Silas watched the woman. She had not moved when the bidding started and she did not move now,
except once: when Cross first spoke, her eyes came down from the mountains for a single moment and
found him by the well, and looked at him the way a person memorizes a cliff edge in the dark —
precisely, and without hope, and then her gaze went back to the mountains, and Silas understood that she
was keeping accounts too. She was learning the prices of the men who would own her, and grading
them, and the grading did not mistake money for mercy. Cross's seventy was worse to her than
Whitaker's sixty-five. She knew what the whole square knew and would not say.
That was the moment his hands stopped shaking.
He had been a scout at nineteen, in the last year of the war and the raw years after, riding for an army
that paid him to find things and report them plainly. He had reported farms burned that his captain
wished unburned and wells poisoned that would have been convenient to use, and he had learned the
trade's one rule: you say what you see, at the moment you see it, because later the words get heavier, not
lighter. He had come home and built a quiet life specifically to avoid moments that required the rule. He
had avoided them, expertly, for years. He had avoided the town council, the vigilance meeting, the
petition about the well, the collection for the Pritchard widow — he had sent money for that one by
Eddie, money being a way of being present without having to stand anywhere.
Seventy-five dollars, said the miner, dropping out with his hands up at eighty, laughing, a man who
had had his fun and bought nothing, which is the cheapest seat at any cruelty.
The sun hammered the square. A baby cried under the awning and was hushed. Slade stood with his
big hands folded, letting the silence between bids do his work, a fisherman who knows the fish is
already hooked and is only deciding how it will tire.
"Eighty," Whitaker said. The purse clinked. "Eighty dollars, cash money, and let's all go eat our
dinners."
"Eighty-five," Cross said.
Whitaker turned, then, and looked at Cross full-face, and the square quieted with real attention,
because here was a shape it recognized better than the auction itself: two men, a line, a question of who
would step back. Cross finished his cigarette, ground it under his heel with care, and smiled his ruined
smile.
"You buying for yourself, friend?" Whitaker asked. "Or is somebody's money burning a hole in a
borrowed pocket?"
"Could ask the same," Cross said pleasantly. "Yours spends like it belongs to a man who ain't here.
Must be lonely money. Mine's my own." He raised two fingers to Slade, lazy as a man hailing a drink.
"Eighty-five stands."
"Mr. Cross has eighty-five," Slade said, quick now, scenting the real contest. "Eighty-five for this
valuable — ninety, Mr. Whitaker? A round ninety? Hale stock is known territory-wide, what's ninety to
the Hale —"
"Ninety," Whitaker grated.
It would go to a hundred. Silas could feel the number coming the way you feel weather in a healed
bone. A hundred dollars was a story the town would tell. A hundred dollars made it an event instead of a
shame. Men who had bid nothing would go home saying they had seen a woman go for a hundred
dollars, as if the size of the number laundered the thing it counted. He understood, standing there with
his palms dry now and his heart going slow and huge, that the town was not really buying a woman at
all. It was buying the story of having bought her. It was purchasing permission. And every dollar added
was another coat of paint over wood no one intended to look at.
"Ninety-five," Cross said, and grinned at the mountains, at her, at everyone.
She understood the number too. Her shoulders — Silas saw it, no one else, he would swear to it later,
no one else even looked — her shoulders set, very slightly, the way a deer's set an instant before the bolt
for the treeline. If the rope had not been at her throat she would have gone. Not toward freedom — there
was no freedom in that square, there were three hundred yards of crowd and dust and then desert that
kills the barefoot by sundown — but gone anyway, because what Cross's money meant was worse than
the desert, and she had already made the arithmetic that the dying is cheaper than certain kinds of living.
The man holding her lead felt the shift and hauled the rope, not hard, just a practiced jerk, enough to
turn her half a step and remind her and the crowd where the power was arranged. A laugh started
somewhere and died, ashamed of itself, then another man laughed louder to cover the first man's shame,
in case shame should prove catching.
"Ninety-five dollars," Slade called. "Ninety-five, from Mr. Cross. Do I hear —"
"A hundred," Silas said.
He had not decided to speak. He had decided, in some chamber of himself that had been locked since
the winter of '73, long before he arrived in this square — it had decided, while he was still tying Biscuit
at the rail, probably; while he was still folding a list over his heart. His voice came out quiet, because it
was the only voice he had, and the square was so arranged that quiet carried strangely, the way it does in
a church. Men at the far fence turned around.
"Well now," Slade said, recovering beautifully, delighted, because a new bidder with a known purse
was money's favorite weather. "Mr. Wren. The gentleman from Wren Creek. A hundred dollars. Mr.
Cross —"
"A hundred and five," Cross said. The grin was gone. He was looking at Silas now the way he had
looked at the square before: appraising. What he saw plainly puzzled him. Silas Wren did not bid on
things. Silas Wren did not stand in squares.
Whitaker let out a breath and stepped back a pace, and folded his arms: Hale's part was done, capped,
and there was relief in the big man that his master's money would not be the money remembered.
History, in Red Hollow, would now have other names to keep.
"A hundred and ten," Silas said.
"Silas." It was Doyle, from the jail steps, not loud. A warning and a plea in one word: think, man. He
held the paper with both hands. "Silas, that's — you know what that money is. That's your year. That's
seed and tax and Rosa's wages and —" He stopped, because a sheriff may not advise a bidder, and
because friendship loses to office in public, in that order, and both men knew it.
"A hundred and ten," Silas said again, to Slade, in case the first one had been for Doyle.
"A hundred and twenty," Cross said, and now there was something new in his face — not cruelty, but
curiosity sharpened into spite. He wanted to see how far the quiet man would walk into the light. Men
like Cross collected other men's limits the way boys collect birds' eggs. "Come on, rancher. Show us the
creek runs deep."
Silas thought of the money. It was not an abstraction; he knew its addresses. One hundred twenty
dollars was the tin box in the flour bin, which held one hundred and ninety-one dollars and was the
whole of his margin against drought, tax, a broken leg, a dead well, a winter like the winter. It was
Rosa's wages through Christmas. It was the seed for the lower field. It was, precisely, the difference
between a ranch and a memory of a ranch, if the rain failed again. Clara had sewn the box's hiding place
into the routine of the house, a secret between the two of them, now a secret between him and a house
that listened less kindly.
He also thought — and this thought came without words, as a picture, Clara's own hands brown with
garden soil — that Clara had once returned a found purse containing six dollars to a Mexican drover's
wife in this very square, and had walked home in the rain pleased about it for a week, and that he had
loved her most in the moments when she made goodness look like the simplest housekeeping in the
world.
"A hundred and thirty," he said.
The square had gone entirely quiet. Even the baby. The woman on the platform had turned her head
— slowly, as if the movement cost something she had to borrow — and for the first time she was
looking at him instead of the mountains. Not with gratitude. He wanted to be very clear about that later,
when men tried to put gratitude in the story. She looked at him with a narrow, measuring disbelief, as if
a new kind of trap had been described to her in a language she almost knew. Another bidder. Another
price. The examination in her eyes was total and it was not kind, and Silas bore it the way you bear a
doctor's hands on a wound: without flinching, because flinching helps no one.