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
somewhere that wanted it enough to pay a storekeeper out of his bed.
Wade touched Roach with his heels and they went on down the back lane,
quiet as weather, and behind them the lit window shrank and went out, and
the dark came down over the town again like a hand over a lamp.
The town began to know on a Tuesday, and it began the way weather begins
in that country, not with the storm but with the stillness ahead of it, a change
in the air a man feels on his skin before he can find a word for it.
Wade rode into San Tomas with a list in his head and four dollars in his
pocket, which was his usual arrangement with the world. Flour. Coffee. Salt
pork. Lamp oil. A bottle of carbolic, which he would say was for a cut horse
if anyone asked, and which nobody did, because by the time he reached
Foster's counter the asking had already stopped. The store was not empty.
That was the thing he noticed first and understood last. Two freighters off the
Las Cruces road were standing by the stove with their coffee going cold, and
a cattle buyer from El Paso was studying a shelf of canned peaches with the
concentration of a man reading scripture, and the liveryman was at the
window pretending to watch the street. Every one of them had been talking
when Wade's boot hit the porch boards. Every one of them had finished by
the time the door shut behind him.
Hiram Foster came out of the back with a sack of beans in his arms and set it
down careful, the way a man sets down something he does not want to have
to pick up again.
"Morning, Hiram," Wade said.
19
"Wade." Foster did not quite look at him. He looked at the beans. He looked
at the scale. He took down the ledger from its shelf and laid it open on the
counter and turned it around so Wade could see, which was a thing Foster
had never done in six years, because the ledger had always been Foster's side
of the counter and the debt had always been Wade's, and each man had kept
to his side of it like a fence both of them maintained.
"Read it," Foster said.
Wade read. His name. Six years of entries in Foster's cramped hand, flour
and nails and harness leather and coffee, paid on slow and paid on always,
the balance never once carried past a season's end. At the bottom of the page,
in ink still new enough to shine, someone had ruled a line and written a
single word. Reviewed.
"What's it mean, reviewed?"
"It means the paper on this store changed hands last week," Foster said. "The
note I carry with the wholesaler in El Paso. It's been sold on, Wade, and the
new holder has called in the slow accounts to be looked at. Yours among
them. I'm told to close every account under review until it's settled in cash."
He shut the ledger gently. "I am sorry to say it in my own store. I have
extended you credit since you were twenty-one years old and you have never
once made me sorry of it. But I don't hold the paper anymore. A man who
doesn't hold the paper doesn't hold the decision."
"Who holds it?"
Foster looked at the door, and then at the men by the stove, who were
examining their coffee as if it might contain instructions. "I wasn't told a
name," he said. "I was told an address in this town, and there's only the one
address in this town that buys paper for the pleasure of holding it over
20
people."
Wade paid cash for half his list. He left the lamp oil and the carbolic on the
counter because four dollars is a short rope, and he saw Foster see him leave
them, and neither of them said anything about that either.
He was cinching the sack behind his saddle in the street when the
blacksmith's boy came pelting down the boardwalk with his hat in his hand,
twelve years old and tow-headed and out of breath, and pulled up short three
feet from Wade as if the last three feet were the hard part of the errand.
"Mr. Sutter. Pa sent me. Pa says to tell you the shoeing's gone."
"Gone where, son?"
"Pa says Mr. Ransome come by Monday and took the whole B-Bar string to
the livery smith, and the livery work Pa was promised for the spring is
promised to Clovis's cousin now, and Pa's not to shoe for your breaking no
more neither." The boy swallowed. "Pa says he's sorry. Pa says it's not him.
Pa says you'd know whose it is."
"I know whose it is," Wade said. "You tell your pa I said thank you for the
six years, and there's no hard feeling carried."
The boy nodded with the relief of a message delivered into the right hands
and ran back the way he had come, and Wade stood a moment with his hand
on the mare's neck and let the town finish happening around him. It was then,
buying nothing, standing still, that he heard the other piece of it. Two men
had come out of the telegraph office onto the porch above the street, and one
of them was saying, not low enough, that the wire had gone out Sunday
night, late, straight to the adjutant at Fort Stanton. Raiders on the San Tomas
road. Two white men dead. The Army asked to move. The speaker said the
operator had sat up past midnight writing it fair, and Wade's hand tightened
21
on the reins until the mare shifted, because he had been on that street Sunday