"Last night a coyote answered you. I thought it was your brother."
Silas considered this. "If a coyote ever answers you back, Dokan, I don't
want to know what you said to it."
"It asked about the cards," Dokan said. "I told it you cheat."
They rode east laughing, and for a little while the weight of what they were
riding toward sat lighter on both of them.
The survey camp lay in a box canyon two days east, exactly where Quill's
careful directions had said it would be β the land office clerk had drawn
them a map on the back of a filing form, his hand shaking only a little, and
made them swear they'd never had it. They reached the canyon rim at dusk
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on the second day and bellied down in the juniper to study what waited
below.
Dokan studied the camp for a long time without moving, and Silas β who
had learned patience hauling freight through country that punished hurry β
waited.
"Seven men," Dokan said at last, barely breathing the words. "The big tent is
the surveyor's. The two by the fire are the watch, but they watch the fire, not
the dark. The cook sleeps in the cook tent. The others are in the crew tent." A
pause. "The dog sleeps by the fire. It will wake for me."
"Can you get past it?"
"I will not get past it. I will become uninteresting to it."
Silas remembered Saya's instructions then, her hands demonstrating on the
table back at the cabin: shade the edges so the paper lies flat, press light or
the charcoal tears through, number each sheet in the corner so the order
holds. He touched the folded paper in his shirt and found his mouth dry.
Forty-two years old, and his hands were shaking like a boy's on his first
freight run.
They waited for full dark. When the cookfire burned low and the camp
settled into snores, Dokan moved first β a shadow detaching from shadow,
circling wide to come at the camp from downwind. Silas gave him ten
minutes, then followed, keeping to the canyon wall where the rock would
hide his shape.
The hound lifted its head when Dokan was twenty yards out. Dokan stopped.
From his pouch he drew a scrap of the venison, tossed it underhand so it
landed soft near the dog's nose, and made a small sound in his throat β low,
unthreatening, almost a hum. The hound sniffed the meat, sniffed the air,
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looked directly at the place where Dokan was not quite visible, and then β
with the profound pragmatism of its species β ate the venison and laid its
chin back down.
Silas let out a breath he hadn't known he was holding and slipped toward
Pell's tent.
Inside, the air was close with lamp oil and paper. Pell lay on his cot fully
dressed, boots off, mouth open, one arm flung across his eyes. On the camp
table beside the lantern stood a framed tintype: Pell younger and thinner, an
unsmiling woman, two small children in stiff collars. Silas looked at it a
moment longer than he meant to. Men with families still chose this. That was
the part he would never understand, and he stopped trying to understand it,
and got to work. Under his pillow β Silas could see the corner of it, red as a
warning flag β sat the notebook.
Silas eased it out with two fingers, the way he'd once eased a rattlesnake out
of a grain sack: slowly, and with complete attention. Pell muttered something
about chain measurements and subsided.
The notebook was bound in red cloth, swollen with folded papers, its pages
filled in Pell's cramped surveyor's hand. Silas shuttered the lantern down to a
needle of light, spread Saya's thin wrapping paper on the camp table, and
picked up the charcoal stick.
A missing book warns them, Saya had said, pressing the paper and charcoal
into his hands that last morning. A copied book convicts them.
Page by page, he worked. A sketched map of the Three Springs country,
parcels marked with dates and claim numbers that matched β he recognized
some of the numbers now β the filings Quill had shown them, Hale's ring
closing around the water like a fist. A ledger page: payments listed in a neat
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column, each initialed A.H. β E., April, paid in full, A.H. A page of names
in a different ink, hurried, as if written fast and late at night: Esteban β
April. Below it: Halloran β woman, two children β May. Below that: Cobb,
peddler β February. Beside each name, a date. Silas felt his jaw tighten as
he copied. Another page, in a different ink, hurried: Esteban β April. Below
it: Halloran β woman, two children β May. Below that: Cobb, peddler β
February. Beside each name, a date. And on the facing page, a column of
payments in Pell's neat hand, each initialed A.H. β sums that would buy a
man's silence for a year, or his soul outright. One entry made Silas's charcoal
stop moving: deputy clerk β $40 β filings delayed. So Hale had owned the
land office too, or enough of it. Quill, the clerk who'd helped them, must
have been the one honest man in that building. No wonder his hand had
shaken.
Near the back, folded small, was a note in a bolder hand than Pell's β a hand
used to giving orders: The springs secured by autumn. No more loose ends.
Silas copied that one twice, pressing hard enough to tear the paper on the
second pass, and had to start the sheet over with steadier hands, numbering
the corner the way Saya had taught him.
He knew, from Felipe's broken telling and Quill's frightened one, what those
dates meant. People had gone looking for Esteban in April. The Halloran
wagon had been found empty in May.
His hand was cramping and the charcoal was half gone when the cot creaked.