Chapter 12
Most nodded back, or did something near enough to it, with the particular look a small town gives a stranger before it has made up its mind about him. A door cracked just the width of a face, to see who’d come up the walk before deciding whether to open it the rest of the way or shut it.
A few didn’t trouble themselves even with that much.
A heavy man outside the feed store watched Abe the whole length of the storefront and worked something slow around his back teeth and never changed his expression.
Two men on the steps of the hardware let their talk fall off as he came even with them and didn’t take it back up until he was a good ten paces past, and he felt their quiet on his back like a hand laid flat between his shoulders.
He kept on, easy, and gave no sign of feeling any of it.
The sheriff stepped out into the middle of the dirt street.
He was a broad man, not tall, built low and heavy through the middle, with a star pinned crooked to his vest and a gut that said the star hadn’t cost him a great deal of running in the years he’d worn it.
He set himself square in the center of the road in Abe’s path, planted, with the comfortable ease of a man who had done exactly this many times before and found that it generally answered.
“Morning,” the sheriff said.
“Morning.” Abe stopped two paces off. He let his hands hang easy and kept his face the way it was, open and unbothered.
“Don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure. Here in Colinas Rojas.”
“First time I’ve come up this way.”
“Passing through it, or stopping in it.”
“I’ve got a little business with your mayor,” Abe said. “Shouldn’t take me long to see to.”
The sheriff looked him up and down, taking his unhurried time about it, a man who had decided some years back that hurry was a thing for other men to do. “What kind of business would that be.”
“The kind that’s between me and the mayor, mostly.” Abe said it pleasant, easy, with not one thing under it for a man to take hold of. “But I’ll be sure and tell him you took an interest, if you’d like that passed along.”
The sheriff’s eyes went down him and back up, as though weighing whether the situation in front of him was going to call for more than standing in a road and talking. The pistol on Abe’s hip got a look. Then the face. Then the trail-worn coat. Then the face again, longer.
“We don’t get a whole lot of foreigners come through here,” the sheriff said.
“So I’ve been given to understand, since I rode in.”
“Folks in this town like to know who’s walking around in it, and what he’s about while he does it. They like things kept orderly. It’s a quiet town and they aim to keep it one.”
“That all sounds reasonable to me,” Abe said. “A man likes a quiet town. I’m about my business with the mayor, like I said, and the moment it’s seen to I’ll be back down that road and out of your quiet town, and you’ll not have to give me another thought.”
He touched his hat, one polite economical motion, and stepped around the planted bulk of the man and went on up the street.
He felt the eyes ride his back a half block, heavy, and then they came off, and he never once turned his head to check whether they had.
***
Nash’s house stood at the north end of the main street, set well back off the road behind a painted fence, two full stories of it, the best-built structure in the town by enough of a margin to say a great deal about whichever man had raised it or come into the having of it.
A kept garden across the front, watered and weeded in a country where water was dear.
A stable off to the right hand of it, larger than any one household’s horses could account for, its big doors shut against the morning.
A hand pump at the near corner of the house, the fittings on it new and bright, the kind of hardware a man had to send away east for and pay the freight on.
Abe took in the stable, and took in the size of it, and filed the both of them, and went up the walk and knocked at the front door.
The woman who opened it was small and trim and dark-haired, somewhere in her forties, with the composed and ready look of a woman who ran a large house and a difficult husband and had found, somewhere along the years, a way to make the carrying of both look like no weight at all.
She read him off the step quick and sure, the way she’d plainly read a long line of men off it before him, and her eyes did a thing the sheriff’s hadn’t, traveling him not for the threat in him but for something else, and coming to rest on his face.
A small thing stirred up in her and got smoothed flat and put away before it had finished surfacing.
“Good morning,” she said.
“Good morning to you, ma’am. I’m hoping to find Mayor Nash at home. I’d a little business I was wanting to lay before him.”
