behind. He had not brought the paper. He had not brought a troop. He had
ridden away, which both of them understood was not the same as believing,
and was not meant to be, and was worth more than believing would have
been.
Amos Barlow rode into the draw the next morning, and for the first time in
Wade's life he saw the man on a horse that was not a parade horse, a plain
claybank gelding with dust on its legs, ridden the six miles from town by its
owner, alone, without so much as a dog. It was the aloneness that Wade
noticed. Men like Barlow did not travel alone unless the errand was one they
did not intend to have witnessed, and Wade came out of the shack with his
hands empty and his face arranged in nothing and met him at the corral
fence.
"Mr. Barlow."
"Sutter." Barlow swung down and looped the reins and looked around the
yard the way a man looks at a property he is valuing, which, Wade
understood, in Barlow's case was not a metaphor. The windmill. The shack.
The corral with no stock in it. The empty road. "You keep a clean place. I'll
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say that for you. A man who keeps a clean place generally keeps his word.
That's the reputation you have, and I've traded on worse information." He
declined the coffee Wade had not yet offered by looking past it. "I'll come to
it plain, because I believe you're a plain man under all this weather you've
made for yourself. I've bought your paper."
"So I gathered at Foster's."
"Foster's book. The feed account at Mesilla. The note on this claim at the
county bank." Barlow said it the way a man reads items off a bill he is about
to settle, without heat, almost with satisfaction. "Every cent you owe in this
territory, Sutter, is owed to me. Now. I can carry that paper to the courthouse
and squeeze, and by fall you'd be breaking horses for wages on another man's
land and this draw would be B-Bar grass, all lawful, all regular. Or I can burn
every page of it in your stove tonight." He paused and let the wind work in
the windmill. "I'm prepared to do the second. I'm prepared to do more than
the second. Thirty head of horses to break through the season, at a dollar a
day above the going rate, because whatever else this foolishness is, you are
the best hand with a spoilt horse in three counties and I don't burn assets, I
use them. And a deed, Sutter. The bottom forty along the draw, the piece
your fence cuts across. A man should own his own water outright. I'd have
thought recent events would have taught you the value of that."
"And the price of all this generosity," Wade said.
"The girl." Barlow said it as flatly as he had said the rest, an item on the bill.
"Friday. I'll ride out with the Army's escort myself, all lawful, all regular,
papers signed. She'll be taken to the agency, fed, kept safe, doctored. She'll
answer some questions and she'll live, which is more than her present
arrangements are likely to afford her. You have my word on her safety."
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Wade stood with his hands on the corral rail and watched the man, and he
heard Enola's voice as plain as if she were standing in the yard between
them. They did not want the horses. Horses are the story. And he understood,
looking at Amos Barlow's face, seamed and patient and utterly without
doubt, that Barlow's word was a thing he spent. He spent it the way he spent
money, in exact amounts, on purpose, expecting a return, and it cost him
nothing to make because there was nothing behind it but the spending. A
man who gives his word the way Barlow gave his was not promising. He was
paying. And what he was buying, with the debts and the horses and the
bottom forty, was the only witness alive to a murder on the San Tomas road
and the water at Ojo Caliente.
"She's not mine to hand over, Mr. Barlow," Wade said.
Something crossed Barlow's face then, not anger, something almost like
respect, the way a man acknowledges weather he has misjudged. "Mine is a
word that does a sight of work in this country, son."
"It's the only work it's ever done for me."
Barlow gathered his reins and mounted up in one movement, smooth for a
man of his years, and settled in the saddle and looked down at Wade from the
height the whole county was arranged to give him. When he spoke again he
was almost gentle, and the gentleness was worse than the bill-reading had
been.
"Then I'll have to let the town decide what you are," he said. "Towns are
good at deciding, son. It's the one crop that never fails."
He woke to the smell of it before the sound, which is the order those things
come in for a man who has slept his whole life with one ear open, and he was
out of the bunk with his boots half on before he had named it. Smoke. And
32
under the smoke, coal oil, sweet and chemical and wrong, a smell that did
not belong to any accident of nature. Then the horses began, and the light
came through the shack's one window in a color no lamp makes.
The haystack stood fifty feet off the corral, his whole winter in one stack,
three tons of cut and cured grass he had put up in the spring against the cold
months, and it was burning the way a stack burns when it has been helped,
all at once and from the windward side, a wall of fire standing up into the
night and leaning. The wind that had turned his windmill all evening was up
off the hills now and it had the fire by the collar and was walking it toward
the corral fence, toward the shack, toward the trough and the tower. The