way we have always traded. The riders fell on us in the rocks at the pass, in
the morning, from above, the way you shoot at — at targets." Her voice
stayed level, which was worse than weeping. "Loche put me on the ground
behind the rocks and the horses over me. He is dead in those rocks with the
horses gone, and the men who shot him are telling your town that we were
the thieves." She looked back at Wade. "I crawled to the sound of your
windmill. I could hear it for a mile in the night. It is a loud windmill, horse
man."
"It is," Wade said. "I've been meaning to fix that vane for a year."
"You should leave it," Enola said, gravely, as if this were counsel of state. "It
calls things that need water."
He lay awake that night on the floor beside the stove with her words going
around in him, and did his arithmetic, and the arithmetic was bad. The wound
was clean but it was deep, and she was weaker than the sitting-up had made
her look, and his mother's kit was twenty years old and his quinine was
nonexistent and his knowledge had edges to it that he could feel in the dark
like the edges of a cliff. She needed a doctor — real medicine. And there was
exactly one doctor in reach: Abigail Hart, in San Tomas, a widow his mother
had known, who had set Wade's own broken arm when he was fourteen. Six
miles. In the dark. With the valley watched by men who set their cups down
like markers.
16
He went the next night, when Enola was sleeping the true sleep and the moon
was a thin rind low in the west that would give him dark for most of the ride.
He left her water within reach of her good hand, and her knife on the bed
beside her, and he saddled Roach in the corral without a lantern and rode out
through the greasewood with the reins loose, letting the gelding pick the way
by smell and memory, the way they had done a hundred times.
Dr. Hart's house stood at the far end of San Tomas's one real street, with the
surgery at the back and a lamp in the surgery window even at that hour.
Wade went around to the back door and knocked the way you knock at a
doctor's in the night — twice, and then wait, and let her come in her own
time. She came in a wrapper with her hair down, a woman of fifty with a face
that had been handsome and was now something better, and she looked at
him standing in her doorway hatless and dusty at two in the morning, and she
asked none of the things a person asks. She said, "Come into the surgery,
Wade Sutter, before someone with less sense than you sees you," and she
shut the door.
He told her a wound. A shoulder, a rifle ball, dug out three days ago, fever
broken, clean but deep, the patient weak. He did not tell her a name or a
place or a people, and she did not ask for one. She asked about the pulse, and
the color of the drainage, and whether the arm below the wound moved and
felt — a doctor's questions, four of them, precise as stitches. Then she went
to her cabinet and measured out laudanum in a brown bottle and quinine in a
paper twist, and took down clean bandaging and a small jar of ointment, and
wrapped it all in a cloth and tied it with string while he stood there with his
hat in his hands like a boy.
"You'll want to keep it cleaner than clean," she said. "And the quinine
whether the fever's broken or not, through tomorrow. And if the streaks come
17
up the arm, Wade — " she looked at him then, full in the face, and her voice
did not change at all " — you ride back here whatever hour it is, and
whoever's watching the road can go to the devil. Do you hear me?"
"I hear you, Abby."
"That'll be two dollars," she said. "On your book. Your mother — " and then
she stopped, and something crossed her face that was not professional at all,
and she said, more quietly, "Your mother would have done the same.
Whatever it is. She'd have done the same, and so I won't ask you the one
question I could ask you, because I find I've already guessed the answer, and
a guess is a thing a body can keep to herself." She put the bundle into his
hands. "Go home by the back lane. And Wade — feed her. Whatever else,
feed her like it's your job, because right now it is."
He rode out of San Tomas with the bundle tied behind his saddle and the thin
moon standing on its edge over the basin, and Roach moved under him at the
easy, ground-eating lope of a horse that knows the way home. The town was
dark and shuttered, lamps out, the street empty — except at its middle, where
the telegraph office stood, and the telegraph office was lit.
Wade slowed Roach to a walk in the shadow of the livery wall and looked,
because a lit window at two in the morning is a thing a man looks at the way
he'd look at a fire on a ridge. Through the glass he could see the operator at
his key, young Pfifer, with his shirtsleeves up and the earpieces on, sending
— the key working steady under his hand. And standing over him, close,
with his store apron still on over his nightshirt as if he'd been got out of bed
by the matter and hadn't troubled to dress for it, was Hiram Foster, holding a
sheet of paper in both hands and reading from it, his lips moving, while the
key chattered under the boy's fingers.
18
Someone in San Tomas was awake at two in the morning. Someone was
awake, and writing, and the writing was going out over the wire to