for.
"He said the story was the whole job," Malone whispered. "He said moving
the territory's mind, that was the skilled labor. Barlow—" The boy's eyes
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rolled and found Wade's face and held it with an effort that cost him visibly.
"Barlow planned the shape of it, Mr. Sutter. Deke did the— the placing of us.
In the rocks. Before light. Your—" He stopped. His hand moved in the
gravel, searching, and found Enola's wrist where she was holding the water
bag, and did not take hold of it, only rested there, as if checking that she was
real. "Her brother was with the horses. Loche. He wasn't supposed to—
nobody said there'd be a herder that morning. It was supposed to be empty
pasture and a clean take. When he stood up out of the grass with that rifle,
Deke started it, and Loche— Loche fired back. He was good. God forgive
me, he was so good. He put Harlan through the chest and Bell in the throat
before my second shot, and I fired wide. I fired wide twice, miss. I want that
in it too, when it's written. I wasn't brave. I was just— my hands wouldn't."
"Two B-Bar dead," Wade said. "Harlan and Bell. And the territory was told
they died defending the herd from a raid."
"That's the paragraph," Malone said. "That's what Deke called it, after. He
said a raid needs dead men the way a letter needs a stamp." Fever took him
then for a while, and he talked to people who were not in the wash — to his
mother, to Deke, once to the horse — and Enola held the water bag to his
mouth through all of it, patient as rain that has decided where it will fall, and
Wade sat with his hands in the gravel and listened to a dying boy spend the
last of himself on the truth.
When the sun was full up and the heat had come into the wash like a held
breath, they heard the rider. One horse, coming unhurried down the road
from the direction of San Tomas, and Wade stood up with his hand resting
easy near his hip and waited until the rider came abreast of the draw and
reined in and sat looking down at the three of them — at the dead horse, at
the water bag in Enola's hands, at the B-Bar boy in Wade's coat — with the
60
expression of a man whose suspicions have just been confirmed so
completely that confirmation itself feels like a kind of grief.
Tom Reilly had not slept either; it was in his face. He had ridden out before
dawn on his own arithmetic — a sheriff counting the same sum Enola had
counted, figuring that if the girl ran, the road to Stanton was where the
territory's trouble would all come together in one place, and a man might as
well be standing there when it did. He came down into the wash without a
word, took off his hat, and knelt in the gravel across from Wade with his
notebook already out, the way other men would have reached for a gun.
"Jess Malone," Reilly said, not unkindly. "You've got the look of a man
who's carried something too far in the heat. Set it down here. I'll take the
weight of it."
So Malone said it again. It took an hour. It came slower the second time and
in better order, the way a thing does when it is being written down — the
names, the dates, the line camp, the rocks, the grass, the shots, Loche
standing up out of the pasture like a man rising out of water. Reilly wrote it
all in his small square hand without interrupting, except to ask, twice,
"Whose words were those, Jess — yours or Deke's?" and to write the answer
down too. He wrote that Deke had ordered Malone left at the line camp after
the doctor had been brought and sworn to quiet — left there with a side of
bacon and a jug and instructions to heal or die without troubling the ranch
house either way, because a live witness was a risk and a dead one was a
paragraph. He wrote that Malone had gotten on a horse he could not ride,
fever and all, because the doctor's face when she changed his bandages had
finally become a mirror he could not stand to look into. And at the end, when
Reilly read it back in his flat sheriff's voice, the boy listened with his eyes
closed, and then he took the pencil in a hand that shook so badly that Reilly
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had to steady the notebook against his knee, and he signed it. The signature
was a child's scrawl on a man's confession. It was the truest handwriting
Wade had ever seen.
"One thing more," Malone said. His voice had gone down to almost nothing.
He was looking at Enola, and it was plain he was spending the last of his
strength on the looking. "Not— I ain't asking pardon. I know the price of the
thing and it ain't mine to set. But when it's written wherever they write it—"
His eyes moved to Reilly. "Write that I came myself. Nobody fetched me. I
was coming to town to say it when my horse fell. Write that I came myself."
Reilly wrote it. "It's written, Jess."
Malone nodded, or tried to. Then he looked back at Enola, and waited, like a
man who has put down a load and does not know if he may stand up. Enola
held his gaze a long moment. Wade watched her weigh something he could
not see the scale of — the rocks, the rifle, her brother's name spoken out of
this boy's mouth — and then she nodded, once. It was the most she had to
give. It was honestly given, and Malone closed his eyes as if it had been a
great deal more, and slept, with the sun on the wash and his confession in a
sheriff's pocket and the water bag still in Enola's hands.