Cross held his look a long moment. Then Cross did a surprising thing: he laughed, once, softly, with
what in another man would have been admiration, and spread his hands wide, empty, theatrical, bowing
a little toward the platform, toward Slade, toward the whole purchase.
"Mine's a rented appetite, friend," he said. "Yours is real. I don't bid against real. It gets expensive in
currencies I don't carry." He touched his hat — to her, Silas saw, not to him; Cross, whatever else was
rotten in him, knew whose moment it was — and said, "A hundred and thirty to the creek."
"A hundred and thirty dollars," Slade said, and his voice had gone a little hoarse with joy, because a
hundred and thirty was beyond his dreaming for this merchandise and he was already composing the
letter he would write about it. "Going — for a lifetime of faithful labor — going —" He raised his hand
like a priest ending a blessing. "— gone. To Mr. Silas Wren of Wren Creek, for one hundred and thirty
dollars, cash, with papers."
The crowd exhaled a complicated breath. Some of it was disappointment: the game was over. Some
of it was relief, in men who would go home and tell their wives they had stood against it, silently, the
whole time. And some of it — Silas heard it forming already at the edges, in the tone men use to move a
thing from their own conscience to another man's character — was the beginning of the story Red
Hollow would tell about Silas Wren and why he had bought himself an Apache woman at noon on a
Tuesday, for a hundred and thirty dollars, when everybody knew what a man alone three years on a
ranch might want and be too proud or too peculiar to ask for plainly.
He walked forward through it, through the parting crowd, feeling every eye do its arithmetic on his
back, and he climbed the two steps onto the platform, into the full white sun, where there was no shade
at all to stand in.
Chapter 3 — Cut
Slade came to meet him at the platform's edge with the paper in one hand and his other hand open, palm
up, a tradesman's altar waiting for its offering. Up close, his beard had gray in it like frost in a hedge,
and his eyes were pale and intelligent and utterly without weather in them — nothing had ever rained on
the inside of Obadiah Slade.
"Mr. Wren," he said warmly, low, for the two of them. "A discerning man. I'll want the cash before
the — well. You understand. The patrol paper transfers on payment. Full title. No one can question it.
You'll find her — tractable, after a fashion, once she's fed regular and knows the house. They take to a
house. It's in the —"
"Count it in front of them," Silas said.
Slade blinked. "I beg —"
"The money." Silas took the folded bills and coin from his inside pocket — he had gone to the store
prepared only to spend nine dollars, but a rancher in a drought year who rides anywhere without his
margin is a rancher composing his own obituary, and the tin box's contents, minus what he kept at the
ranch, rode with him in a money belt as a rule he had never broken since the war. He had known that
too, somewhere below deciding. "Count it in front of them. Slow. I want the town to be able to say what
changed hands, exactly, so nobody has to improve it later."
A flicker crossed Slade's face — annoyance at a customer with stagecraft of his own — and then the
tradesman reasserted himself, because a crowd watching money counted was a crowd that would
remember the seller's honesty. He counted, aloud, in his pulpit voice, bill by bill and coin by coin, and
the square listened to arithmetic the way it had listened to bidding: as entertainment, as sacrament. One
hundred and thirty. He folded the money away inside his fine coat, close to his heart, and held out the
paper with a flourish.
"Bill of sale," Slade announced, "transferring full right and title in the woman known as —" he
consulted it — "Naya, of the Chiricahua, taken lawful at Salt Wash — to Silas Wren, this day —"
"I'll take it from the sheriff," Silas said.
He stepped past Slade, and past the paper, and Doyle — who had come down from the jail steps
without Silas seeing him move, drawn as if by a wire — put the document into his hand with the air of a
man handing over something hot. Silas glanced at it once. Signatures. A sergeant's mark. A date. Words
arranged to make a person into a parcel. He folded it, once, and put it in the pocket where the list still
was — salt, wire, coffee, lamp oil — and turned to the woman.
She had watched the counting with the rest, and Silas saw that she understood money — understood
it exactly, what it did, what it sealed. Whatever hope the mountains had held for her at noon was
finished now; the sale had closed over her like water over a stone. Her face had gone back to its far
country. Only her hands betrayed her: bound in her lap, they were working, very slightly, a small, secret,
ceaseless testing of the rope, the way a person in a dark room keeps touching the wall to remember the
wall is there. It was not escape she was doing. It was the opposite of surrender, performed at the smallest
scale that could not be punished.
Silas took his pocketknife from his trousers.
The crowd made a sound. The man with the lead rope — Slade's bigger man, whose name Silas never
learned and never asked — tightened his grip and said, "Now, hold on, you'll want her — you can't loose
her here, friend, she'll run, she ran twice on the road, she's —"
"I know what she'll do," Silas said. "She'll do what she chooses. That's the arrangement." He looked
at the man until the man, baffled by an instruction outside the day's script, looked to Slade; and Slade,
who had his money and his story and no remaining interest in how his former merchandise conducted
herself, gave a small, elegant shrug that said the rope was Wren's property too, now, to ruin as he
pleased.
Silas knelt.
He did it without thinking about how it would look, which was fortunate, because it looked — as
every witness agreed later, though they agreed on nothing else about that day — like a man kneeling to a
queen in a story, or a penitent at a rail, and Red Hollow would chew on the image for years. He knelt
because the knots were at the height of her seated hands and because a man should not stand over bound
wrists with a knife; he had cut rope off calves and off a trapped mule and off his own boot once, in
snow, and you kneel for such work or you do it badly.
Up close she smelled of smoke and dust and the iron smell of old fear, and under it, faint, some herb
— sage, he thought. Her wrists were raw where the rope had worked, and one cut, not deep, had bled
and dried and bled again. When his hands came near, she did not flinch. She held utterly still, and the
stillness had a quality he recognized from horses and from wounded men: she was reserving the flinch
for when it would count.
"Naya," he said. It was the first time anyone in that square had used her name as a name and not as a
label on a parcel, and he felt the word go through her like a rifle crack through canyon walls. Her eyes
came to his face, sudden and close and black as well water, and they were not emptied out at all, up
close. They were furious, and frightened, and intelligent — all of it banked, all of it watched. "I'm going
to cut the rope," he said. "The knife is for the rope. Only the rope. You understand me?"
A beat. Then — the smallest nod a human being has ever given, one a less attentive man would have
missed, and missed the whole day with it.
He worked the blade under the rope, turned edge-out, away from the skin, and sawed gently. New
rope is honest stuff; it cut clean in four strokes. The loops fell. Her hands came apart slowly, as if they
had forgotten the permission, and she raised them and looked at the wrists — the ring of rawness, the
paler skin beneath — with an expression Silas could not read at all, and then she did read as clear as
print: she rubbed each wrist once, formally, like a person signing a document.
The lead rope at her throat remained. Silas stood up, and reached — carefully, telegraphing the
movement, hand open so the knife showed folded and done — and untied the knot at her throat himself
rather than cutting it, because cutting near a throat was a threat no matter the intent, and worked the rope
loose and drew it away and let it fall on the platform boards, where it lay like a small, dead snake.