“I’m afraid the mayor’s away from the house just now.” She held the door at an angle that was perfectly courteous and gave nothing at all through the gap of it. “I expect him back inside an hour, perhaps two. Is it something I might see to in his place?”
“I’ll wait on him, if it’s no trouble to you and yours.”
She considered that a moment, the wait and what it might mean. “I can tell him you called, and spare you the standing about. May I have your name to give him?”
“Abraham Auer.” He watched her face with care as he laid it down in front of her, the whole weight of his attention on it behind the easy set of his own. Nothing crossed it.
The name landed on the woman the way rain lands on a tin roof and ran straight off and left no mark of having fallen. The name meant not one thing to her. “I’ll not put you out by asking to wait inside. I’ll keep close by, on the road there, and watch for him.”
She held on his eyes one beat past what the moment called for. “I’ll tell him you came by, Mr. Auer.”
“I’m obliged to you, Mrs. Nash.”
He touched his hat to her and turned and went back down the walk to the road, and felt her watching him go.
***
At the fence he stopped a moment, the way an idle man stops, and looked the stable over.
The doors stood shut and the hasp on them carried a padlock, which was not how a man arranges a building he keeps his horses in and goes in and out of a dozen times across a day.
And a fellow leaned against the wall by the doors, smoking a pipe, doing nothing and going nowhere and showing no intention of doing or going.
Abe looked at the man and the man looked back at him, flat, and neither of them said a word or moved a hand, and after a moment Abe turned and walked on south along the line of the fence toward the open field behind the property, keeping to the same unhurried gait he’d worn coming up the main street, a man with somewhere to be who’d elected to take the long way around to get to it and see the country while he did.
He came around the far side of the stable, out of the pipe-smoker’s line of sight, and stopped.
The padlock on the side door was newer than the one hung on the big front doors, and better made, heavier, a town-bought lock on a country building. The kind of lock a man hangs when it’s the contents he’s minding and not the appearance of minding them.
He laid his ear flat against the dry boards of the wall and held still and breathed slow and listened with his whole body.
No horse. No smell of horse, no shift of a big animal’s weight, no slow grinding of teeth on hay in the dark inside. Something else under the smell of the dry sun-cured wood. The cold mineral edge of oiled metal, a great deal of it, more than a household’s worth of guns.
And beneath that, fainter, a thing he knew from another country and another year of his life and had no wish at all to stand this close to, the dense oily sweetness of a quantity of powder kept dry against its use.
He straightened off the wall.
He walked back to the fence line and then south past it into the open field and on across the field into the scrub at its far edge, a good two hundred yards out from the stable, where a stand of post oak made a screen against the morning sun.
He found a fork in the largest of them that would hold his weight, and he went up into it without hurry and got himself settled with his back against the trunk and a clear sightline back across the field to the stable, and he waited.
He wanted to see who came when it went up. How they came, and how fast, and from which directions, and what they did and what they didn’t do, and most of all who among them was missing from the dooryard of a burning building they ought by rights to come running to.
He had matches and he had time and he had a good seat in the tree, and he settled in to use all three.
***
He heard it before he felt it and felt it before the eye could make sense of it, the low flat shove of pressure against the chest that was not rightly a sound at all.
It was the thing dynamite does in the half instant when it has discovered its space is too small for it and set about, all at once and with great violence, the business of making a larger one.
The big front doors of the stable came off their hinges and went flat. The near side wall stood a heartbeat and then bowed outward and let go in a spray of boards, and the smoke came pouring through the new gaps in thin gray ropes.
And then the second charge took, the stacked cartridges he’d smelled going off in a long ragged rolling string of cracks and whines that for all the world sounded like a gunfight in which nobody had the upper hand and nobody meant to quit.
Abe watched it from the fork of the oak, two hundred yards off and screened in the leaves, and felt the heat of it reach him even at the distance.
He’d cut the fuse for eight minutes, which had given him just the time to walk back across the field unhurried and climb the tree and find his seat in it before it went. He had not meant to set a fire. He’d meant a clean blast and a wrecked building and the contents ruined.