Sheriff Amos Doyle stood on the jail steps with a paper in his hand, reading it for the tenth time, his
mustache going gray at the ends, a man who had kept this town's peace for eleven years by knowing
exactly how much law the territory actually contained, which was less than the law books said and more
than nothing at all. He caught Silas's eye and gave a small shake of his head. Not approval. Not warning.
Just: I see it too, and I am counting what it costs me to stop it, and the count is not done.
At noon exactly, when the church bell struck its flat note and the shadows had pulled in under every
boot and wheel, Obadiah Slade climbed onto the platform with the ease of a man mounting a pulpit he
owned.
He was dressed better than anyone in the square — a frock coat brushed to a shine, a waistcoat the
color of old wine, a string tie, boots polished — and the finery did what it was meant to do: it made the
business below the coat look respectable by association. He had a beard trimmed like a hedge. His smile
showed a gold tooth. In another life, Silas thought, watching him, this man sells pianos to widows, or
heaven to the dying. He had the voice for either trade, a rich, rolling preacher's baritone that reached the
back fence without shouting.
"Friends," Slade said, spreading his hands, "neighbors, Christians — and those working on it."
Laughter, on cue, grateful laughter, the crowd telling itself it was in good spirits. "I won't waste your
dinner hour. You know why I've come. The brave boys of the patrol, under Sergeant Cole, have cleared
the Salt Wash road of the raiders who burned the Pritchard place and run off stock from three ranches
—" a cheer, ragged, "— and in the Lord's providence, the fruits of that victory have fallen, in part, to
me, by lawful purchase, witnessed and signed. I offer that fruit to this community today, in the open, in
the sunlight, like honest men do business."
He gestured. Two of his men went to the covered wagon at the platform's side.
Silas had been braced for it for an hour, and it did not help at all when they brought her out.
She was younger than he had expected — that was the first thing, and it shamed the square in a way
the square refused to feel. Twenty-four, perhaps. She wore a torn dress of trade cloth that had once been
red, and a man's shirt over it, far too big, filthy at the cuffs. Her feet were bare and cut. Her hair, black as
a raven's wing, had been hacked short on one side — someone had done that, Silas understood at once,
not in battle but after, for the pleasure of the scissors, to mark her and make the crowd's work easier. Her
wrists were bound in front of her with new rope, rope someone had bought for the purpose, and there
was a second rope at her throat, a lead, held by the bigger of Slade's men the way a man holds a mule he
expects to kick.
She did not look at the crowd. She looked at the mountains.
That was what Silas would remember, afterward, when other men remembered her face or her silence
or the bidding. She looked past the platform, past the roofs, to the blue, indifferent line of the mountains
to the north, the way a person looks at a door they can see and cannot reach. Her face was not pleading.
It was not defiant, either, in the way the crowd wanted, so it could enjoy hating her. It was set, and
emptied out, and held together by something the square could not name and he could.
He had seen that face on a boy at a burnt farm in Kansas, twenty years before, sitting in the ashes in a
state beyond tears. He had seen it on Clara, once, in the last hour before the fever took her under, when
she looked past him at something in the room he could not see. It was the face of a person who has gone
somewhere inside themselves where hands cannot follow, and is rationing what is left until the hands are
done.
"Now then," Slade said, almost tenderly, as if presenting a horse he was fond of. "She's sound. She's
strong. She cooks, she sews, she knows horses better than any hand on the Hale place, Whitaker, and
that's God's truth, ask the patrol boys who watched her handle their remuda. She's been christened by a
mission aunt, she has English enough for orders and sense enough for the rest. She'll work. Oh, she'll
work." He let the smile go sly. "And for the man who prizes — quiet company — she's not hard to look
at, once she's cleaned, though I sell her for labor, friends, labor alone, as a Christian tradesman should."
The laugh that went around was uglier than the first. Slade let it run, conducting it with one raised
finger, and then cut it off clean.
"Terms are cash. The patrol's paper transfers with her — full right, full title, witnessed by Sergeant
Cole and by your own sheriff, who has the document in his hand this very minute and has found no flaw
in it, have you, Amos?"
Every head turned to Doyle. The sheriff stood a moment with the paper, in the sun, a man being
slowly nailed to a door in front of his whole town. "The paper's signed," he said at last, heavily.
"Signatures are real. That's all I've certified and that's all I'll say."
"That's all a lawful man needs," Slade said, beaming, and turned back to the crowd with his hands
raised like a man about to catch something thrown. "Who opens? Who opens this fine acquisition for the
town of Red Hollow? I am told the mines pay twelve dollars a month for a cook who doesn't steal. I am
told a certain ranch" — his eyes slid pleasantly toward Whitaker and the clinking purse — "has
particular need. We'll start her low out of Christian charity. Twenty dollars. Who says twenty for a
lifetime of labor, friends? Twenty —"
"Twenty," said Whitaker, without moving.
"Twenty-five," said a miner from the south pits, and the crowd made the little sound crowds make
when a contest begins, and the platform, the sun, the woman with the rope at her throat, all of it settled
into the familiar shape of a market, which was the shape Red Hollow understood best in the world.
Silas stood at the back, in the thin shade of the livery wall, with his list in his pocket and his nine
dollars' worth of goods waiting in the store, and his hands were shaking. He noticed it with interest, as if
they belonged to someone he was responsible for. He put them flat against his thighs to still them, and
watched the bidding climb, and counted — not the money. The faces. He counted the faces of his
neighbors, people whose children he had helped raise barns for, whose dead he had helped carry, and he
found them all, every one, either merry or bored or hungry, and none of them — not one — looking at
the mountains, where she was looking, at the door she could see and could not reach.
Thirty dollars. Thirty-five. Forty, from Whitaker, phlegged and unhurried, Hale's money patient as
groundwater.
And Silas Wren, who had come to town for salt, understood with perfect clarity that if he rode home
today he would hear that bidding in his sleep for the rest of his life, in the voice of a town he would have
to stop pretending to belong to.
Chapter 2 — The Price of Silence
The bidding did not climb the way bidding climbs for a horse or a wagon. For a horse, men bid against
the horse's faults. For this, they bid against each other, and there was a pleasure in it that had nothing to
do with labor or cooking or any of the words Slade had dressed it in. Silas could hear it in the way the
numbers came faster once fifty was passed — not the speed of need, but the speed of a card game when
the pot gets large enough to make losing interesting.
"Fifty-five," said the miner.
"Sixty," said Whitaker.
"Sixty-two," said Jubal Cross, from the well, without looking up from his cigarette, and a murmur
went through the square, because Cross had not been expected to bid at all. Cross owned nothing. Cross
worked for no one longer than a week. What Cross wanted with a woman he would have to feed was a
question with answers nobody wanted said aloud, and saying his number, Cross smiled around the
square as if he knew exactly what they were thinking and was charging them for the thought.
"Sixty-five," Whitaker said, and for the first time there was an edge in it. Hale's purse was deep, but
Hale's instructions had plainly had a bottom to them, and Whitaker was a man who did not enjoy
reaching his master's bottom in public.
"Seventy," Cross said.