expression Elias had seen once before, on a quartermaster's face at Salt Creek
in the hour after, when the accounts of a thing stop balancing and a man sees
the true figure for the first time.
"You goddamn boy," Vail said, almost conversationally. "You soft-headed,
ungrateful — I fed you. I took you off a freight wagon with nothing — "
"Mr. Vail," Marsh said. "You are under arrest."
And Vail threw the cup at Marsh's horse's face and ran.
He had a horse ready — a man like Vail keeps a saddled horse the way other
men keep a loaded pistol, from a lifetime's understanding that the last
argument is always departure. The big chestnut stood tied at the corral's far
side with the reins looped loose, and Vail went over the rails in a scramble
that was ugly and fast, a trooper's carbine coming up and Marsh's hand
coming down across its barrel in the same motion — "Alive, damn you, the
book needs him alive!" — and then Vail was on and gone, through the fence
gap and up the bank into the black timber.
Elias did not ride in the chase. He sat the sorrel in the open snow with the
bandage pulling at his ribs and watched Marsh take six men up the bank at a
run — and found that he was not sorry to be left out of it. His part in the
day's work was the guiding and the naming, and it was done. He listened to
the chase go away through the timber like weather departing: the chestnut's
big stride, the Army horses behind, a long crashing through brush where Vail
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had cut down toward the creek — the creek, because the creek was his road,
had always been his road, and he knew every crossing the way a spider
knows its web — and then, sharply, a horse screaming.
It was Vail's horse, and it was not screaming about a bullet. Elias knew
before Sekan said it beside him, quiet as a man confirming a sum: "The line.
He has run onto his own line."
The chestnut had faltered at the creek crossing where the ice broke under it
— gone through to the belly in black water, throwing Vail onto the far bank,
alive and scrambling, hat gone, running afoot into the poplar thicket between
the creek and the open meadow, running the ground he knew better than any
man living. And at the edge of the thicket his own line had one more set the
patrol had not walked because it lay beyond the fork — an orphan set, baited
before the last storm and never tended: the great jaw trap bedded down in the
leaves where deer came down to the creek at dusk.
It took him above the ankle, through the boot, with a sound like a book
slammed shut, if a book could be made of iron and grudge. They said his
scream changed key when he understood what had hold of him — the first
scream was pain, and under it a second thing, a man reading his own name in
the clerk's book at last. He went down fighting the chain, clawing at the
anchor log, dragging the whole apparatus a body's length through the snow
before the chain fetched up, still trying to tear his own leg out of his own iron
rather than be found in it when Marsh's men came down off the bank.
It took four of them and the lever from the groundsheet kit and the strongest
trooper sitting his full weight on the spring. Vail cursed them in two
languages and begged them in one, and when the jaws ground open and the
leg came free ruined and bloodied, he wept — not softly, but with the open,
raging grief of a man whose whole philosophy has just closed on his own
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ankle. They bound the leg with a torn shirt and put the irons on his wrists
while he was still screaming that the trap was planted, that the book was lies
— and the clerk looked down at the trap where it lay sprung in the torn snow
and said, in his thin young voice: "That one isn't in my record yet. It is now."
And he knelt, right there, in his good agency trousers, and opened the book
on his knee in the falling light, and wrote it down.
They brought Vail back through his own camp on a litter made of a cabin
door, past his crew sitting bound in the snow under guard — all but one, who
sat apart with a trooper beside him not as a guard but as a witness's escort.
Pruitt watched Vail carried out in irons with his leg bound in a shirt, and
whatever the boy's face did then, Elias was glad not to have to carry the
memory of it. He had enough faces.
Sekan rode up beside the sorrel as the column re-formed in the dusk. The
cane was slung. The bad leg hung stiff. He looked at the litter, and at the
bound men, and at the boy sitting apart, and was silent a long moment.
"From your mouth, you said," Sekan said at last. "An accounting. With
soldiers standing there to hear it in their own language. The boy did my
accounting for me, Elias Ward. A white boy, with his hands up, in the open
snow." He shook his head slowly. "I did not know the world had that in it."
"The knife is in your father's lodge," Elias said. "That's the ground it ends on.
The rest is paper, and paper travels."