Mercer wanted those girls because Mercer wanted everything in this valley. And four young women without a guardian was just another resource to be acquired. But the gray suit man was a man who had been told to win an auction, not to bankrupt his employer over a stubborn cowboy in a torn coat. He sat down.
He didn’t bid again. Pel looked around the square once, twice. Lifted the gavvel slow like he was hoping somebody would save him from what he had to do. Going, he said. Going. A man in the back yelled. That’s our women going to a kidnapper. Pel, you old fool. Going, Pel said again louder. And gone.
Sold to the gentleman in the duster for $411 American. One horse in quarter section 22 on Coffin Creek. The gavl came down and the noise that came up out of that crowd was not a cheer. They wouldn’t even let him on the platform. The bankman came down off it with the papers in his hand, and Silas signed his name three times in three places, the pen scratching across the paper louder than it had any right to.
The bankman didn’t look him in the face once. When Silas pushed the deed across the table, the deed to section 22, the only thing he’d owned outright in his adult life, “The bank man took it with two fingers, the way you’d pick up a dead mouse.” “You understand the terms,” the bankman said very quiet. “I understand them.
Indenture, marriage, or labor. The territory don’t ask after them again. Anything that happens to those girls under your roof is on your head, mister. I understand it. I’m not sure you do.” Silas looked up. The bankman was looking at him now for the first time, and there was something in his face that wasn’t hate exactly. It was something worse.
It was the resigned, tired pity of a man who had seen a great many ugly things signed off on this same table, and had stopped expecting any of them to come out. Well, “They’ll talk,” the bankman said. “Around here. They’ll say things.” They already do. They’ll say worse. Let them.
The bank man shook his head just once and stamped the bottom of the paper. It was done. The sisters came down off the platform one at a time. Evelyn first. She walked down the three plank steps with her chin up and her shoulders square the way a soldier walks to a court marshal. And when she got to the dirt at the bottom, she stopped in front of Silas and waited.
She did not put out her hand. She did not say anything. She just stood there and looked at him. that same wolf on the frozen river look and waited for him to tell her what came next. Norah came down behind her. The grease was still on her cheek. She kept her hands at her sides and her eyes on the ground, but Silas could see her counting again.
The small flexing of the fingers, the way her shoulders shifted, counting exits, counting weapons in the crowd, counting the seconds it would take her sisters to get to the horse if she had to make a distraction. Sadi came down third, and Sadi’s eyes went straight to Silas’s hip, to the Colt sitting there in its sweat darkened holster.
She looked at the gun for a long second and then up at his face. And Silas understood without anything being said that this 15-year-old child had already decided that if he laid a hand on her littlest sister, she was going to get that gun off him or die trying. He nodded at her just barely. He hoped she understood what the nod meant.
He wasn’t sure himself. And then Clara. Clara wouldn’t come down. She stood at the top of the steps with her arms wrapped around herself and her bare feet rooted to the platform and her face had gone past gray into a kind of white and she was making a small high sound that wasn’t quite crying.
Evelyn turned and went back up the steps. Silas watched the older sister kneel down in front of the younger one, watched her say something very low that he couldn’t hear. Watched Clara shake her head violently once, twice, and then nod just the smallest bit. Evelyn picked her up, lifted her clean off her feet, all 50some pounds of her, and carried her down the steps and set her on the dirt next to her other two sisters, and never once looked at Silas while she did it.
When all four of them were standing in front of him, Silas cleared his throat. He had not thought about what he was going to say. He hadn’t gotten that far. He had not, in fact, thought about any of this. He had ridden into town for nails. My name’s Silus Boon, he said. Nobody answered. I have a place, he said. Two days ride from here, north and a little west.
There’s a cabin and there’s a creek and there’s He stopped. He had been about to say there’s food, but he didn’t actually know if there was. He had been gone 6 days. There might be food. There might be a raccoon in the larder. There’s shelter, he said instead. It ain’t much. It’s what there is. Evelyn spoke for the first time. What do you want from us? It was not a question.
There was no question mark in it anywhere. It was a flat thing laid down between them like a knife on a table. Nothing, Silus said. Evelyn’s mouth tightened. Don’t lie to me, mister, she said. You spent $400 and a horse and your land on us. Nobody spends that for nothing. So you tell me right now what you want and you tell me plain because I would rather know it standing here in the daylight than find it out in the dark. Silas opened his mouth.
He closed it. He looked at her, this 19-year-old girl in a torn brown dress, no shoes, hair half down, who had just watched her father’s debt sold off her back and had walked down off an auction platform without crying once. and he understood that whatever he said in the next few seconds was going to matter for the rest of his life.
“I want you to live,” he said. Evelyn’s expression did not change. But something behind her eyes did. Something flickered very briefly and then was gone. “That’s it,” Silas said. “That’s what I want. I want you four to live. I don’t want servants. I don’t want wives. I don’t want anything you’re thinking I want. I got a piece of country up north that nobody’s looked at in 10 years and I got a fool idea about what to do with it.
And I need He stopped. He had to start again. I need people who got nowhere else because people who got somewhere else, they don’t stay. And what I’m building won’t work if folks don’t stay. What are you building? Norah said. It was the first time she had spoken. Her voice was lower than her sisters, quieter.
The voice of somebody who was used to not being heard the first time. A town, Silas said. The three older sisters looked at him. A town that don’t belong to the bank, he said, or to the railroad. Or to a man named Mercer, who I expect you’ll meet sooner or later. A town where if your daddy dies owing money, his daughters don’t end up on a plank in the sun with their shoes off.
That’s what I’m building, or trying to. I’ve been at it 2 years, and I got a cabin and a creek and 40 acres, and now I don’t even got the 40 acres. So that’s the truth of it. There was a long quiet. Clara, the littlest, was staring up at him now. Her eyes were enormous in her gray face. “Mister,” she said.
Her voice was very small. “Do you got any biscuits?” Silus looked down at her. Something in his chest did a thing he was not prepared for. “In my saddle bag,” he said. He had to clear his throat. “I got I got three. They’re a day old and they’re hard as a hoof, but they’re biscuits. You can have all three.
Clara considered this with the gravity of a judge. All three? She said, “All three. For me? For you? Your sisters can fight over the jerky?” The faintest, faintest crack appeared at the corner of Clara’s mouth. It wasn’t a smile. It was the place where a smile would live if she ever decided to have one again. “Then it was gone.” All right, she said. Okay.
They walked out of Drybone Hollow on foot, all five of them, because Partardo could carry one rider or a pack, but not five people. And Silas wasn’t going to put any of the sisters up on the horse while he walked because he had a notion, a stupid notion, maybe a notion he couldn’t have explained that they needed to leave that town on their own two feet.
Even Clara, especially Clara. The crowd watched them go. Nobody threw anything. That part came later. on other days in other towns. On this day, the crowd just stood there in the square and watched the cowboy in the torn duster lead four barefoot girls out of Drybone Hollow toward the north road. And the silence that came up off 200 people was the silence of a jury that had already voted and was waiting only for sentencing.
A woman near the bank, an older woman in a black bonnet, made the sign against the evil eye as they passed her. Silas saw it from the corner of his vision and pretended he hadn’t. Bettos, the ranch foreman, spat in the dust at Silas’s feet as they went by. Boon, Bettos said. Silas didn’t stop walking.
Boon, you crazy son of a You know what you just done? Silas kept walking. Mercer’s going to hear about this. Bettos called after him. Mercer’s going to hear about this before sundown. You hear me, Boon? You bought yourself a war. Silas heard him. He kept walking. When they were a quarter mile clear of the last building, where the road bent past the old broken down windmill, and the country opened up into the long, flat sage country that stretched all the way to the foothills, Silas stopped.
He went to Partardau, and pulled the saddle bag open and dug out the three biscuits, hard as he’d promised, wrapped in a piece of waxed paper. He squatted down on his heels in the road, and held them out to Clara. She took them with both hands. She did not eat them. She held them against her chest like they were a small dead bird that might come back to life if she was careful enough.
Clara, Evelyn said, eat one. Clara shook her head. Eat one, baby. Clara shook her head again harder, and then she very carefully broke each biscuit into four equal pieces. 12 pieces. She held three of them out to Sadi, three to Nora, three to Evelyn, and kept three for herself. Then she ate. Silas watched the four of them stand in the road eating broken biscuit and he thought very clearly and for the first time in many years.
I do not know what I am doing. I do not know what I am doing and I have just bet everything I own on it. God help these girls. He didn’t say it out loud. He didn’t say anything out loud. He stood up, brushed the dust off his knees and looked north toward the long blue line of the sangres on the horizon.
and he thought about the two days of country between him and the cabin, and how much of it was Mercer’s, one way or the other, and how the news of what he had just done was probably riding faster than any horse in the territory right now, faster than wind, faster than the truth could ever ride. “All right,” he said, mostly to himself.
“All right, then.” He looked at the sisters. “It’s a long walk,” he said. “We best get on.” Evelyn looked at him for a long second. Then she nodded just once. the same small nod he had given Sadi back in the square, and she turned and started walking up the north road in her bare feet. The others followed. Silas took Partardo’s reigns and went after them, and the wind off the sangra came down hard against his face, and the dust got in his teeth, and somewhere behind him in dry bone hollow, a man was already saddling a fast horse to ride
east with the news. And somewhere ahead of him, a fire was being laid in a stove he had not lit in six days. And somewhere out in the long sage country, a cattle baron named Wade Mercer was sitting down to his noon meal, not yet knowing that his life had just changed. And somewhere very small and very deep inside Silus boon.
A thing he had been certain was dead turned over once in its grave, and opened its eyes. He did not name it. He just walked. The five of them went north up the road, the cowboy and the four sisters and the meaneyed horse. And the sun climbed, and the shadows shortened, and the country swallowed them whole. And behind them the town of Drybone Hollow stood in the dust, and watched them disappear, and began already to tell the story wrong.
They walked until the sun was a low red coin sitting on the rim of the country, and then they walked some more. Silas had figured on making the old stage relay at Coyote Wells by full dark, but he had not figured on four sets of bare feet, and he had not figured on Clara. The little one held up better than he’d expected for the first 3 miles.
Around mile four, she stopped talking. Around mile 5, she stopped looking up. By the time the shadows were running long across the sage, she was walking with her eyes on the road 3 ft in front of her and her arms wrapped around her own ribs, and she had bitten her lower lip so hard there was a smear of blood at the corner of her mouth that she didn’t even seem to know was there.
Evelyn noticed first. Evelyn noticed everything. Mr. Boon, she said she had not used his first name. She would not for a long time. Yes, ma’am. My sister can’t walk much further. Silus stopped Partardo in the road and looked back. Clara was maybe 10 paces behind, her head down, putting one foot in front of the other with the slow, stubborn rhythm of a child who had decided she was not going to be the reason anybody stopped.
“All right,” Silas said. “All right, hold up a minute.” He walked back to her. He squatted down on his heels the way he had in the road outside Drybone Hollow. And Clara stopped walking and looked at his belt buckle because she could not yet look at his face. “Clara,” he said. “Your feet hurt?” She nodded very small.
