Evening, friend, the man said. "I hear you're asking after the canyon."
My name's Cyrus Tanner, the man said, stepping fully into the evening light so Elias could see him plain. He was forty-four, broad through the shoulders, with a face that had been handsome once and was now weathered into something harder and more practiced. His hair was dark with grey at the temples, his eyes were a pale, watchful blue, and his smile was the kind a man uses when he is selling something he does not quite own. The old blue cavalry coat hung well on him, but the collar told its own story: the yellow piping had been ripped off, leaving a frayed seam and a paler line of cloth beneath, as if the coat had been stripped of its rank and kept anyway, for the authority of the colour. He wore a revolver low on his hip and a pair of boots that were dusty but well kept, and he moved with the loose confidence of a man who had ridden many trails and talked his way out of most of them.
I used to scout for the army, Tanner said, as if that explained everything, which in a town like Lark Spur Flat it very nearly did. "I know the canyon trails. Every water hole, every pass, every place a man can ride and every place he can't. I heard you asking Otis about bottomland, and I thought I'd save you some wandering." He leaned against the hitching post, easy as a man at his own fence. "I can guide you in. Thirty dollars. Half now, half when you come back out with your eyes full of what you wanted to see."
Elias did not answer at once. He looked at Tanner the way he looked at a horse he was thinking of buying: at the feet, the hands, the eyes, and the spaces between what the man said and what the man meant. A scout who talked too easily about another man's land was a thing to be careful of. A man who offered to guide a stranger into country held by people who did not like soldiers or speculators, for thirty dollars and a smile, was a man who either knew something Elias did not or wanted something Elias had not yet named. And yet Elias had no other way in. Otis had warned him not to go alone, and Otis had not offered to go himself. The canyon was a day's ride away, and the trails through red rock country were the kind that swallowed a man who guessed wrong at a fork. His father's compass pulled at him, too, a quiet weight in his saddlebag, as if the brass itself remembered a surveyor's hand and wanted to be used again in the place it had once been carried. He thought of Thomas riding west with that compass in his pocket and never coming back, and he felt the old stone in his boot shift.
What do you get out of it besides the thirty? Elias asked.
Tanner's smile widened a fraction, but his eyes did not change. "The pleasure of good company," he said, "and the hope that a man who finds what he's looking for remembers who showed him the door. I do a little guiding, a little trading. I know folks in town who'd be interested in a man with an eye for land, if you ever decided to take a partner." He said it lightly, but Elias heard the hook in it, plain as a fishhook in clear water. A partner. An interest. A claim by another name.
I don't want a partner, Elias said. "And I don't want to stake anything. I want to look. That's all. If I go in, I go in with my hands open."
Then that's how we'll go, Tanner said quickly, too quickly, spreading his hands in a show of agreement. "Look, don't touch. I know the people up there, more or less. Iron Elk's a hard man but a fair one, if you come right. A man who comes in quiet and leaves quiet gets treated quiet. A man who comes in waving a chain gets run off. You and I, we'll come in quiet."
They talked on the porch while the light failed and the town's lamps came on one by one. Tanner told him about the trail: the wash that ran north from town, the fork at the dead cottonwood, the pass where the wind cut through like a knife, the place where the canyon opened and the grass stood tall enough to brush a horse's belly. He told it well, with the detail of a man who had truly ridden it, and Elias found himself listening in spite of his wariness, because the country Tanner described was exactly the country of his dream: tall grass, black dirt, cold water running all year. He asked about the people of the camp, and Tanner shrugged. "They keep to themselves. Good horses. Proud. The chief's daughter runs the horse lines and knows the water. Folks in town say she's not much to look at, but that's town talk, and town talk is cheap." He said it offhand, and Elias filed it away without comment, though something in him disliked hearing a woman he had never met summed up in a sentence by a man selling a trail.