down the aisle to the witness chair, putting his body between Enola and the
room with the simple authority of a man standing in a doorway that is his.
Enola had not moved. She sat with her hands folded over Dr. Hart's shawl in
her lap and looked out at the courthouse of San Tomas the way she had
looked at Wade over the tin cup β measuring, unhurried, as if time were a
horse she intended to outlast.
The judge adjourned it by main force, the hearing unfinished, the inquest
suspended until the morning β the morning, Wade thought, with the cold
settling in him like water in a boot, when the United States Army had just
announced it would come and take the witness out of the county's book
entirely, and bury her in a fort's paperwork.
They got her back to the draw by dark, in Reilly's buggy, the sheriff himself
driving, Wade riding alongside with his rifle across the saddle. Reilly stayed
only long enough to say his piece at the corral β that he would come himself
in the morning, that the law had not finished, that he intended to be awake all
night finding what a county could still do β and Enola thanked him the way
she thanked people, once, with her whole attention, and went down into the
cellar without being told.
Wade did not sleep. He sat at his table with the lamp turned low and did the
arithmetic of a poor man facing the United States Army, and the arithmetic
was all one column. One good horse β the roan; the gray was wind-broke
and old. Eleven dollars and some cents in a coffee tin. A rifle, a revolver with
a worn cylinder, two boxes of cartridges. No kin nearer than Kansas. No
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friend in the county not already bled white for helping him. To run at dawn
was to be hunted as a horse thief of the worst kind β a man who stole the
Army's prisoner β and caught within the week, in country he had broken
horses over for six years, where every rancher knew his roan. To hide her
was worse: the cellar had been a secret when the secret had an ending. Now
it had a deadline. Soldiers would search the draw at dawn and find her, or the
signs of her, and take Wade in irons for the finding β and everything she
had said in the courthouse book would curdle into proof of the coaching
Cottrell had named.
There had to be a third thing. He sat with his head in his hands and hunted
for it the way he had once hunted a lost remuda in a blizzard β quartering,
doubling back, refusing the easy conclusion β and the lamp burned down,
and the windmill turned and complained, and the third thing would not come.
At last he stood to go down and tell her the shape of it whole, because she
had earned whole shapes from him.
The cellar door was open to the night.
He knew before he went down. A man who works horses knows the feel of
an empty place the way he knows a changed step in a horse β through the
soles of him, all at once. But he went down anyway, lamp in hand, calling
her name once, quietly, into the earth-smelling dark, the way you call to a
thing you have already lost.
The pallet was folded. Not stripped, not tumbled β folded, the blanket
squared at the corners the way soldiers did it, the way she had folded it the
morning she first stood alone. Her spare bandaging was laid by in a neat roll.
The tin cup stood washed on the crate. Eleven days she had been the wound
at the center of his life, the secret his whole poor estate had been spent to
shelter, and she had left his cellar tidier than she found it, as if she had been a
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guest, as if the debt ran the other way.
And on his table upstairs β where she must have come in the dark, past his
unsleeping back, silent as weather β on his table sat the one thing she
owned that the ambush had left her: Loche's silver concho, the big stamped
medallion from her brother's horse gear that she had carried out of the Pinch
against her skin and never once, in eleven days, let out of her keeping. She
had set it in the middle of the table like a signature at the bottom of a letter.
Like a name written where he could not pretend he had not read it.
He understood the whole letter. She had sat in the law's chair and done the
thing she came up out of the cellar to do, and it had not been enough for the
men with paper, and the Army was coming at dawn to take the fact of her
and file it where facts go to be forgotten. And Enola, daughter of Kaya, who
would not be a secret and would not be a story men could burn, had made the
only arithmetic left to her: that a surrender walks to the fort on its own feet
and is a person still, arriving; that a woman dragged out of a white man's
cellar is a thing the territory already has its word for. She would be at the
Stanton road by dawn and present herself, and spare him β the irons, the
hunting, the price of being the address where she was found. She had paid his
bill with the only coin she had. She had left the concho so he would know it
was not fear that took her. A trade. The last trade of Loche's party, conducted
in the dark, at par.
Wade stood in his own doorway with the silver concho closing in his fist
until its stamped edge bit his palm, and looked at the empty road going down
from the draw toward San Tomas, pale under a thin moon, the night wind
coming off the rocks smelling of dust and cold. The windmill turned above
him and complained, turned and complained, marking time over an empty