“You bleeding?” A pause, another nod, smaller. “Can I see?” She didn’t answer. He looked up at Evelyn over the child’s shoulder, and Evelyn’s mouth set in that hard, level line, and she gave him the kind of nod that meant, “If you do one wrong thing, I will end you, and please help her at the exact same time.
” Silus lifted Clara’s right foot, gentle as he could, with hands that had not been gentle with much in a long time. The soul was red, not bright red, the dull, crusted red of skin that had been bleeding for an hour, and had stopped bleeding because there wasn’t enough left to bleed. He set it down and lifted the other one. The same.
“All right,” he said quietly. “All right, sweetheart. That’s enough walking for you today.” “I can walk,” Clara said. He came out as a whisper. “I know you can. You just proved you can. You’re done, though.” He stood up. He went to Partardo and unbuckled the saddle bag and pulled out the spare shirt he kept in there. Flannel, dark gray, washed so many times the elbows had gone soft as paper.
He tore it down the long seam with two short hard pulls. He tore the halves into strips. He came back and crouched and wrapped Clara’s feet, both of them snug but not tight, layer over layer. Now, he said. He looked up at her. You ever ridden a horse? She shook her head. You afraid of him? Another shake.
Liar, he said, and the smallest crack appeared again at the corner of her mouth. The same one that wasn’t a smile, but was the place a smile might live. He lifted her onto Partardau’s back. The horse swung his head around, ears flat, ready to be ugly about it. Silas leaned forward into Partau’s neck and said three quiet words that nobody else heard, and Partardo blew out a hard breath and laid his ears back to neutral and stood still.
Clara held the saddle horn with both small hands and looked terrified and proud at the same time. “Don’t kick him,” Silas said. “He don’t like that. You just sit and I’ll lead.” What’s his name? Partardo. Partardo, she repeated, careful with it, like a word in a new language. That’s a funny name for a horse. He’s a funny horse.
He took the reins and started walking again. Behind him, Evelyn fell into step on Part’s left side, close enough to catch Clara if the child slipped. Norah and Sadi came along behind. Nobody said anything for a while. The only sounds were the soft scuff of feet and the heavier knock of Partardo’s hooves on the packed dirt and somewhere far off the dry, brittle scream of a hawk hunting late.
After a long stretch, Sadi spoke from behind him. Mister? Yeah. How far is it really? Silas considered lying. He’d been considering it for the last hour. He decided against it because Sadi was the kind of person who would know. 2 days hard, he said. 3 days the way we’re going. Maybe more if your sister’s feet don’t hold. They’ll hold, Evelyn said.
She did not look at him when she said it. There’s a creek about an hour up, Silas said. Cold water. We can rest there. I got a little flour and salt pork in the saddle bag. It ain’t much, but I can make us something. You got salt pork in there? Norah said. It was the first thing she’d said in 2 hours. And you didn’t tell Clara.
I told Clara about the biscuits. You told Clara about three-day old biscuits when there was salt pork in the bag. Salt pork ain’t to be ate raw on the road, ma’am. It wants a pan. You called me ma’am, Norah said. That a problem? I’m 17 years old. And I’ve been calling women ma’am since I was younger than you. Habit.
Take it or leave it. Norah made a small sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. It wasn’t a friendly sound either. It was the sound a person makes when she is too tired to decide what she thinks about something. And so she just files it away for later. They walked on. The creek Silas had promised was where he’d said it would be about an hour on, running shallow and clear over a bed of round black stones in a shallow draw between two low hills.
There was a little stand of cottonwoods at the bend, the leaves already going yellow at the tips, even though it was barely fall, and the grass underneath was flat from cattle that had bedded there sometime in the last week. Silas led them down to the water and helped Clara off the horse. She tried to walk and her bandaged feet folded under her and Evelyn caught her by the elbows and lowered her down to the creek bank.
“Put your feet in,” Silas said. “Cold water will help.” Clara looked at him doubtful. “I’ve done it a hundred times,” Silas said. “Save my hide twice. Go on.” She unwrapped the strips of his shirt slow and careful, like she was afraid of what she might find underneath. And then she put both feet into the creek and made a small high noise that was half pain and half relief.
And her shoulders came down for the first time in eight hours. Evelyn knelt next to her and put a hand on the back of her neck. Just laid it there. Didn’t say anything. Clara leaned a little sideways until her head was against her sister’s arm. Silas turned away from them. There are things a man should not stand and watch. He took the small iron pan out of his pack and set about building a fire on the bank a little ways downstream.
He took the salt pork, not much of it, a piece the size of his fist, and laid it out on a flat rock and cut it into slices with his clasp knife. He mixed a little flour with water from the creek in a tin cup until it was a thick paste, then thinned it with more water until it was a thin batter.
Frontier biscuits, or a Frontier Man’s idea of biscuits. They came out flat and brown and tasted mostly of salt and grease, but they would sit in a stomach. Sadi came over while he was working. She stood a little behind him and a little to one side, the way a person stands when she has not decided yet whether she is approaching or watching from cover.
He pretended not to notice her. “You always cook for the people you buy,” she said. He kept his eyes on the pan. “Ain’t bought nobody before today.” “That makes one of us.” He looked up at her. She was standing with her arms crossed over her thin chest and the bruise on her cheekbone was darker now in the fire light going purple at the edges.
“Who hit you?” he said. She didn’t answer for a moment. Then man named Gity. Run the boarding house in Drybone where they kept us the last four nights. Said I was sassing him. I was. Wasn’t worth a punch, but he was that kind. He’s still walking around. Far as I know. All right. She watched him. All right. What? All right. Is what I said.
You going to do something about it? He turned a slice of pork in the pan with the point of his knife. The fat hissed. Sadi, he said, I’m not in the business of riding back to towns I just left. I got enough trouble in front of me without going hunting for the kind behind. If Gity comes around where I am, that’s a different conversation.
Until then, he’s just a name I’m going to remember. She thought about it. Fair, she said, and walked away. He watched her go. She walked the way a person walks when she has been hit by men more than once and has decided that the next one was going to be the last one to ever do it. It was not a walk a 15-year-old should have had to learn.
It was a walk Silas knew well because he had it himself for a while after the ranch, after Dodge. He turned back to the pan in the fire and did not let himself follow the thought any further. They ate sitting on the creek bank in a rough half circle, the fire low between them. Silas had cooked 13 slices of salt pork and made eight flat hard biscuits, and he portioned them out so that the sisters got more than he did, and Clara got more than her sisters. Nobody argued the math.
Clara ate three biscuits and four slices of pork and then fell asleep sitting up, her head sliding sideways onto Evelyn’s shoulder, and Evelyn shifted her gentle until the child was curled in her lap. And that was the end of any conversation for a while. Silas put what was left in the pan back into the saddle bag for breakfast, washed his hands in the creek, and walked a little way upstream to where he had a view back down the road they’d come up.
He stood there in the dark and watched. He stood there a long time. Norah came and stood next to him after a while. She didn’t say anything at first. She just stood there in the grass with her arms wrapped around herself against the cold and looked back down the road the same way he was. “You expecting somebody?” she said, hoping not to be.
“That man at the auction, the one in the gray suit.” “Yeah.” “You think he’s coming?” “I think somebody is. Maybe him, maybe not. There was a man at the back of that crowd I didn’t know sitting a tall claybank with a Henry rifle on the saddle and he left the square about 10 minutes before we did. He didn’t go inside any building.
He just rode off east. So somebody’s already gone to fetch somebody. Norah was quiet for a moment. Who’s Mercer? Silas considered how to answer. Wade Mercer, he said, is a man who owns about 110,000 acres of country between here and Pueblo, depending on who you ask. He owns the bank in three towns. He owns half the politicians in two counties.
He has between 40 and 60 men on his payroll depending on the season. And about a dozen of them are men I would not turn my back on if I was holding a loaded gun. And he wanted us. He wanted somebody. U4 was just what was on the platform. Why? Silas looked sideways at her. The fire light from down the bank caught half her face and left the other half in dark. She didn’t look 17 right then.
She looked older than him. Mercer don’t like anything in his country he don’t own. Silas said don’t matter if it’s land or water or cattle or people. If it’s in his country and he don’t own it, he wants to. Some men collect coins. He collects leverage. Four sisters with no people and a debt against their name is leverage.
Leverage for what? Anything he wants. Marry one of you off to a foreman to bind a loyalty. indenture another to clean a house. Sell the contracts down the line to somebody who’d pay. Doesn’t matter what. The point is he had four cards he was about to be dealt for free. And then I walked in and bought the deck. Norah was quiet again.
You should know, she said finally, that we are not grateful. He kept looking down the road. All right. I mean it. We don’t know you. We don’t know what you are. You stood up in that square and bid for us like we were cattle. And I understand you think you were saving us, but you was bidding for us, mister. You was bidding.
You put a number on my little sister. I know. My daddy died eight days ago, and he died owing money that wasn’t his fault. And nobody in that town would lend us a horse to leave on. And now we’re sitting on a creek in the dark, a 100 miles from anyone we ever knew, eating a stranger’s salt pork, because the stranger paid $400 for the right to take us somewhere we don’t know. I know.
So when I say we are not grateful, I mean we are not grateful. We are scared. There is a difference. Silas nodded slow. There is, he said. And I ain’t asking you to be grateful. I never asked anybody to be grateful for anything in my life. I’d be obliged if you was scared a little less of me than of the man in the gray suit, but that’s a thing you’ll have to work out on your own and on your own time.
He looked at her. Then I will tell you one thing, though, and you can do what you want with it. Your sister Clara is asleep down there on Evelyn’s lap. She ate three biscuits and went to sleep with food in her stomach for what I’d bet is the first time in a week. Wherever you four sleep tonight, she sleeps fed. That ain’t gratitude.
That’s just an accounting. I’m telling you, so you got it for your books. Norah didn’t answer. After a while, she walked back down to the fire. Silas stayed where he was for another hour, watching the road, until the moon came up cold and white over the eastern hills and lit the country pale, and no rider came, and no dust rose.
Then he went back down to the camp and sat with his back against the cottonwood, and his rifle across his knees, and he did not sleep. They moved at first light. Silas had set out a small handful of oats for Partardo on a flat stone, and the horse was eating them when the eastern sky started going gray. The sisters had slept in a tight knot under his bed roll in a horse blanket, Clara on the inside, Sadi on the outside, facing the open country.
Sadi had been awake when Silas had walked back from the road in the night. He was sure of it, though she’d kept her eyes closed and her breathing even. That was a good thing to know about her. He got them moving without much breakfast. There was no more salt pork worth cooking, and the flower was for tonight.
He passed around strips of jerky and let them drink from the creek, and they were on the road north before the sun had fully come up over the hills. Clara rode Partardo again. Her feet were swollen, and the bandages were stiff with dried blood. Silas figured she’d need a day off them once they got to the cabin.
