent their nights penned in Vane's box canyon stood hipshot and easy among the rest, fat on valley grass, and a man who had not known which twelve they were could not have picked them out of the twenty-eight. Wade did not begrudge himself the satisfaction.
"Counting at the herd again," Weshka said out of the dark beside the fence. He had not heard her come, which was her custom and her pleasure. "It does not grow faster for the looking, grandson."
"It grows some," Wade said. "Grass and quiet. Horses are like banks that way."
"Horses are like men. Grass and quiet, and a fence they believe in." She stood with him a while, watching the rim. "That moon had an errand once, in this valley."
"I remember the errand."
"It will rise tonight and find you here, and be ashamed of itself, and go on about its business." She turned back toward the lodges, unhurried. "That is the whole of most deadlines, grandson. Weather that somebody threatened you with."
The traders had come in at midday with three pack trains out of the river towns — blankets, flour, coffee, iron, beads bright as bird feathers — and the trading had gone the way Tazlo had plainly intended it to go: on the band's own ground, at the band's own pace, with nothing given away to hurry. Wade had watched Tali sit beside her father at the trade blanket and argue a price down to the last brass button with a patience that made the traders laugh and pay it, and he had understood that he was watching a thing restored. A people trading as partners, with goods of their own to withhold, in a valley that no false report had emptied.
One of the river men had tried, out of habit, to buy Bar M horses at wreck prices, the way a man buys off a flood. "Heard you lost your camp, friend. Hard season. I'll take the whole string off your hands and save you the feeding."
"You heard wrong," Wade said. "I lost a camp. I kept the horses." And Tali, without looking up from the blanket, had said, "His horses are spoken for, trader. The Army pays better than pity," and the man had laughed and paid full price for two of the band's colts instead, and no more was said.
By the middle of the afternoon the trade blankets were spread in a row in the cottonwood shade, and the whole valley had the air of a fair. Children ran errands for coffee. Old men who had not agreed about anything in thirty years agreed about the price of hides. Wade walked the line of it with his hands in his pockets and thought about the other version of this day — the one in which the traders had come to an emptied canyon and found stakes and paper instead of people, and the moon that night had risen on nobody at all.
Folded in oilskin against his ribs was the day's other paper: the remuda contract from the fort, brought down with the trains, the post commander's signature already dry on it. Remounts at the set Army price, counted jointly at the delivery gate. And riders — six of the band's young men hired at Army wages to ride the drive, named in the contract as plain as any white drover's crew that ever signed at a fort. Callum's hand was in that, Wade was sure. The lieutenant had listened at the spring the way a man listens when he is learning the shape of a thing, and he had written the valley down as he found it.