gossip changed its key. Coulter's riders had stopped asking after a
schoolteacher. At the fifth station the keeper told Rube, with a sideways care,
that the questions coming down the road now wore better clothes and came
from farther east — a lawyer's clerk out of Hays, making a list of the station
keepers who had fed the freight outfits that week, and writing down names.
Harrow was building his own file for the hearing, name by name, kindness
by kindness, and Willa felt the trap change shape under her feet: it was not a
road trap anymore. It was a paper one, being laid in Hays at the speed of a
clerk's pen, and it would be waiting for all of them in a room with the
windows shut.
On the fifth day Johann shared the second of Marta's loaves. He unwrapped
it at the noon halt with the ceremony of a man opening a document, and
broke it among the four of them — Willa, Rube, Oyler, himself — with his
big hands careful on the crust, and ate his portion last and slowest. "She will
ask what became of the bread," he said. "I will tell her it fed the road. She
will say that is what bread is for, and she will be" — he searched for the
word and found it with an effort that was nearly a smile — "correct, and also
annoyed, which is her way of being correct." The third loaf stayed in the
flour sack in his saddlebag, untouched, riding toward Hays like a small
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brown ark. Willa thought about the quarter-section behind him, standing
empty in the sun with its fence and its leaking roof corner, and about her own
schoolhouse standing in Alder Creek with the roof open to the sky where the
fire had taken it, and understood that the two of them were traveling toward
the same room for the same reason: that paper, read honestly by a man who
could read, was the only wall either of them had left that weather could not
get through.
The storm found them at the Smoky Hill on the evening of the sixth day, and
it came the way the spring storm had come to Alder Creek — not as weather
arriving but as a decision the sky had made hours earlier and was only now
announcing. All afternoon the wind had worried the grass in long traveling
waves and the air had smelled of iron and wet stone, and by the time the
wagons came down the long slope to the ford the southwest horizon had
stacked itself into an anvil of cloud so black at the heart that the light went
out of the day an hour early, leaving a greenish dusk in which the river
showed pale between its banks like something poured.
The ford was the only crossing for eleven miles, and the river was already
up. Oyler walked his lead team to the bank and stood looking at the water
with his hat off, rain beginning to stipple his shoulders, and delivered his
verdict in the manner of a man reading an inscription: it could be crossed
tonight, in the next hour, with care and a rope and the wagons chained light.
By morning it could not be crossed for two days, maybe three. Behind them
the hearing sat ten days out in Hays and shrinking. Ahead of them the far
bank rose into a stand of timber, cottonwood and hackberry, black against the
storm light, and it was Johann — standing with his hand raised against the
first driven rain, staring across the water the way a man stares at a field he is
afraid of — who said, quietly, "Lanterns."
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There were none. Then, as the rain thickened and the dark came down in
earnest, there were: three, then four points of light kindling in the timber on
the far bank, spaced the way men space themselves when they are waiting
and do not wish to crowd their fire. Not a camp. A camp clusters. These were
spread along the bank above the ford's exit like beads on a string, where the
wagons would have to climb out of the water one at a time, slow and helpless
and lamplit.
Rube came back along the line of wagons with his coat already wet through,
and she climbed down from the wagon bed to stand with him in the rain
because there was no longer any freight in Kansas that needed her to be a
flour barrel. "Coulter," Rube said. "That's his spacing. He'll have counted the
wagons and the men both, and he'll be doing his sums on the bank yonder,
deciding we're a freight outfit with two teamsters and a schoolteacher, and
that the river will deliver us to him in single file like a present." He looked
across at the lanterns. "He's not wrong about the file."
The voice came out of the rain before anything else did, and Willa would
remember afterward that it was the voice she remembered — not the man,
who resolved out of the dark a moment later at the water's edge on their side
of the river, mounted, hat streaming, one hand raised in a patience that was
almost courtesy. Henry Reinhardt had crossed somewhere upstream in the
last of the light, alone, in the rising water, and the fact of it rearranged the
whole arithmetic of the ford. "Ward Coulter," the voice said, across thirty
yards of rain and dark water, not loud, carrying the way a voice carries over a
river when the man using it has no need to shout. "That is close enough. I am
Henry Reinhardt, Deputy Marshal of the United States. The party at this ford
is traveling to a federal land contest at Hays, with evidence for that hearing
in their keeping, and a special agent of the General Land Office among their
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number. You are interposing yourself in a federal errand. I am telling you
once, in front of witnesses, so that the record of it is clean."
The lantern at the ford's exit did not move. For a long moment there was