Maybe two, maybe more. He’d worry about it when they got there. The country opened up wider as they went north. The sage gave way to a long flat scrubland broken by low rocky ridges and then to a stretch of broken country where wind and water had cut shallow ravines into the dirt deep enough to hide a man on a horse if he ducked.
Silas didn’t like that country. It was the kind of country where you couldn’t see anybody coming until they were on top of you. He watched the ridges hard. Around midm morning, Sadi came up to walk beside him. She had picked up a long straight stick somewhere and she was walking with it like a staff the way a shepherd would.
Silas had seen her doing it for the last hour, switching it from hand to hand, getting a feel for the weight. You ever use one of those in a fight? He said, “No, you want to maybe reverse your grip on it like that. So the long ends behind you and the short ends in front. Now when somebody comes at you, you don’t swing. You drive straight forward into the throat or the gut.
A swing they can see and catch. A drive they can’t. She looked at him. You teaching me to fight? I’m answering a question you was about to ask. I wasn’t going to ask. You was. You was going to ask in about half an hour after you got tired of pretending you wasn’t curious. I just saved you the half hour. She didn’t smile, but she switched her grip on the stick the way he’d shown her and walked the next mile holding it that way.
And Silas knew she was feeling the difference. “My daddy never let us fight,” she said after a while. “Said it wasn’t ladylike.” “Your daddy ever been in one?” “No, he was a clerk. Before the farm, he kept books for a freight company in St. Joe. Then he got the notion to homestead and We Come West 6 years ago, and he turned out to be a worse farmer than he was a clerk.
Then his heart give out. Sorry to hear it. Don’t be. He was a good man. He just wasn’t a strong one. There’s a difference. There is. They walked. Mr. Boon. Yeah. What happens if those men do come? The ones from Mercer. Silas looked sideways at her. She was looking straight ahead up the road, jaw set, the stick rocking gentle in her hand with each step. Depends how many, he said.
depends what they want. If it’s two riders looking to talk, we talk. If it’s six riders looking to take you back, we don’t. What does we don’t mean? It means I fight. And if you lose, then your sister Evelyn takes my rifle off my body and she gets you three on part and she rides north, north and west into the high country.
You don’t stop at any town. You don’t trust any man. You ride till you hit the Simmeron and you cross it and you keep going. There’s a woman in a place called Enselmo who used to know my mother. Her name is Hattie Voss. She’ll take you in if you tell her my name and show her the silver dollar I keep in my left boot.
Sadi was quiet for a long time. You thought this through, she said. I thought it through last night while you was all sleeping. I think most things through at night. Saves time in the daylight. Why are you telling me? Why not Evelyn? Because Evelyn would argue. Evelyn would say she ain’t leaving without me and we’d waste 3 minutes we don’t got.
You won’t argue, you’ll just do it.” She turned her head and looked at him then. Really looked at him. And for the first time in two days, her expression was something other than weariness. It wasn’t trust. He wouldn’t have known what to do with trust. It was the small, careful look of one practical person recognizing another.
“All right,” she said. “All right.” She walked beside him for another mile and didn’t say anything else. And then she fell back to walk with Norah, and Silas heard the two sisters talking low behind him, but couldn’t make out the words and didn’t try. They stopped at midday in the shade of a rockout crop and ate the last of the jerky and drank from the cantens.
Silas climbed up the rocks alone to look back the way they’d come. He stood up there a long time with his hand shading his eyes. When he came back down, Evelyn was waiting for him at the bottom. Somebody, she said. Dust. How far? 3 miles, maybe four. Hard to tell with the heat coming off the flats. Two riders.
Looks like maybe three. Coming fast. Coming steady. Not running, but not strolling. Evelyn closed her eyes for a second. Just one second. When she opened them, she was already calculating. How long till they reach us? Hour. Hour and a quarter if they keep that pace. How long till we reach somewhere we can hold? There’s a draw about two miles up.
Narrows down between two ridges. A man could sit on the high side with a rifle and make it expensive for anyone coming through. A man could, she said. Could a girl? He looked at her. Could a girl what? Could a girl sit on the high side with a rifle? Because you’ve got one rifle and one pistol and there might be three of them.
And one of you against three of them in open country is not arithmetic I like. You ever fired a rifle? Twice. My daddy showed me when we first come west said a woman ought to know. You hit anything. A coffee can at 30 paces once. The other shot I missed by a foot. That was years ago. It was 4 years ago.
I remember how the gun sat in my hand. I remember the kick. I’m not saying I can outshoot you. I’m saying I can hold a position with a rifle pointed downhill at a man on a horse and I can pull the trigger if I have to. Silus studied her. She was 19 years old. She was barefoot. She was wearing a torn brown dress and her hair was coming out of its braid.
And she had not slept a full night in 9 days. And she was looking at him with a face that said she had already done the math and made her choices and was now simply informing him of the result. All right, he said. All right. All right, we get to the draw. You take the rifle in the high side. Sadi sits in the rocks below you with that stick of hers and a fist-sized rock for each hand.
Norah takes Clara and the horse up the backside of the ridge and waits in the cottonwoods on the far side. If shooting starts, Norah rides north with Clara and don’t look back. You and Sadi hold the draw till the riders break off and then you come up and join Nora and you all keep going. And you? I stand in the road. Evelyn went very still.
You stand in the road in the middle of it, so they have to talk to me before they ride past. They won’t talk. They might. Mercer’s men generally do. Mercer likes his messages delivered before the killing. It’s a courtesy he indulges in. Gives him cover later. My men tried to negotiate. The cowboy went for his gun. What was a Christian businessman to do? So, they’ll talk first.
And while they’re talking, you’re going to be looking down a rifle barrel at the lead writer’s chest from the high side. And Sadi is going to be in the rocks at the low side. And if any one of them moves wrong, you fire, Evelyn. You fire first and you ask later. And if it doesn’t go wrong, then they say their peace and ride off.
And we go on north and we get to the cabin tomorrow night. And if it does, then it does. and we do what we said. She held his eyes for a long time. You’re going to stand in the road by yourself. I’m going to stand in the road with two rifles on the ridge above me that the men in the road don’t know about. That ain’t by myself.
That’s the only kind of company that matters in a fight. She kept looking at him. Why? She said, “Why? What? Why are you going to stand in the road?” He didn’t answer right away. Because if I stand in the road, he said finally, they think they only have to kill one man. And men who think they only have to kill one man get careless.
And careless men can be shot by a 19-year-old girl on a ridge with four years of rust on her trigger finger. That’s why. Evelyn looked at him another long moment. Then she did something he did not expect. She put her hand on his sleeve. Just laid it there on the duster above his elbow. She did not squeeze. She did not say anything.
She just laid her hand on his arm for the space of two heartbeats and then she took it away. “All right,” she said. She turned and walked back to her sisters. Silas stood there in the shade of the rock outcrop and looked at the place on his sleeve where her hand had been and felt something he could not have named if a court had asked him for the word.
Then he went to get the horse. They were 2 mi short of the draw when the wind changed. It came around out of the south first, a small dry shift that lifted the dust off the road in little curls, and then it gusted hard, and the curls became a sheet. Silas tasted the air. There was rain in it somewhere, not close, but coming.
He looked at the sky south, and saw the long gray purple bank of cloud sitting low over the country there, miles off, but moving. “How long till we reach those rocks?” Evelyn said from beside Partardau. She had been watching the south too. Half hour at the pace we’re going. The writers wind will slow them some. Maybe slow us too. About even, I’d guess.
What if it rains? It’ll rain. Question is whether it rains here or 30 mi off. If it’s here, the road turns to Greece and nobody’s going anywhere fast. Might be a help, might not. They walked harder. Clara on the horse had woken up to the wind and was clutching the saddle horn white- knuckled and Norah was walking with one hand on her sister’s leg just to let the child know somebody was there.
Sadi had moved up ahead, walking point about 50 paces out, her long stick in her hand and her eyes on the ridges to either side of the road. Silas had not told her to do it. She had just done it. The first drops of rain came when they were a half mile from the draw. They hit the dust in big, slow, heavy spots.
The kind of rain that’s only the start of a thing. And they kept coming, getting closer together, and by the time the rocks came into sight, the road was darkening, and the wind was driving the rain sideways into their faces. Silas put a hand up to stop them. He squinted up the road through the rain. The draw narrowed between two pale rocky ridges about 40 ft apart, a wagon track running down the middle with broken stone on either side.
Good ground for what he had in mind. He could put Evelyn up on the south ridge where the rocks made a kind of natural lip a person could lie down behind and Sadi low in the boulders on the north side where she would be out of any line of fire from above. The road came around a bend before it reached the draw, so any riders coming up would not see the draw itself until they were 100 ft from it.
And by then it would be too late to change their minds. This is it, he said. This is the place. Up the ridge, Evelyn, fast as you can, Sadi. Those rocks there, the big ones. Get behind them and stay down. Nora, take the horse and Clara around the back of the south ridge and through the cottonwoods on the far side. You don’t stop till you can’t hear voices from the road.
If you hear shots, you ride hard north and west. You remember what I told Sadi. She told me, Norah said, “Good. Go.” They went. Evelyn took the rifle. She knew how to hold it. He saw that much. Not like an expert, but not like a child either. Balanced, embraced, she climbed the ridge fast, the rain plastering her dress to her back, her bare feet finding holds in the rocks, the way feet that had grown up on hard ground will.
Sadi ducked low and slid in behind the big boulders at the foot of the north ridge, and Silas saw her gather two good round throwing stones into her lap before she went still. Norah took part’s reigns and led the horse and the child around the back of the south ridge and into the cottonwoods, and Clara made one small sound when she went out of sight, but she didn’t cry, and then the wind took even that.
Silas stood alone in the road. The rain was coming hard now. He could feel it running down inside the collar of his duster, cold against his skin. He pulled his colt loose in the holster, set it back, pulled it loose again. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He took a long breath. Up on the south ridge, just barely visible through the gray sheet of the rain, he could see the dark line of the rifle barrel where Evelyn had laid it across the rock, pointing right where he told her to point it, the lead rider’s chest, when the lead rider came
around the bend. He could not see her face. The rocks hit it, but he knew her face. He had been looking at it for 2 days. He knew the set of her mouth and the level brown eyes and the small hard place at the center of her jaw where the muscle bunched. when she was deciding something.
He hoped to God, though he would not have used the word, that she did not have to fire. He stood in the road and waited. The rain came down, and somewhere out in the gray on the road behind him, there came the first faint sound he had been listening for since the auction block in Drybone Hollow. The soft, steady, water muffled drum of hooves coming up the road at a working trot.
Three horses moving close together, slowing as they approached the bend. Silas Boon took his hand off his gun. He let it hang at his side, loose and empty and ready, and he set his feet square in the mud, and he waited for the riders to come around. The first horse came around the bend at a walk. It was a big bay, 16 hands at the shoulder, with a white blaze running crooked down its face, the way a blaze will when the colts been kicked in the fpin.
The man on its back was tall and narrow, and wore a slicker the color of wet ash, and he had a Winchester laid across his thighs with both hands on it, easy, not pointed at anything yet. Behind him came a second rider on a short, stocky paint, a man with a heavy jaw and a beard that the rain had matted flat against his collar.
