Salt pork. Dried apples in a twist of paper. A heel of cheese. He stood there
in the dark with the sack in his hands and he knew the handwriting on the
stenciled label, which the owner had inked over in her neat school hand to
say FOR THE MARE, as if the mare did the shopping. The blacksmith's wife
had written the lists for the harvest suppers at the church for eleven years,
and her hand was as familiar to him as his own mother's had been, and she
had risked her husband's last standing in that town to feed a man her husband
had been made to refuse. He carried the sack inside and put it away and he
never spoke of it to any living person, and he understood that he would go to
his grave not speaking of it, because some debts are paid best by never being
named, and because she had not signed it, and a gift with no name on it is a
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door a man must not open from his side.
The boys came on the Wednesday, two of them, sons of a B-Bar rider whose
name Wade knew and whose faces he had seen at the school picnic in better
years. He heard the first stone hit the windmill from inside the shack, a clang
that went through the tower iron like a bell struck wrong, and he came out
with his hands empty and stood in the yard and watched them on the road
bank with their pockets full of stones. The second stone bent a blade. The
third cracked a vane. He did not shout. He walked to the tower, climbed it
with his tools on his belt the way he had climbed it a hundred times, and set
about the repair in full view of the road with the sun on his back, unbending
the blade with a hammer and a block, fitting a new vane from his stock of tin,
trueing the wheel until it caught the wind and settled into its old creaking
rhythm, pumping water, indifferent as scripture. The boys watched from the
bank for a while with their stones still in their pockets. A wagon went past
slow. Nobody threw anything else. It unsettled people, he learned in those
weeks, more than rage would have. Rage they had priced into the account. A
man calmly repairing what they broke, in the open, at his own cost, without a
word — that was a figure that would not sit still in their arithmetic, and more
than one rider on that road went away doing sums.
Sheriff Tom Reilly rode out to the draw on the Friday evening, alone, with
his badge in his coat pocket instead of on it, which Wade noticed and filed
away with everything else he was noticing that spring. They drank coffee on
the porch of the shack the way they had a dozen times in better years, and
Reilly turned his cup in his hands and delivered what he had ridden six miles
to deliver, a piece at a time, like a man setting down eggs.
"Amos Barlow's lawyer has been to the county seat," he said. "There's a
petition for a lawful search of this property and a hearing on it, and the
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justice is inclined to sign. I can slow paper, Wade. I can't stop it. Paper that
wants to move, moves." He turned the cup another quarter turn. "The Army
has been wired at Fort Stanton. Not by me. A troop may ride within the
week, and when soldiers come they don't come with a county warrant and a
neighbor's manners. They come with a list. I am telling you all of this
because you are entitled to hear it from the law before the law arrives at your
gate, and because I have known you since you were a boy who lied about
nothing bigger than a fish."
"I appreciate it, Tom."
"Don't appreciate it yet." Reilly looked out at the windmill, turning easy in
the evening wind, and at the trough, and at the yard, all of it ordinary as a
held breath. "I have a question I am obliged to ask, and I am going to ask it
once, and I want you to hear the whole of it before you answer any of it. Is
there an Apache girl on this property, Wade?"
The windmill creaked. Somewhere below the draw a quail called, and
another answered it. Wade thought of the cellar door under the rug and the
lamp and the folded blankets. He thought of a rust-colored beard and a herd
running toward Barlow grass and a spring of hot water that never failed, and
of what would happen to all of it, every true word of it, if the girl under his
floor passed into the keeping of men who had already written her death into a
reward notice and a telegraph wire. He thought of his mother, who had held
that a lie was a debt you paid interest on forever. He paid.
"There's no raider on this property, Sheriff," he said.
Reilly looked at him then, a long look, level and gray and not young
anymore, and something in it moved that Wade could not name and did not
try to. "I asked what I asked," Reilly said at last. He stood up and put his hat
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on and gathered his reins. "The hearing's set for next week. If there's
anything on this property that paper would be bad for, I'd expect a prudent
man to think hard about his arrangements." He swung up into the saddle and
settled his coat, and the badge stayed in his pocket. "Good night, Wade."
"Good night, Tom."
Wade watched him ride up out of the draw in the last of the light, and he
understood that Reilly had given him the only gift a lawman in Barlow's
county could give a man in Wade's position. He had asked the question once,
in a yard, in the evening, where the answer could be a lie a man could stand