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.
"Barlow's inquest is four days off and asking after depredations, and there's a
boy down there hasn't been under dirt in eleven days. You'd think a paper
county would at least bury what it writes about."
"We'll do it," Wade said.
It cost them the whole morning's first hour and more, and Wade understood,
working, that Reilly had counted the cost before he ever swung down β the
burying was not a delay in the lawman's business but a part of it, and maybe
the truest part. They dug in the gravelly shoulder where the ground gave, and
carried the four of them down one at a time in their own blankets and laid
them in a row facing east, because Enola had told Wade once, in the cellar, in
the dark, that her people faced the dead toward the morning. Neither of them
spoke over the graves except once, when the sheriff, standing with his hat in
both hands and the sweat cutting the dust on his face, said, "I don't know
their names to say."
"Loche," Wade said. "The tall one is Loche, her brother. The boy β she
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never said. The others were his party." He set the last stone with both hands.
"Say Loche, then. One name's better than a number. Barlow's been calling
them a number for eleven days."
"Loche," Reilly said, to the stones, like a man entering it in a book. "All
right."
Then they went to work, and the work changed.
Wade read ground the way his father had taught him and the horse-breaking
trade had sharpened β not as pictures but as sentences, one sign finishing
another. The file of the herd had come down from the north: close-set prints
in file, shod and unshod together, the unshod ones the string's own β
Apache ponies, forty by Enola's count. Here the file had bunched and broken
where the shooting started, hooves gouged sideways, a horse down and
gotten up again, blood baked black on a stone. And here, above, the thing
Enola's closed eyes had seen exactly: the shelf of rock behind the boulder
shoulder, screened from the trail, with room for six or eight men to lie prone
and take the file under their rifles like fish in a narrowing creek.
"Raiders wouldn't shoot from here," Wade said, standing on the shelf with
the whole arrangement plain as a diagram under him. "Raiders after horses
stampede the herd and cut it off in the open β you don't stop to kill the
herders unless herders are the point. And you don't pick a place with no back
way off it. These men picked this shelf because the file couldn't scatter and
couldn't climb. They came to do murder with a horse theft over it, Tom. Like
a coat over a coffin."
Reilly said nothing. He was down on one knee β the bad one complaining,
Wade could see it in the way he bore his weight β turning over the leavings
of the men who had lain there. Fighters who live off a country leave a
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country clean; men who ride out from a ranch leave what these men had left:
a scatter of brass cartridge cases glinting in the gravel, more than a score of
them, .44-40 and .45-60 both β the calibers of good new rifles bought
through an agent, not the mixed and ancient arms of a raiding party. Reilly
picked them up one at a time with the care of a man gathering eggs and
dropped them into a grain sack from his saddlebag, and the sack ticked
faintly, brass on brass, while he worked.
Then Wade found the horseshoe.
It was downslope of the shelf, where a horse had been held in the rocks
during the shooting β held hard, by the look of the churned ground, sawing
at its reins for the length of a fight. The shoe had torn loose at the toe, nails
bent, half-buried in the dust for eleven days. Wade turned it over in his palm
and felt the stamp before he saw it, the way you feel a brand through a glove:
two letters and a bar, struck deep in the iron at the heel β the mark the
B-Bar put on every shoe out of its forge.
He carried it down to Reilly without a word and put it in the sheriff's hand.
Reilly looked at it a long time. He turned it over. He set it against the light.
Then he put it in the grain sack with the cartridge cases, and the sack made
no sound at all this time, and that silence was the loudest thing in the Pinch.
"Tracks," Reilly said. "Show me the tracks, Wade. All of it. I want the going
as well as the coming."
The going took them an hour more, and it was the worst of it, because it was
so plain. A raiding party that had taken forty horses would drive them one
way: away β north and east, toward the mountains, scattering as it went, the
sign fanning out like a hand opening. This sign did not open. It closed. The
forty had been gathered below the shelf by riders who knew horse work β
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the wide circling prints of three or four mounted men bringing the bunched
herd around β and then the whole mass of them, shod and unshod together,
had gone south and west in a kept column across the gravel flats, toward
exactly one piece of country: the long box canyon that cut into Barlow range
from the north, three miles off, where B-Bar wintered its remuda and no
outsider's business ever took him.
"They didn't even trouble to split them," Wade said, standing in the churned
earth at the edge of the flats. "Forty horses into a box canyon on Barlow
range, in daylight by the end of it. Men who believed no living soul would
ever stand here and read it. Because the only soul who saw it was supposed