Behind him, a third, younger, maybe 22, on a nervous chestnut that kept trying to swing sideways in the mud. three of them, just like Silas had figured. The lead rider saw him standing in the middle of the road and pulled up at maybe 40 paces. He held up a gloved hand, and the other two stopped behind him. The rain kept coming.
Nobody moved for a long count of five. Then the lead rider walked his bay forward another 20 paces, slow, and stopped again at the edge of comfortable pistol range, and lifted his chin so the brim of his hat tipped the water off in a small stream between them. You’d be boon, he said. His voice was flat and dry, the kind of voice that had told a great many people a great many things they did not want to hear. I would, Silus said.
My name’s Cole Ashb. I work for Mr. Wade Mercer. I know who you work for, Ashb. Then we can skip a few minutes of pleasantries. I’d be obliged. Ashb studied him a long moment through the rain. He was a man maybe 40, maybe 45, with a long face and a thin mouth and pale eyes that had no particular color to them.
He sat the bay easy. He was not afraid. Silas had known men like him before, and the thing that was always true about them was that they were not afraid because they had given up on being afraid a long time ago. That was different from being brave. Brave men had something to lose. Ashb did not look like he had anything to lose. Mr.
Mercer Ashb said would like to discuss a matter of property. There’s no property here to discuss. There is four young women who are property of an estate that owes a substantial sum to Mr. Mercer’s bank in Casper Wells. The estate satisfied a portion of its debts at auction in Drybone Hollow yesterday afternoon.
We have no quarrel with how that auction was concluded. We have a quarrel with the fact that the buyer at that auction has not yet appeared at the bank to satisfy the remainder of the estate’s obligations which Mr. Mercer believes attached to any party who acquired the estate’s principal assets. The auction settled the debts. The bankman stamped the paper.
The bank and Drybone settled the dry bone debts. The bank in Casper Wells has a separate ledger. Then take it up with the bank and dry bone. We are taking it up with you. Silus let a small wet silence sit between them. How much? He said. $212. I don’t have it. Mr. Mercer is prepared to be reasonable. He’s prepared to accept payment in kind. In kind.
Two of the four. His choice. There it was. The thing Silas had known was coming since the man in the gray suit sat down at the auction yesterday and stopped bidding $10 short. Mercer hadn’t lost. Mercer had just decided to win the cheaper way. Silas felt his shoulders settle a/4 in the way they did when a thing he had been waiting on finally arrived.
That ain’t going to happen, he said. Mr. Boon, it ain’t. I would encourage you to think about it for a moment before you give a final answer. There are three of us. There is one of you. The young women are not present, and I assume they are nearby, but I do not see them, and I would prefer not to look for them.
If you and I can come to an understanding here in this road, no one needs to go looking for anyone. Two of the four, you said his choice. That is correct. Which two? Ashby’s pale eyes did not change. I expect Mr. Mercer would choose the oldest and the youngest. The oldest for her capacity.
The youngest for her, let us say, her durability over time. Up on the ridge, Silas knew Evelyn had heard that every word of it. The rain was loud, but voices carry strange in a draw, and he had not been speaking quiet, and Ashby had not been speaking quiet, and the sound went up the rocks the way water finds a crack. Evelyn had heard a man on a wet road put a price on her little sister’s durability.
He hoped she could keep her finger off the trigger another 60 seconds. He needed those 60 seconds. Ashby, he said, I want to ask you something honest, manto man. Go ahead. How long you been writing for Mercer? 11 years. In those 11 years, how many men you killed on his account? Ashby thought about it. Nine, he said.
Of the kind that counted, maybe a few more of the other kind. How many women? None. How many children? None, Mr. Boon. I have a daughter myself. I don’t kill children. And yet here you sit in a wet road telling me your boss wants a 10-year-old for her durability. Ashby’s face did not change, but the man on the paint behind him shifted in his saddle.
A small movement, the kind of movement a man makes when something has been said in his hearing that he does not entirely like. Silas saw it. He filed it. I am not the boss, Mr. Boon, Ashby said. I am the man he sends. And what you’ve been sent to do, you don’t like. What I have been sent to do, I will do. That ain’t an answer.
It’s the only one you’re going to get. Silas nodded slow. All right, he said. All right, then. Here’s mine. You ride back to Mercer. You tell him the auction is done. The debt that attached to those girls is paid, and any new debt he wants to claim he can take to a judge in Santa Fe.
You tell him further that the four Whitlock sisters are not on a ledger anywhere on this earth no more. They ain’t property. They ain’t goods. They’re people, Ashby, and they are with me, and they will stay with me. And any man who comes for them will have to come through me first and he will pay a price for the going through that he won’t enjoy paying.
Mr. Boon, I ain’t done. You also tell him this. You tell him I know about the water rights he stole off the Henley place last spring. I know about the cattle he bought off Hanhan 3 weeks before Hanahhan’s barn burned. I know about the surveyor he had killed outside Trespedras in 73. and I know which deputy he paid to forget about it.
I have been in this country 11 years, Ashby. I keep my mouth shut and I keep my eyes open. There is a satchel under a floorboard in my cabin with names and dates and the names of witnesses still living. And if anything happens to me or any one of those four girls, that satchel goes to a man I trust in Santa Fe who will see it printed in three newspapers within the week.
You tell Mercer that. You tell him I have been writing his obituary in a satchel for 4 years and the only thing keeping it unpublished is his manners. Ashby looked at him a long moment. You’re bluffing. I might be. You want to ride home and tell him I might be? The man on the paint shifted again. Silus saw it again.
What’s his name? Silas said suddenly, looking past Ashb. The one on the paint. Ashby’s mouth tightened. Tom Lacy said the man on the paint himself before Ashb could answer. Tom, you from around here, Tom? From up by the Wapiti originally. Wapiti country. I’ve been through there. You You got people there still? My mother, Tom, listen to me.
I don’t know you. You don’t know me. But I’m going to give you a thing to take home and think about. Your boss just now told this man he sent you with that he’d settle a debt with a 10-year-old girl for her durability over time. I want you to roll that phrase around in your head while you ride back tonight.
I want you to think about whether your mother up on the Wediti would be proud of the work you’re doing. I ain’t asking you to do anything. I ain’t asking you to quit. I’m just asking you to think on it, that’s all. Tom Lacy did not answer. He looked at the rain running off his saddle horn and he did not answer. “Boon,” Ashb said.
His voice had gotten quieter and harder both. I’m going to give you one more chance to be reasonable. You ain’t giving me a first chance. You’ve been telling me how it’s going to be. Two of the four, his choice. Or I take all four right now in this road. and the difference between those two outcomes will be measured in how much of you we leave behind for the coyotes.
Silas smiled then a small, very tired smile, the kind he had not worn in a long time. He did not move his hand toward his gun. He did not have to. Ashb, he said, look at the south ridge. Ashb did not look. Look at the south ridge, Cole. You’re right. About 50 ft up. The flat rock with the dark streak down it.
Look, Ashb looked. He looked for maybe a second and a half. He saw the rifle barrel laid across the rock. He saw just barely the outline of a head behind it. He saw more clearly because the rain had washed the dust off the metal, the dull wet shine of a brass fitting near the muzzle. He looked back at Silas with absolutely no change in his expression.
That’s pointed at your chest, Cole. Has been since you came around the bend. The shooter is steady and the shooter is patient and the shooter has been waiting a long time for me to give a particular signal. I have not given that signal. I would prefer not to give that signal. But if your hand moves toward that Winchester, the signal will become unnecessary because the shooter will fire on her own judgment and she has her own judgment about what’s been said in the last 2 minutes. Her Ashb said her.
There was a long, long silence in the rain. Tom Lacy on the paint had gone very still. The young one on the chestnut, Silas did not know his name and never would, had gone the color of curdled milk. Ashby’s pale eyes moved up to the ridge again and again and then back to Silas. “You let a woman cover you,” he said. There was no contempt in it.
There was something closer to wonder. I let the best shot I had cover me. Her being a woman is none of my business. Ashb was quiet a long time. Mr. Mercer, he said finally, is not going to be satisfied with what I bring back. I expect not. He’ll send more. I expect that, too. Next time it won’t be three. I figured. You’re a fool.
Boon been called worse by better. Ashb looked at him another long moment. Then he did something that Silas would remember the rest of his life. He lifted one gloved hand very slowly away from the Winchester and he touched the brim of his hat. Just touched it. A small formal ironic gesture, the kind of gesture a man gives to another man at a funeral he did not particularly want to attend. All right, Mr.
Boon, he said, “We’ll see each other again.” “I expect we will.” Ashby turned the bay in the mud, careful, no sudden moves. He nodded once at the other two, and they turned their horses, too. Tom Lacy gave Silas one long, unreadable look as he came around. The young one on the chestnut did not look at anything but the road in front of him.
The three of them rode back the way they had come at a walk, and the rain swallowed them in less than a minute, and the road was empty again. Silas stood in the mud and did not move. He stood there a long time. He stood there until he was sure they were not going to circle back. He stood there until he was sure his legs would hold him when he walked.
He stood there until the rain had washed every trace of their hoof prints out of the road in front of him, and he was for one strange moment almost able to believe none of it had happened. Then he turned and walked toward the south ridge. Halfway there, his right knee gave a small sideways jerk that he had not given it permission to give, and he stopped and put his hand on a rock and stood there breathing for a count of 10.
He had not realized how tight he had been holding himself. His back was wet through. His shirt was wet through. His hands were shaking now. Small, fast tremors at the fingertips. The way a man’s hands shake when the fight is already over and the body is just now finding out about it. He waited until the shaking stopped. Then he climbed the ridge. Back.
Evelyn was lying behind the flat rock with the rifle still pressed into her shoulder, and she did not move when he came up beside her. He sank down on his heels next to her in the wet grass. You can put it down, he said. She did not put it down, Evelyn. Are they gone? They’re gone. Are they coming back? Not today. Maybe in a week. Maybe in a month.
Not today. She lowered the rifle. Then she did it slow, the way a person lowers a thing that has become very heavy. She laid it on the rock, and she stayed where she was, lying on her stomach in the mud, and the wet grass. And her shoulders began to shake. She did not cry. She just shook. Her whole body in long, slow waves, and her teeth chattered once and stopped and chattered again. Silas had seen it before.
He had done it himself. After Shiloh, after the ranch, after Dodge, the body holding itself together for as long as it had to, and then letting go. He did not touch her. He sat there beside her in the rain and let her shake. After a while, she said into the rock. I was going to shoot him. I know. The one in the slicker, not the leader.
The one on the paint. The leader was Ashby. The one on the paint was Lacy. I was going to shoot Lacy. Why? Because the leader was watching you and Lacy wasn’t. And Lacy had his rifle across his lap with the safety thumbmed off. And I saw him thumb it off when he came around the bend. And I thought if anybody was going to do it first, it was going to be him.
