Mateo gave him a sideways look.
“You talk as if you have known many cowards.”
There was a morning during the search for evidence when Jack and Ruth disagreed so sharply that neither spoke for nearly an hour. Ruth wanted to bring the surviving records directly to an attorney, while Jack insisted they first identify the man who had been watching the schoolhouse. She accused him of treating every problem as though it could be solved by following tracks. He accused her of trusting documents more than the people carrying them. The argument ended when a child entered the room and asked whether the two adults were angry because the arithmetic lesson had gone badly. Ruth apologized to the child, and Jack stepped outside to reconsider what he had said.
He found Tomás behind the livery, brushing down a horse whose ribs showed beneath its coat. The boy had been passing messages between the town and the valley, a dangerous task that no one had formally assigned him. Jack asked why he continued. Tomás said that his older sister worked at the hotel and heard things the company men believed servants would never repeat. She had once tried to warn a miner about a false debt and been dismissed for interfering. Tomás had decided he could carry messages because no one paid attention to boys. Jack told him that being overlooked did not make him safe. The boy replied that staying quiet had never made his sister safe either.
They spoke about routes through the town. Tomás knew which alleys flooded after rain, which shopkeepers closed early, and which dogs barked at strangers. He showed Jack a narrow passage behind the blacksmith's yard where a person could cross two streets without being seen from the hotel. Jack realized that the boy's knowledge could save lives, but he was uneasy about relying on someone so young. He offered to pay Tomás for stable work instead. Tomás asked whether the offer meant Jack wanted him out of danger or simply out of the way. Jack had no comfortable answer.
When Ruth joined them, she listened to the boy describe the route and proposed a different arrangement. Tomás would not be asked to approach the company office or carry papers that could incriminate him. He could alert the school if he noticed unusual movement in the streets, and an adult would decide what to do next. Tomás objected at first, then agreed when Ruth explained that a warning was useful only if the person giving it survived. Jack saw the same principle that Isabel had tried to teach him: courage did not require pretending that one person's life was expendable for a good cause.
Later, Ruth and Jack returned to the schoolroom. She admitted that she sometimes clung to documents because paper was easier to protect than people. Jack admitted that he had been so frightened for Daniel that he wanted every uncertain situation to offer a clear enemy he could confront. Neither apology erased the disagreement. Instead, they began to make a plan that accounted for both kinds of danger. Ruth would copy the most important records, and Jack would help arrange safe transport. Tomás would watch the streets only from places where he already had reason to be. The arrangement was less dramatic than either adult's first idea. It was also more likely to work.
That evening Tomás brought a message from his sister. A company wagon had left the hotel yard carrying crates marked as agricultural tools. She had heard one of the drivers complain about the smell of oil. Jack remembered the drover he had met before arriving in town. He told Ruth about the barrels delivered after dark, and she marked the information in her notebook. The clues did not prove what Meridian intended, but they pointed toward a pattern. Someone was preparing to move flammable supplies while claiming they were ordinary freight. Ruth looked up at Jack and said that perhaps following tracks and preserving papers were not such different kinds of work after all. Both required noticing what powerful people hoped everyone else would overlook.
“I’ve known men who were afraid and did the right thing anyway. I’ve known men who were not afraid of anything except losing money.”
They searched the office first. The desk had been overturned, its drawers torn out. Someone had dragged a heavy cabinet across the floor, leaving a dark groove in the dust. Jack knelt and examined the marks. The cabinet had been moved after the fire, not before; beneath it lay a rectangle of clean floor protected from soot. A narrow iron ring was fixed into the boards. He pulled, but the hatch did not move.