She turned her face to Wade. "You saved my life in the draw when it would
have been easier to ride past. I have not thanked you in words; words are
cheap in both our languages. But I will not repay the saving by spending the
life in a hole in the ground while the man who made the hole sits in a
courthouse burying my brother a second time — under paper."
Wade stood with his hat in his hands and the windmill complaining above
them, and knew he was beaten, and knew the beating was just. He had
hidden her the way a man hides a fire in dry grass — carefully, and with less
hope every day that the hiding itself was not the danger. She was offering the
other thing: to carry the fire into the open, where everyone would have to
look at the light.
"I'll ride in and tell Reilly," he said at last. "If it's done, it's done under his
protection, with his rules. You ride in his buggy, not a horse, and you sit
where he puts you, and if he says run, you run, even from a witness chair.
Promise me that much of it."
39
"I promise the sheriff his rules," Enola said gravely, "for as long as his rules
are the law's and not Barlow's." It was, Wade thought, exactly the kind of
promise she would keep to the letter and not one inch past it.
Dr. Hart sighed and stood and brushed the cellar dust from her skirt. "Then
I'll want three days to get her strong enough to sit a buggy and a witness
chair both," she said. "And Wade — before that hearing, you'd best have
something more than her word in your pocket. Barlow will come with paper.
Paper is beaten with iron, not with more paper. Think on what iron there
might be."
She said it lightly, gathering her bag, but it stayed with him all day, turning
with the windmill: iron, not paper. It was still with him at dusk when Tom
Reilly rode into the draw unannounced and got down stiffly at the corral, like
a man who had decided something on the ride and meant to say it before the
deciding cooled.
Reilly would not come into the house. He stood at the corral rail with his
reins in his hand and delivered his business to Wade across it, low, while the
evening put long shadows out from the windmill tower.
"Barlow's petition went through," he said. "Hearing's set, four days. Judge
Penniman rides in from Las Cruces to sit on it — a fair man on most things
and a frightened one on Apache things, and Barlow knows the mixture to the
drop." He turned his hat in his hands. "Word in town is the girl's dead, Wade
— been dead since the day of the raid, and you're hiding an empty cellar and
a guilty conscience. If she walks into that courthouse breathing, half his case
dies in its chair. And the other half — " The sheriff looked out toward the
road, where the light was going. "The other half is what I rode out here
about. Her word is her word, and I'll back her right to give it. But this county
will weigh a Mescalero's oath against a rancher's paper and find her light,
40
unless there's something under her words that a man can hold in his hand."
"Abigail said the same. Iron, not paper."
"Abigail Hart is the smartest person in this county and that includes the
bench." "So. The girl described the place to you — the rocks on the Stanton
road, where the trail pinches. Tomorrow at first light you and I ride out there,
just the two of us, no posse, no noise. Show me where a raider story would
leave different sign than a robbery story. If there's nothing, there's nothing,
and we go into that hearing with her word and my star, and God help the
arithmetic. If there's something — "
"If there's something, it'll still be there," Wade said. "Ground keeps what men
drop. It only needs reading before the wind does the county's lying for it."
"Then we read it at first light," Reilly said, and swung up stiffly, and rode out
of the draw into the dusk without ever having asked to see her, which Wade
understood was the sheriff's own kind of promise.
They rode in the cold hour before sunrise, Wade on the roan and Reilly on a
county bay, and neither spoke much past the river crossing. The Stanton road
unspooled east toward the fort, and the land rose and broke into the long
tilted slabs known as the Pinch — where the trail narrowed between a rock
face and a fall of broken stone, and a horse herd could pass only in file, with
no way off but forward or back.
Enola had described it in the cellar with her eyes shut: the herd coming down
in file, Loche riding point, the rifle fire arriving from above — from the rock
face side, where no raider would need to be if all he wanted was horses, but
exactly where men would be if what they wanted was that no one in the file
should come out of it to say who had been shooting.
The dead were still there.
41
Eleven days and more since the ambush, and no hand had been sent out to
gather them. They lay where the file had broken — two near the trail's
mouth, one fallen among the boulders where he had tried to climb toward the
rifles, one — and Wade's throat shut — small and spare in the dust at the
trail's edge, no more than fifteen, who had ridden along, most likely, because
an older brother had promised him the sight of the fort. Buzzards had been at
them. The sun had done the rest. The smell was a thing Wade had met
before, in other years, in other people's wars, and it did not get easier for the
meeting.
Reilly stopped his horse above the trail and took off his hat.
"County never sent a wagon," he said. His voice had gone flat and old.