So, I had him. Silas looked at her sideways. “You had Lacy,” he said. “The whole time. You told me you was going to take the leader.” “I changed my mind when they came around the bend. Lacy was the threat. So I took Lacy.” He sat very still for a moment. Then he laughed just once. A short rough sound he did not entirely recognize as having come out of his own mouth.
“Evelyn Whitlock,” he said. “What? You’re a soldier.” She turned her head sideways against the rock and looked at him with one eye. The other was still against the stock. I am a farmer’s daughter from St. Joseph, Missouri, she said. I helped my mother make jam. I read books. I taught my sisters their letters when my father was too tired to do it. I am not a soldier.
Today you was. She looked at him another long second. Then she set her forehead down against the wet stone and she closed her eyes. I do not want to be a soldier, Mr. Boon. I know. I do not want any of us to be soldiers. I know. But that man said durability about my sister and I thought I am going to put a hole in his throat before he gets within 100 ft of her and I have never thought a thing like that in my life and I think I will think it again and that is what I do not know what to do about. Silas was quiet.
He thought a long time about what to say. Evelyn, he said finally, I knew a woman in Tennessee during the war. Her name was Mariah Croft. She was 41 years old and she was a Quaker, which means she had never raised her hand to a living thing in her life, not even a chicken for the pot. When Forest Cavalry came through her county in the spring of 63, they killed her husband, and they killed her older son, and they were dragging her younger boy out of the cellar when she came up out of the smokehouse with her husband’s squirrel gun, and she shot
the corporal who had her boy by the hair. And then she shot the next man who came at her. And the third one she missed, but he ran anyway. And she sat down on the porch with her dead husband and her dead older boy and her live younger boy, and she did not move for 2 days. Evelyn did not say anything.
After the war, Silas said, “I rode through that county. I was a different man then, looking for different things. I stopped at her place for water and she gave it to me and we sat on that same porch and we talked some. And I asked her, I was 19 years old and stupid. I asked her if she felt bad about the men she shot.
And she looked at me like I had asked her if she felt bad about breathing. And she said, “I felt grief, son. I felt grief like a flood. But I did not feel bad. There is a difference. Bad is what you feel when you have done a wrong thing. Grief is what you feel when you have done a necessary thing in a world that should not have made it necessary.
He stopped. I never forgot that, he said. I thought about it a lot of times. I think about it now. Evelyn was quiet a long time. Mariah Croft, she said. Yes. You think I’m going to be Mariah Croft? I think you already are. I think you have been Mariah Croft since the day they put your daddy in the ground. I think today was just the first time it showed. She did not answer.
She lay there beside him in the rain for another long minute. Then she sat up. She picked up the rifle and she handed it to him, but first with both hands, the way a person hands a tool back to its owner. This is yours, she said. Tonight it is. Tomorrow it might be yours again. All right. She stood up.
She wiped the rain off her face with the back of her wrist. She looked down the slope toward the cottonwoods on the far side of the ridge where Nora and Clara and the horse were waiting. Mr. Boon. Yeah. Thank you for not making me shoot him. He looked up at her. He did not know what to say to that, so he just nodded.
She went down the back of the ridge to fetch her sisters. Silas stayed where he was a minute longer, sitting on his heels in the wet grass with the rifle across his knees. And he looked down at his own hands, and the shaking was gone now, but there was a hollow place behind his sternum where it had been, and he thought, “That was the easy one.
That was the warning one. The next one is going to be worse.” He stood up, his knees popped. He went down the ridge after her. They made the cabin the next night, an hour after dark, in a soft, cold rain that had been falling on and off all day. Coffin Creek Country was not pretty country.
It was a long, shallow valley between two low ridges of pale broken rock, with the creek running brown down the middle through stands of willow and the occasional struggling cottonwood. The grass was sparse, and the soil was thin, and the wind funneled down the valley most days, like the country itself was trying to push you back out. Silas’s cabin sat on a small rise about a/4 mile up from the creek, a low square building of stacked logs, chinkedked with red clay, with a sawed roof gone deep green from a wet spring, and a stove pipe sticking up at a tired angle.
There was a leanto off the back for Partardo. There was a small split rail corral that needed mending. There was a wood pile under a strip of oiled canvas. There was, when you came down to it, not much. Silas led them up to it in the dark with a kerosene lantern he had lit at the creek, and he stopped at the door and turned and held the lantern up so they could see. “This is it,” he said.
“This is everything.” The four sisters stood in the wet grass and looked at it. Nobody said anything for a long moment. “You said quarter section,” Norah said finally. “On the road, you said you bit a quarter section. I did. Is this still yours? No, ma’am. This belongs now to a fat man in a green vest in dry bone hollow.
Or to whoever he sold the paper to. I expect somebody will ride up someday to inform us were trespassers. Until that day comes, this is where we live. Sadi made a small sound that was almost a laugh. You bet your house on us, she said. I bet my house on a thing I thought needed doing. You four happen to be the thing. Don’t take it personal.
I take it personal. Take it however you want. Go inside. It’s dry mostly. He opened the door. The cabin had two rooms. The front room had a stone fireplace at one end and a plank table in the middle and a single window with a piece of greased paper instead of glass. The back room was smaller and had a rope bed with a straw tick and three pegs on the wall for clothes.
The floor was packed dirt. There was a tin coffee pot on the hearth, and a single iron skillet hung on a nail, and a small wooden box of matches on the mantle, and a calendar from a feed store in Pueblo, two years out of date, tacked up beside the door. That was it. That was the whole of Silas Boon’s life, laid out under a sawed roof on a rise above a brown creek in a valley that didn’t want anyone in it.
The sisters came inside one at a time. Evelyn first carrying Clara, Norah behind her, leading Sadi by the wrist as if Sadi might bolt back out into the rain. They stood in the front room and looked around in the lantern light. And Silas saw them seeing it, and he saw what they saw, and he did not try to make it look like more than it was.
“There’s wood in the box,” he said. “I’ll get a fire going. There’s dried beans in the croc and there’s a side of bacon hanging in the leanto and there’s about a half a sack of cornmeal in the chest. Tomorrow I’ll see what’s in the smokehouse. I’ve been gone a week. The squirrels may have got at it.
The bed in the back is yours. All four of you. It’ll be tight. I’ll sleep out here by the fire. There’s one bed. Evelyn said there’s one bed. And you sleep on the floor. I’ve been sleeping on the floor a long time. The floor and me have an understanding. Evelyn opened her mouth to say something and then closed it again.
Silas knelt at the fireplace and laid kindling and got a fire going. He did it the slow, careful way of a man who had built 10,000 fires in his life and still respected the act. The kindling caught, the small wood caught. He fed in two larger pieces and stood up and brushed his hands on his pants and turned. And Clara was standing right behind him. She was looking up at him.
She still had not put on shoes. There were no shoes for her here, and her feet were wrapped in fresh strips he had cut for her at the noon stop. She had a smear of mud on her chin. Her hair was wet and stuck to her forehead. “Mr. Silas,” she said. It was the first time any of them had called him by his first name. “Yeah, sweetheart.
” She held something out to him, a small thing in her palm that he could not at first make out in the firelight. He bent down. It was a smooth greystone oval about the size of a robin’s egg polished by water. I found it in the creek when we crossed, she said. It’s pretty. I want you to have it. He looked at the stone.
He looked at her. Why? He said. His voice came out rougher than he had meant. She thought about it the careful way she thought about everything. Because you gave me the biscuits, she said. He took the stone out of her hand. It was warm. She must have been carrying it in her fist for hours.
Clara, he said, thank you. You’re welcome. She went over to the fire and held her bandaged feet out toward it and did not say anything else. Evelyn watched the whole thing from the doorway and did not say anything either. But Silas saw her hand come up and touch the corner of her own eye just once and come back down.
He put the stone in the small inside pocket of his duster, the one over his heart, where he had once kept his brother’s letter and his mother’s ring before he buried them under the flat rock behind the cabin. He cleared his throat. “I’ll get the bacon,” he said. He went out into the rain. He stood for a minute in the dark behind the leanto with his hand on Partardau’s neck, and his face turned up to the wet sky, and he did not cry because he had not cried since 1869, and he was not going to start now.
But he stood there a long time with his eyes closed and the rain washing down his face. And he thought, “All right, all right. We are here. They’re inside. The fire is lit. Tomorrow is another day, and the day after that there will be men coming. But tonight they are inside, and the fire is lit.
And that is more than I had the right to ask for.” He cut down the bacon. He went back inside. He shut the door against the wind, and the small square cabin on the rise above Coffin Creek held its five people in its lantern light. And outside the rain came down on the sage and the sod and the dark country.
And somewhere 30 mi east in a long low ranch house with three fireplaces and a wall of cured oak, Wade Mercer was listening to a man in a wet slicker tell him a story about a cowboy and a girl on a ridge and a satchel under a floorboard. And Wade Mercer was not saying anything at all. And the silence in that room was the worst silence Cole Ashby had heard in 11 years of work.
The silence in Mercer’s ranch house broke the way a dry plank breaks. Not loud, just sudden and final. “Say the phrase again,” Wade Mercer said. Cole Ashb stood into the middle of the long room with his hat and his two wet hands and a small puddle forming around his boots on the polished oak floor. He had been speaking for 10 minutes.
He had told it straight. He had not made himself look better, and he had not made Silas Boon look worse, because Mercer paid him in part for the quality of his information, and a colored report was worth nothing to a man who needed to make decisions on the strength of it. Which phrase, sir? The one about the satchel.
He said he has a satchel under a floorboard in his cabin. Names, dates, witnesses still living. He said the Henley water rights. He said the Hanhan cattle. He said the surveyor outside Trespedas in 73 and a deputy who took money to forget about it. He said if anything happens to him or to any one of the four girls, the satchel goes to a man in Santa Fe and the contents go to three newspapers inside a week.
Mercer sat behind a long writing desk with his hands flat on the wood in front of him. He was 61 years old and he was thin and dry as a piece of split kindling and he had a head of white hair combed back hard from a high forehead and a small precise white mustache and pale blue eyes that did not blink very often.
He had been a freight clerk in Pennsylvania at 23. He had been a quarterm’s aid in the war. He had come west in ‘ 66 with $800 and a wagon and a wife he buried within a year. And he had built what he had built one mortgage and one bought off witness and one quietly murdered surveyor at a time.
And he had done it because he had understood earlier than most men understood it that the frontier was a thing being made up by whoever showed up first with the patience to write the rules. He did not look angry. He almost never did. Trespedas, he said 73. Yes, sir. That was that was the Reed business. Yes, sir.
and he named the deputy. He did not name him out loud. He said he knew which one. He said it like he knew. Mercer was quiet for a long moment. There was a fire at the big stone hearth at the end of the room. There were three lamps lit. There were two other men in the room besides Ashb, a man named Pel, no relation to the auctioneer who kept Mercer’s books, and a man named Gity, the same Gity who had run the boarding house in Drybone and put a bruise on Sadie Whitlock’s cheek.
Gity had ridden over the night before. He was standing by the fire with a glass of whiskey he had not been offered and was drinking anyway. “Gity,” Mercer said without turning his head. “Sir, do you know anything about a satchel?” “No, sir. Have you ever heard Mr. Boon speak about a satchel?” “No, sir, I have not.
