can shoot his way out of. He smiled inside his beard and raised the cup
slightly, as if Marsh had come to breakfast.
"Lieutenant. You're a long way off your parade ground." His eyes went past
Marsh and found Elias on the sorrel, and the smile changed, became a
different and more honest thing. "And you've brought the map-maker. Well.
Careful he don't guide you somewhere historical, son. It's his one talent."
"Mr. Vail," Marsh said, in a voice as flat and official as the clerk's page, "I
am here under orders to inspect a line of steel traps and a hide cache located
on lands reserved to the White Mountain Apache. We have completed the
inspection. The clerk's record is made. You will account for the line, the
cache, and the contents of the cache."
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"Licenses," Vail said promptly. "Territorial licenses, paid and stamped, for
every man in this camp. Trapping's a lawful trade, Lieutenant. Lines drift.
Creeks wander. If your friends at the agency have moved the boundary in a
book somewhere, that's a matter for lawyers, not carbines." He took a drink
of his coffee, unhurried, performing ease the way other men perform
courage. Behind him, in the cabin door, the rest of the crew stood with their
hands in sight, deciding how much they were part of what was coming. Elias
marked them: the Pole, Anton, heavy and silent; Ruiz, who had once been a
soldier and stood like it still; a rangy man called Beckett — and at the end of
the line, a little apart from the others as if the gap were habitual, Will Pruitt.
Pruitt was nineteen and looked fifteen in that light, hollowed out around the
eyes the way a boy gets who has stopped sleeping through the night. He was
not looking at the soldiers. He was looking at Sekan — at the cane and the
bad leg and the upright, unbending way Sekan sat his horse — and
something in the boy's face had been quietly coming apart at the seams the
whole time Marsh and Vail fenced with each other.
"— contents of the cache," Marsh was saying, "including one buffalo robe,
and one beaded knife sheath containing a knife, recovered from your hide
box by the witness Ward, and identified — "
"Planted," Vail said, easy as breathing. "He" — the chin jerked at Elias —
"carried that in hisself, Lieutenant, and I can tell you why, too. He's got a
grief to settle with me, and a history — ask him what he was guiding the last
time he rode point for the United States Army — "
"I have his history," Marsh said. "He signed it himself. It is in the clerk's
book, in front of yours." The clerk, impeccable, lifted the book slightly.
"Yours, Mr. Vail, is what we lack. Account for the knife."
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"It ain't a crime to own a knife — "
"It ain't the knife, Cyrus." It was Anton who said it, heavily, from the
doorway, and then stopped. But the seam had opened, and into it, as into a
crack in creek ice, everything now began to run.
Because Will Pruitt stepped forward out of the line — two steps, onto the
open snow, his hands up and empty in a gesture no one had taught him and
everyone there recognized — and said, in a voice that cracked on the second
word and then steadied into something flatter and more terrible than
shouting: "It was February. It was our set. He was in our set."
"Will." Vail's voice had dropped out of its performance register entirely, into
the register underneath, the one men use on dogs and boys. "Will, you shut
your — "
"I was there the night the boy died," Pruitt said, to Marsh, to the clerk, to the
page that would keep it, talking fast now the way a man talks going downhill,
"and it wasn't ice took him, not the way it's been told. We come down the
line at first light, and he was in the big set at the bend — caught by the leg,
both hands froze to the iron trying to work it, and he was still alive when we
found him. Barely. He was talking some. Not English. I think he was asking.
And Cyrus said a live Apache in our trap was the end of us all, and he held
him under. Not long. He was froze through already. And then he said put him
under the ice proper, where the current takes, and reset the set, and — " His
eyes went to Vail for the first time. "He took the boy's knife off his belt while
I was holding his legs. He kept it in the box with the winter skins. I have seen
it there every time the box got opened, all year. I have not slept right since
February and I am not going to carry it into another winter. Write it down.
My name is Will Pruitt and I am saying it in front of soldiers because nobody
else in this camp is ever going to say it, and the boy had a name, his name
98
was Kes, and his brother is standing right there on a cane from the same iron,
and that's the end of what I know."
The clerk's pencil made the only sound in the camp for a moment, fast and
small. Marsh had gone very still, recalculating what his orders meant. Vail
stood with the tin cup forgotten in his hand, and looked at Pruitt with an