Do you believe a man like Silas Boon has the wit to assemble such a satchel?” Gity considered. He was a heavy man and a brutal one, but he was not actually a stupid one. And he gave the question the consideration it deserved before he answered. Yes, sir, he said. I do believe it. Boon is angrier than he is smart, but he ain’t stupid, and a man who has been angry for as long as he has. That kind of man keeps lists.
Boon keeps lists. I’d lay money on it. Mercer nodded once, very small. Hell, sir. The deputy who took the money on the reed business. Sir, that was Hollis Brand. He was up in Trinidad last we heard. I believe he is still living. Is he reachable? Yes, sir. Reach him quietly. Send him $50 and a letter telling him a man in Coffin Creek has been making representations about him by name.
Tell him I would consider it a personal favor if he would come down here and discuss the matter. Yes, sir. Tell him bring his own pistol. Yes, sir. Mercer was quiet again. Ashb waited. He had been standing in the same spot for 15 minutes now, and his slicker was dripping and his back hurt, and he had not eaten since breakfast, and none of these things showed on his face because none of them mattered.
What mattered was the next thing Mercer said. Cole, sir, you let a woman cover you with a rifle from a ridge. Yes, sir. In broad daylight. In a rainstorm, sir. But yes, and you rode home. Yes, sir. Why? Ashby thought about how to say it. He had been thinking about how to say it for 40 mi of wet road.
Because I had three men in the open, and he had one shooter on the high ground and one in the rocks below, and a third party I never saw with the horse and the youngest girl. And the shooter on the ridge had her sights on Lacy, not on me, which meant she had read the situation correctly inside of 3 seconds, which meant she was not a person Boon had taught to point a rifle that morning.
She was a person who had been a shooter before he ever met her. I did not know that. I had assumed Boon was alone in his ambition. He is not. He has at least one competent shooter and possibly two. And the second one in the rocks had stones for throwing, which means she was patient enough to plan a backup weapon.
That tells me something about how this is going to go if we treat it as a man with four hostages. It is not that. It is a man with four allies. The arithmetic is different. Bistam. Mercer’s pale eyes rested on him a long moment. You like him, he said. Sir, you like Boon. You came back and you delivered his message and you spoke to me just now about allies and arithmetic and you used the language of a man who is in some quiet corner of himself on the other man’s side.
Sir, I delivered the message I was sent to deliver. You delivered more. You delivered an assessment. I did not ask for an assessment, Cole. I asked for a report. Yes, sir. I beg your pardon. Don’t beg it. I want the assessment. I want every man in my employee to give me the truth of what he sees. I’m only noting for the record between us that you saw it the way you saw it.
We will both remember that you saw it that way. Are we clear? Yes, sir. Good. Go eat. Dry off. Be in this room at 6:00 in the morning. Ashb touched the brim of his hat. He turned and walked out. The wet floor squeaked under his boots all the way to the door, and Gity watched him go with an expression that Ashby felt on the back of his neck without having to turn his head.
When the door had closed, Mercer sat very still for another long minute. Then he stood up and walked to the fire and put his hands behind his back and stood there looking into it. Gity, sir, I do not want Boon dead. Sir, not yet. Listen to me. A dead man with a satchel under a floorboard is a worse problem than a live man with the same satchel because a live man can be reasoned with and a dead man is a closed account.
And closed accounts attract reading by their executives. I do not want him dead. I want him broken. I want him to come walking up that road in 3 weeks with his hat in his hands and ask me to take the four girls off him because he can no longer feed them. I want him to surrender the satchel as part of the bargain. I want him to leave the country. Are we clear? Yes, sir.
To break a man like Boon, we do not attack him. We attack what he is building. We make it impossible to build. We make the cost of every nail and every sack of flour rise until he cannot afford to put a roof over those girls heads. We make every neighbor who might help him afraid to be seen helping.
We turn the country against him without ever drawing a gun. That is how this is done. Do you understand? Yes, sir. Pel, sir, tomorrow you will ride to Drybone Hollow. You will speak to the bank. You will purchase the paper on Boon’s quarter section at Coffin Creek from whoever currently holds it. You will pay whatever is asked.
You will then go to Mallister’s Merkantile and to Hollis’s general store and to the freight office and to every merchant within a 100 miles. and you will inform each of them separately and privately that any good sold on credit to Silas Boon or to any member of the Whitlock family will result in the immediate calling of that merchant’s own notes which are held by my bank in Casper Wells.
Are we clear? Yes, sir. Gity, you will ride to the settlers on the upper coffin. The Puits, the Mooney brothers, the widow Aspenwall. You will inform each of them that the man Boon has been seen consorting with a known horse thief named Pick a name, Pel. Give him a name. Earl Trumbo, sir. He died in Yuma in ‘ 74. Nobody will check. Trumbo. Yes.
You will inform each settler that Boon has been seen consorting with Earl Trumbo and that several head of stock have gone missing from neighboring ranges and that we have reason to believe that Boon’s settlement at Coffin Creek is being established as a holding pen for stolen animals. You will not say this in anger.
You will say it sorrowfully as a neighbor regretting a neighbor’s fall. Are we clear? Yes, sir. Within 30 days, I want that man unable to buy a sack of cornmeal. Within 200 m within 60 days, I want his nearest neighbor to cross the road rather than nod to him. Within 90 days, I want him at this door with his hat in his hands.
Are we clear? Yes, sir. He will not come. Of course, he is too proud. So, we will also on day 91 send 15 riders to Coffin Creek to burn his cabin to the ground. By that time, the girls will have been starving for 2 months, and his neighbors will have spent two months being told he is a thief, and the burning will look to anyone who hears of it afterward, like the natural consequence of frontier justice, and not the act of any single man.
Are we clear? There was a small silence. Yes, sir. Gity said. Good. Now, both of you out. I am going to bed. Pel and Ged left. Mercer stood by the fire a long time. After a while, he reached into the inside pocket of his coat and took out a small ivory comb that had belonged to his wife, and he turned it over in his fingers, and he looked into the fire and did not seem to be looking at anything else.
He was not a man who hated. He had never had time for it. He simply held with the same quiet patience with which he held everything the absolute certainty that what was his was his and that the world would given enough time and pressure recognized this. He had been right about it for 35 years. He saw no reason today would be different.
150 mi away in the small square cabin on the rise above Coffin Creek, the sisters had been awake since before first light. Silas woke to the smell of coffee. He had not had coffee in the cabin in 11 days because he had run out before he rode to dry bone. And he had not bought any in dry bone because he had spent everything he had on four girls and a deed.
He sat up on the dirt floor in front of the cold hearth and his back said something to him about its age. And he turned his head and saw Norah at the fireplace with the iron coffee pot in her hand and a small careful fire burning under it. Where? He said. She did not turn around. Bottom of the chest under the bed. There was about a half pound left wrapped in waxed paper inside a tobacco tin. You forgot you had it.
I didn’t forget. I’ve been saving it for what? He thought about it. For an occasion. This is an occasion. She poured a cup and brought it to him. She did not hand it to him so much as set it on the hearthstone within his reach because she did not yet want to put a thing into his hand from her own. He did not push it.
He picked up the cup and drank. It was good coffee. She had made it strong, the way it ought to be made, and she had put a small pinch of salt in the grounds, which was a thing his own mother had done, and which he had not tasted since he was 15 years old. He looked up at her. “Where’d you learn to put salt in it?” “My mother.
” “Mine, too.” She held his eyes a second longer than she usually did. Then she went back to the fire. The other three were out at the creek. He could hear Clara’s voice from down the slope, faint, asking some question of Evelyn, and Sadi laughing once, a short surprise laugh he had not heard from her before.
The sun was just up. The rain had stopped sometime in the night, and the world outside the greased paper window was the clean, washed yellow of a fall morning that had decided to be kind for one day. “Mr. Boon,” Norah said. She was crouched at the fire, poking at it. She did not look at him.
Yeah, we talked last night after you went out to check the horse. All right, all four of us. All right, we have decided to stay. He set the cup down. I had not asked you to leave, he said. No, but we could have. If you had ridden into town today, we could have walked north. We have legs. We have the rifle if Evelyn took it.
We talked about it. Evelyn was for going. Sadi was for staying. Clara wanted to know if Partardo would come with us if we went. And when I said no, Partardo belonged to you, Clara cried for about 2 minutes and then said she wanted to stay where part was. So Clara decided it. The little one decided it.
She turned her head and looked at him then. But we are not staying as your wards, she said. And we are not staying as your servants. And we are not staying because we are grateful. We are staying because we have nowhere else to be and because you told us the truth on the road yesterday about what you mean to build here.
And Evelyn believes you mean it. And Evelyn is the one of us who can tell when a man is lying. And I trust her. So we will stay and we will work and we will earn what we eat. And you and us are partners in this thing, Mr. Boon. Or we are nothing in it. Those are the terms. There are no other terms.
Silas looked at her a long moment. Nora, he said, “How old are you again?” “17?” “You speak older than 17.” “My daddy died 8 days ago, and yesterday a man in a wet road talked about my little sister like she was a sight of beef. I do not have time to be 17 anymore.” He nodded slow. “All right,” he said. “Partners, partners, you want to shake on it?” She thought about it.
Then she came over and stuck her hand out. He took it. Her hand was small and the palm was rough. She had not been a soft-handed girl even before all of this. And she shook once, firm, like a man would shake. And she let go. All right, she said. First thing. First thing, that smokehouse outside is half full. I looked this morning.
There is one whole ham, and there are three sides of bacon, and there is about a quarter of a venison shoulder that has gone past the point a sensible person would eat it, but is salvageable if I trim it. There’s also a barrel of salt that you have not opened, which I find unusual. I forgot the salt. You forgot the salt for 11 days. I’ve been busy.
You’ve been busy. There is enough cured meat in that smokehouse to feed five people for about 2 months if we are careful, three if we are very careful, and supplement with fish from the creek and whatever Sadi can shoot. Can Sadi shoot? I don’t know yet. We will find out. There is no flour to speak of, and the cornmeal is mostly weevils.
We will need to ride into a town for those things, and for salt that is not in the barrel. You forgot. Which town? He thought about it. Not Drybone. They know us in Drybone. There’s a small place about 30 mi southwest called Los Cruus. Not the big one. A little one with the same name. The post office calls it Cru’s South. They don’t know us there.
I can be there and back in 2 days on Partardo. How much money? $11. Including the silver dollar in my boot. That will buy us a sack of flour and a sack of cornmeal and a small amount of salt and possibly some lard if the price is fair. Will it buy us seed? Seed for what? For a garden.
It is fall, but there is still time to put in winter wheat in some of the bottom by the creek. And we should put in greens, turnips, kale in beds close to the cabin, where I can carry water to them by hand through the cold months. You know about gardens? I’ve been growing things since I was 9 years old. My mother taught me.
We did not eat in some winters except for what came out of the kitchen garden. I know about gardens. He looked at her. Nora, he said, “What did you do back in St. Joe before your daddy come west? You said you was a clerk’s daughter. What did you do?” I read. I helped my mother. I went to a small school for 3 years until my father said it was no longer practical.
I read every book in that school and most of the books in my father’s office. I taught myself a little Latin out of a primer I found in a junk shop. When we came west, I sat in the back of the wagon and read the same six books over and over until I had them by heart. And when I had them by heart, I read them again to listen to the way the words sat against each other.
I always wanted to be I do not know what I wanted to be. There was no word for it in St. Joe. I wanted to understand how things worked. Machines especially. There was a man who ran a small grain mill at the edge of town, and he let me come and watch him because I asked good questions. And he told me once that if I had been a boy, he would have apprenticed me.
And I asked him why being a boy was the condition. And he didn’t have an answer to. And I went home and cried about it for an hour. And then I never thought about being a girl as a reason for anything again. So that is what I did before we came west. I read and I asked questions and I cried once. Silas drank his coffee.
Norah, he said, “What? There’s an old mining flume up the North Fork 3 mi up. The Caswell Company put it in 20 years ago to wash or and abandoned it in 70 when their vein played out. The woods mostly rotted, but the iron’s still there, and the channel is still cut through the rock. It runs 3/4 of a mile down out of the high country and dumps into a drywash about 2 mi from this cabin.
If a person could get water back into that flume, clean it, patch it, divert the upper creek into the head of it, that water would come down right here. We could put 20 acres under irrigation, maybe more, in country that has not seen a wet plow since before the war. Norah went very still. Show me, she said. Show you the flume today. Show me.
Today I’m going to cruises south for flower. Tomorrow then, the day you come back. All right. I want to see it. I want to see the iron. I want to see the channel and the drop and the head of it and the dry wash. I want to walk every foot of it. All right. She stood up and put another piece of wood on the fire.
Her hands were not steady. He saw it. She saw him see it. And she set her jaw and put her hands down at her sides. That is what we will build, she said. That the flume. That is the first real thing. That is the first real thing, he agreed. Then go to Cru’s South, Mr. Boon, and come back fast.
I’ll come back fast. He drained the coffee. He stood up. His back gave the same small complaint it had given him on rising. He took down his hat from the peg by the door and his rifle from the corner, and he went out into the yellow morning. B. Down at the creek, Evelyn was kneeling on a flat rock, washing out the strips that had been on Clara’s feet, scrubbing them against a stone with hard, slow motions, and Sadie was up to her knees in the cold water, trying to flip a flat creek stone over with the toe of her foot to see what was underneath.
Clara was sitting on the bank with her bandaged feet out in front of her and a long willow switch in her hand, and she was very seriously pretending to fish with it, the switch held out over the brown water, and Partau had walked down from the leanto of his own accord, and was standing behind the child with his nose almost touching her hair, which was a thing the horse had never done for anyone in the six years Silas had owned him.
Silas stopped at the top of the slope and watched them for a moment. Evelyn looked up and saw him. She did not smile. She had not yet smiled that he had seen, and he was beginning to suspect she did not smile much, even at the best of times, but she nodded at him once, and there was something in the nod that there had not been in any nod before, and he nodded back.
He came down the slope. I’m going to Cru’s South, he said. Nor and me talked. We need flour and meal and salt and lard and any seed I can scrape up for a fall garden. I’ll be gone 2 days, maybe three if the river crossing is high from the rain. All right, Evelyn said, “While I’m gone, there’s some things need doing.
Tell me.” The corral needs mending. Two posts gone soft and a top rail down. There’s a mall in the leanto and there’s split rails in the pile under the canvas. Don’t let Clara near the mall. It’s heavy enough to break her foot. The smokehouse needs the door rehung. Norah knows she found it. There’s a creek down there, but the bank’s slick where you was just washing.
So when you take water for the cabin, take it from the pool above the willow. It’s clearer. And he hesitated. And And if anybody rides into this valley while I’m gone, you take Clara and you put her in the lean tube behind the wood pile. And you do not let her come out for any voice but mine. Doesn’t matter who’s calling.
Doesn’t matter what they say. The voice could be Ashby’s, could be anybody’s. Only my voice. You understand? I understand. The rifle stays here with you. I’ll take the colt. Evelyn looked at him. You’re going 30 mi into bad country with one pistol. I’ve been going into bad country with one pistol most of my life.
I’ll be all right. You will be all right because I will be sitting on this porch with your rifle across my lap is what you mean. Evelyn, it is what you mean. Don’t insult me with the other version. He looked at her a moment. All right, he said. That’s what I mean. Good. Go get your flower. He almost smiled.
Then he came close enough that he could feel where the smile would have been. He did not let it through. He nodded at her and turned and went back up the slope to the cabin to saddle the horse. Clara called after him from the bank. “Mr. Silus,” and he turned. “Bring back something sweet,” she said.
Her face was very serious. Anything. Even a hard candy. Even one. I will if there’s one to be had. Promise. I promise I’ll try. She thought about it. She nodded, accepting the amendment. She turned back to her willow switch fishing pole and forgot him. He went up the slope. Cru’s south was a smaller and older place than Drybone Hollow, set in a fold of dry hills along a creek that ran only in the spring.
It had been a mining camp once and then a freight stop and now it was mostly a post office and a general store and a saloon and 20 houses, half of them abandoned. The man who ran the store was named Aaron 6. He was a Quaker originally from up around Lancaster in Pennsylvania and he had come west in the 60s because he had a brother in the country who had died and he had stayed because there was nothing back east to go back to.
He was 60 years old and he wore a clean white shirt under his apron every day of the week. And he weighed his thumb the right way on the scale and he did not water his coffee or his molasses. And Silas had been buying from him for 6 years and trusted him as much as he trusted any man. Silas rode in at midday on the second day.
The trip had been quiet. Partardo had thrown a shoe on the river crossing, and Silas had walked the last four miles leading him, and his right boot had a wet spot on the inside that was working a blister into his heel, and he was tired and short and not in a mood to be friendly with anyone. He tied Partardo at the rail outside the store and went in.
Aaron 6 was behind the counter weighing out beans for a woman in a black bonnet. He looked up when Silas came in. His face did something strange. It went still in a way Silas had not seen it go still before, and it stayed still for a count of three, and then it composed itself into something like a polite hello. Silas, he said, “Aaron, be with you in a minute.” “All right.
” Silas walked along the shelves the way a man walks who is pretending not to be watching the front of the store. He picked up a tin of peaches. He set it down. He picked up a bolt of cheap calico cloth, the kind a person might make a child’s dress out of, and he held it a moment and put it back. He picked up a small paper twist of hard candy, peppermint, and slipped it into his coat pocket without thinking, the way he had not stolen a thing in 20 years, and was not stealing now.
He was just holding on to it so he would not forget. The woman finished her business. She turned and walked past Silas without looking at him, and went out the door. Aaron 6 came out from behind the counter and closed the front door behind her. He turned the small wooden sign in the window from open to closed.
He came back to the counter and stood behind it and put both his hands flat on the wood, palms down, the way Mercer had put his hands on the desk the night before, 200 m away. Silas, he said. His voice was very quiet. A man came through here yesterday morning. Silas did not move. What kind of man? A man named Pel. Not the pel from dry bone, a different pel, a bookkeeper kind of pel.
He works for Wade Mercer. He came in and he stood about where you are standing now and he told me in a perfectly civil voice that if I sold any goods to you on any terms, cash, credit, barter, charity, anything that Mr. Mercer’s bank would call in the note on my store and on the freight office next door and on three other businesses in this town inside the week.
He showed me the paper. He has the paper. He bought the paper from the bank in Casper Wells two months ago, and he has been holding it. I did not know he was holding it. Silas, I did not know. Silas stood very still. His hand went into his coat pocket of its own accord, and he took out the paper twist of peppermint candy, and he set it very carefully on the counter between them.
Aaron, he said, Silas, I am sorry. Aaron, I have a 10-year-old at my place who has not had anything sweet in her mouth, and I do not know how long, and I told her I would try. Silas, I will give you the candy. You will not. It is one twist of candy, Silus. It cost me 3 cents. I will give it to you for You will not. They will know.
He has somebody watching this store, and they will know. If you give me one twist of candy, he will close you down. and the woman with the beans and the freight office and three other families in this town go hungry this winter because of one twist of peppermint candy for a child I bought at an auction. You will not give it to me.
You will put it back on the shelf. Aaron 6 looked at him a long time. He picked up the candy. His hand was shaking. He walked around the counter and he put the candy back on the shelf in the exact place Silas had taken it from and he came back behind the counter and he stood there with his hands flat on the wood again and he did not look up.
I am sorry, Silas, he said. I know you are. I have known you 6 years. You have never once cheated me. You have paid your bills before they were due. You once paid for a sack of meal you had not picked up yet, because you were worried I would worry. I would sell to you on no notice and no payment for a year of winters.
If it were only my own hide on the line, it is not only my own hide. He has the freight office. He has the Tarver place. He has the doctor’s note on his house. He has bought the paper on this whole town and I did not know. He has been waiting. He has been waiting for somebody to need you. Yes. Silus stood there.
He looked down at the worn boards of the floor of Aaron 6’s store. He thought about his 10-year-old back at the creek with her willow switch fishing pole. He thought about Nora at the fireplace with the salt in the coffee. He thought about Evelyn on the porch with the rifle across her lap. He thought about a saw roofed cabin on a rise above a brown creek and a sack of weevilly cornmeal and four mouths and a winter coming on hard.
And he thought about a man 200 m away who had decided in a polished room with three fireplaces to starve them all out one neighbor at a time. He nodded slow. All right, Aaron. Silas. All right. You done what you had to do. I ain’t going to make it harder on you than it already is. I’m going to walk out of this store now and I’m going to ride out of this town.
And if anybody asks you, you tell them I came in and I tried to buy flour and you turn me away. You tell them I argued. You tell them I cursed at you. You make it convincing. You make sure the man watching this store gets a good story and you make sure Mercer hears it inside a week. Are we clear? Silas, I do not want Are we clear, Aaron? Aaron 6 closed his eyes.
Yes, he said. We are clear. All right. Silas turned. He walked toward the door. He stopped with his hand on the latch. Aaron. Yes. You said he has been buying paper on this whole country. I believe he has. For how long? I think I think years, Silas, I think he has been doing it for years.
I think there is not a town within 200 m of his place where he does not hold paper on at least one person. Silas was quiet a moment. That is a lot of paper, he said, held by one man in one safe in one ranch house. Aaron looked up. He looked up sharp. Silas, he said, do not. Do not what, Aaron? Whatever it is you are thinking right now in your face, do not.
Silas turned the latch. He opened the door. “Aaron,” he said without turning around. “Take care of yourself. Mind your scale. Keep your shirt white. I’ll see you again, Silas.” He stepped out into the dusty street. He shut the door behind him very softly, and he walked across the street to the rail where Partardo was waiting, and he untied the reinss, and he led the horse out of Crus because Partardo was still missing a shoe.
and he did not look back at the store, and he did not look back at the town. And he walked the four miles to the river crossing in a wind that had turned cold while he was inside. And he did not feel the cold, and he did not feel the blister opening on his heel. And somewhere about a mile out of town, with the empty road in front of him, and the empty country to either side, Silas Boon began very quietly, to laugh.
He laughed for almost a full minute. It was not a happy sound. When he stopped, he stood in the road with one hand on Partardo’s neck and his other hand braced on the saddle, and he looked up at the long blue sky over the long flat country, and he said very calmly and very clearly to no one at all, “All right, Wade.
All right, then, you and me.” And then he kept walking. The wind came down out of the north and pushed at his back, and the road unrolled in front of him toward the long line of the sangres on the horizon, and somewhere far ahead of him in a cabin on a rise above a brown creek, four girls were waiting for a man to come back with a sack of flour he was not bringing, and the cabin was warm, and the fire was lit, and the night was coming, and the first hard reel killing winter of Silas Boon’s small impossible settlement was beginning to gather itself on the edges
of the sky. He came back to the cabin at sundown of the third day with no flour, no meal, no salt, no lard, and no peppermint candy, leading a horse with a freshly shot hoof, and a face that had not slept in two nights. Evelyn was on the porch with the rifle across her lap, the way she had said she would be.
She stood up when she saw him on the road. She did not run down to meet him. She just stood and waited. And when he came up into the dooryard, she looked at his empty saddle bags and then at his face, and she did not ask the question. Mercer, Silas said, “How bad?” “He’s bought the paper on every store in 200 miles.
Aaron 6 in Cruis South was told that if he sold me a sack of flour, he’d lose his shop and take three other families with him. I expect the same story in every town we’d try.” Evelyn was quiet a long moment. How long can we last on what’s in the smokehouse and what Norah can pull out of the creek and what Sadi can shoot? 6 weeks.
Eight if we don’t waste anything. Less if it gets cold early. And then and then we don’t last. She nodded slow. She did not look afraid. She looked like a woman who had just been given a math problem and was already working it. Come inside, she said. Eat, then we’ll talk. He came inside. Norah had set the table.
There was a piece of venison no bigger than a deck of cards and four small piles of boiled greens she had found growing wild down by the willowbend and a single cup of coffee at his place, the last of the half pound. The four girls had already eaten. They sat at the table with him while he ate, and they watched him eat, and nobody asked anything until he was done. Then he told them.
He told them all of it. Aaron 6. The paper Mercer’s plan as he understood it. the fact that they were not going to be attacked, they were going to be starved. He told them about the safe in the ranch house, too. What Aaron had said, and what he had not said, and what Silas had begun to think about on the road home in a wind that had turned his fingers numb on Partardau’s reigns.
When he was done, Sadi was the first to speak. “You want to rob him,” she said. “I I want to take back the paper.” “That’s robbing.” “It is. You can’t get into that ranch house. Ashby told you yesterday there’d be 15 riders next time. There’s probably 20 men sleeping on that property tonight. I can’t get in by riding up to the door.
I agree. Then how? He drank the last of his coffee. He set the cup down. Cole Ashb, he said. The four sisters looked at him. You think Ashb would turn? Evelyn said, I think Ashb already turned. He just hasn’t told himself yet. The way he rode off in that rain. Evelyn, you saw it. He touched his hat. That wasn’t a salute.
That was a man telling another man, “I see you and I have noticed something and we will speak again.” And there was a man on the paint named Lacy who has a mother up on the Wapiti and who has been doing work he does not like for a man whose face he does not love. I have one card to play and it is that there are men inside Mercer’s house who are already in some small private way on our side of it.
Not because they like us, because they have stopped liking him. How do you reach Ashby? I don’t. I send him a letter. You can’t write to a man at his employer’s address and expect his employer not to read it. I send the letter to Hattie Voss in Enselmo and I send a second letter to a man named Stem Hollis who runs the livery in Casper Wells and who owes me a favor from 68.
And I asked Stem to put a word in Ashby’s ear next time Ashb comes through to get his horse looked at which he does every other Tuesday because Ashb is the kind of man who keeps a schedule even when he’s killing people. Stem tells Ashb a letter for him is sitting at Hattie’s. Ashb rides to Hattis. Ashb reads the letter.
Whatever happens after that happens. If he burns the letter, we tried. If he doesn’t, we have a chance. What does the letter say? Norah asked. Silas thought about it. It says Cole. I do not want your boss dead. I want him stopped. There is a way to stop him that does not require either of us to put a bullet in him.
If you are willing to hear it, ride to the place we spoke last and stand in the road at sundown on a Sunday. Any Sunday. I will be there every Sunday until you come or until I am dead. Silas Boon. There was a long quiet at the table. And if he comes, Evelyn said, “Then I tell him about the safe. I tell him I know there is a safe in the back office behind the gun cabinet, and I know there is paper in it that would ruin a hundred families if it ever came back into the hands of those families.
I tell him there is also in that safe a ledger Mercer keeps of his own dealings. Pel mentioned it once in Aaron’s hearing two years ago. Aaron told me about it the day I left. A ledger that has every bribe and every theft and every quiet killing written down in Mercer’s own hand because Mercer trusts his own hand and trusts no one else’s.
I tell Ashb that the night I come for the safe is the night Mercer’s empire ends and the night the country gets to be free of him and the night Ashb gets to ride away from a job he has stopped being able to stomach. I tell him I do not need him to fight. I need him to leave a door unlocked. And if he says no, then we starve.
And if he says yes, and it is a trap, then I die. And the four of you do what Sadi and I talked about on the road. You take the rifle and the horse, and you ride north to Hattie Voss, and you tell her my name, and you show her the silver dollar. The girls were quiet a long time. Clara, who had been picking at the last shred of venison on her plate, looked up. Mr.
Silas, she said. “Yeah, I don’t want you to die.” He looked at her. He thought about a great many things he could say. Most of them would have been lies of one kind or another. The small kind lies grown people tell children to put them to sleep at night. And he found that he could not tell Clare Whitlock any of them.
“I don’t want to die either, sweetheart,” he said. “I’m going to try not to. That’s the best promise I can give you. I’m going to try. Clara considered this. All right, she said. Try hard. I will. She nodded, satisfied with the terms. She went back to her plate. Evelyn was looking at him across the table. Her eyes had a thing in them he had not seen in them before.
He did not know what to call it. He did not try to name it. Write the letter, she said. Tonight, I’ll write it to Enselmo myself. Evelyn, I’ll ride it to Enselmo myself. Sadi can hold the cabin with the rifle. Norah knows the country well enough now to take Clara into the rocks if anyone rides up.
I am the oldest, and I am the one who has the best chance of being taken for a traveling woman alone, because I am old enough and plain enough not to draw the eye too hard. I’ll ride. You stay. The man who watches this road from the high country needs to see you here. If you disappear, Mercer knows something has changed.
If I disappear, I’m a girl who got tired of a hard cabin and started walking. They’ll let me go. Write the letter. B. He looked at her. He wrote the letter. M. Six Sundays passed. The first Sunday, Silas rode to the draw between the two pale ridges at sundown, and he sat his horse in the middle of the wagon track until full dark, and no one came.
He rode home in the moonlight with his coat pulled tight against a wind that smelled of the first hard frost and he did not speak when he came in the door and Norah handed him a cup of hot water with a sliver of bacon rind in it for flavor because there was no more coffee and he drank it standing up and did not sit down. The second Sunday the same.
The third Sunday, it snowed two inches in the afternoon, and he went anyway, and Partardo’s breath made big white clouds in the cold, and Silas’s hands inside his gloves had gone past, hurting into a kind of slow, distant ache. And he sat in the draw with the snow coming down on his hat and on the horse’s neck and on the bare wet rocks above, and no one came.
In the cabin that week, Clara got a cough. It was not bad at first. By the fourth Sunday, it had settled deeper into her chest, and Evelyn was up with her every night, and Norah had used the last of the wild whound she had dried from the bottom meadow, making syrup, and the syrup helped a little, and not enough.
The fourth Sunday, Silas rode out and sat in the draw, and no one came. and he rode back. And he did not tell the sisters that on the way home he had stopped at the place where the road bent past the broken windmill. And he had sat there a long time looking back toward Drybone Hollow and thinking about a thing he had not thought seriously about in many years, which was riding alone into a house that had 20 men in it with a pistol and an idea and accepting whatever came of that.
He thought about it the whole ride home. He did not do it. He came home to Clara coughing in the back room and Evelyn at the fire with her face in her hands for one short moment before she heard him at the door and put her hands down again. And he understood for the first time in his life what it really meant to need to live because he had four reasons inside that cabin to live and a fifth reason if he counted the horse which on certain days he did.
The fifth Sunday he went out and a freezing rain was falling in sheets across the country and he could not see 50 feet and no one came and he came home and Sadi met him at the door with a strange look on her face and said he has been here. Who? Lacy the one on the paint from the road. He rode up at noon alone.
He did not come within 50 yards of the cabin. He stopped on the high ridge and he sat his horse there in the rain for 20 minutes and he looked at the cabin and then he turned around and rode away. Evelyn was at the window. She saw him take off his hat to her once before he rode off. She said it was a strange thing.
He took off his hat and held it against his chest and then he put it on and rode. Silas stood very still in the doorway. All right, he said. All right, then. The sixth Sunday, Cole Ashb was standing in the middle of the wagon track in the draw between the two pale ridges alone with his bay tied to a juniper 20 ft off and his hands empty at his sides when Silas came around the bend at sundown.
There is no other inscription. There does not need to be. And maybe that is the whole thing in the end. Maybe that is what the long road from a wooden platform in a forgotten town to a stone marker in a quiet valley was always about. And maybe it is the only thing worth carrying home from a story like this one.
Not that one angry man with empty pockets stood up at the right moment because angry men with empty pockets stand up all the time and most of them get knocked back down. Not that four sisters with no shoes turned out to be stronger than the country that tried to price them because strength is cheap and the country prices everyone eventually.
The thing worth carrying is smaller and harder than that. It is that a person on a given day in a given dusty square is sometimes given the chance to do a thing nobody is going to thank them for and nobody is going to reward them for and nobody is even going to understand at the time. And the only question that matters is whether that person in that moment decides that the cost of doing nothing is finally higher than the cost of doing something.
Silus Boon decided. The four Whitlock sisters decided, Aaron Six decided, Cole Ashby decided. Tom Lacy decided. None of them decided cleanly and none of them decided without fear. And most of them decided too late by their own reckoning. And all of them had reasons not to. They decided anyway. That is the whole of it.
The wind still comes down off the sres in the fall of every year, and it still carries the dust of a country that does not in itself care who lives or dies on it. But the wind passes over the stone marker on the rise above Coffin Creek, and it passes over the names there. And somewhere in the long passing, it carries them a little further out into the country than they were the day before, and a little further the day after that, and a little further the day after that, and so on, and so on, until it has carried them in time all the way
to wherever you happen to be sitting now, hearing this told, which is when you come down to it, the only kind of ending a story like this one ever really has. And it is enough.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
