Chapter 5 The Road to Granite Pass
The second robbery happened on the morning of the fifth day, and this time it was not Mercy's carpetbag.
It was the payroll wagon from the Granite Pass mining operation, which ran the road between Pinecrest and the pass every second Friday with enough cash to pay forty-seven miners and which, for reasons that Nathaniel had been arguing about with the mining company's representative for six months, had no armed guard.
The company's position was that the road was too short to require guarding.
Nathaniel's position was that the road being short was exactly why it required guarding, because short meant predictable, and predictable was what robbers preferred.
He had been right and the payroll wagon had been robbed and now three of the same organization's men who had taken Mercy's carpetbag — released from jail pending the circuit judge's arrival, which was a situation he also had opinions about — were on the road to Granite Pass with forty-seven miners' Christmas money, and Nathaniel was in the saddle before his deputy had finished explaining what had happened.
He did not expect, riding past Mrs. Connelly's on his way north, to find Mercy Alcott standing outside it with her carpetbag and a look of assessment.
He pulled Absalom up.
"What are you doing?" he said.
"Going to the Caldwell ranch," she said. "I have a fitting this morning."
"The road north goes through the valley where the payroll wagon was robbed," he said. "You're not going anywhere on that road today."
She looked at him with the look he was beginning to understand was her version of patience — not passive patience, not the waiting of someone who had no opinion, but the patient attention of someone who was receiving information and processing it before responding.
"The Caldwell ranch is south," she said.
He had been looking north. He looked south. The road to the Caldwell ranch went south. The robbery had been north.
"Go south," he said. "Stay on the main road."
"I was planning to," she said pleasantly.
He looked at her. She looked at him. Something in the exchange had the quality of the previous exchanges — the particular charge of two people who have not yet determined what they are to each other but have determined that they are something.
"There may be other activity today," he said. "The group is moving. If anything seems wrong on the south road, turn back to Pinecrest."
"All right," she said.
He waited.
"Sheriff," she said, "you should go. The payroll wagon is getting further away."
He turned Absalom north and rode, and he did not look back, and he thought about the road south and whether it was clear and he told himself this was professional concern for a member of the public and not anything else, and he had believed harder things in his time and this was not one of his more successful attempts.
* * *
He found the payroll wagon's robbers by mid-afternoon, which was faster than he had expected and spoke well of the snowfall that had started at noon and tracked them.
The recovery was straightforward by his standards.
Two men were persuaded by the presence of the sheriff and his rifle to reconsider their career choices on the spot.
The third required slightly more persuasion of the physical kind, which Nathaniel delivered with the focused efficiency of a man who found violence distasteful and therefore did not prolong it.
The payroll was recovered intact. The miners' Christmas money was, by evening, back on the wagon and heading to Granite Pass under the escort it should have had in the first place.
He was back in Pinecrest by seven.
He told himself he was not looking for the light in the window of Mrs. Connelly's boarding house as he rode past.
He saw it anyway.
He continued to the jail and saw to his prisoners and then to the stable and saw to Absalom and then to his office, where there was paperwork and a cold stove and the particular kind of tiredness that was not only physical but the tiredness of a man who had been doing this for twenty years and had not taken a proper meal since breakfast.
His deputy, a young man named Foster who had the earnest quality of someone who had not yet been disappointed by enough things to stop expecting the best, had left supper on the desk.
Cold now, but there. Nathaniel looked at it and thought, not for the first time, that Foster was going to be all right.
He ate. He did the paperwork. He banked the stove. He put on his coat.
He walked past Mrs. Connelly's boarding house on his way home, which was not on his way home. Mrs. Connelly's was on the other side of the main street from his house, but the main street was only a hundred feet wide and the detour was approximately thirty seconds.
The light was still in the window. He did not stop. He looked at the light and walked past it and went home.
In his house — three rooms, plain, scrupulously clean, the house of a man who had decided that the material requirements of a solitary life were modest and should remain so — he sat at the kitchen table and drank the coffee that was always cold by the time he reached it because he had a habit of putting it on and then doing something else and returning to find it cold, which was a metaphor he did not examine.
He thought about Mercy Alcott, which was not unusual.
He had been thinking about Mercy Alcott at intervals since the moment on the road when he had found her sitting on a fallen log reading her Bible with the serenity of someone who had been placed there by the weather for the specific purpose of being found by him.
He did not believe in specific purposes anymore. He had stopped believing in them at Gettysburg, along with several other things that had turned out to cost more than he could afford to maintain.
But he thought about her anyway. He thought about the precise description she had given him of the robbery, and the absence of dramatics, and the remark about most situations being less dire than they appear if you wait a moment before deciding what to think of them.
He thought about none of your business being a thing she said to herself rather than to other people, which suggested she had a clear-eyed awareness of the limits of her legitimate concern and applied it to herself.
He thought about the light in the window.
He went to bed.
* * *
The next morning she was in the street at eight.
He had not planned his morning walk to coincide with this, which was technically true because he had not made any explicit plan. He had simply walked the street at the time he always walked it, and she had simply been there at the time she had been there for the previous four mornings.
"The payroll was recovered," he said.
"I heard," she said. "Mrs. Connelly's nephew works at the Granite Pass mine. He came in last night. Everyone at supper knew by seven."
"News travels," he said.
"Everywhere," she said. "Small towns, large cities. The speed varies but the destination is the same."
He looked at her. She was wearing a dark wool coat and a scarf the color of pine needles and the plain hat that the wind was again making its best effort against, and she looked entirely comfortable in the cold morning as though the cold morning were simply the current condition and conditions were things you inhabited rather than endured.
"The group is broken up," he said. "The road is clear. You can travel safely."
"Good," she said. "I have a fitting today and a second curtain to hang and Clara Caldwell will want to discuss the lining options for the dress, which will take some time because she has opinions."
"She does," he agreed.
Something moved in the air between them that was not the wind. It had the specific quality of a thing that had been building for five days and had arrived at a point where it required either acknowledgment or the kind of deliberate non-acknowledgment that was its own acknowledgment.
He made a decision. It was a small decision in the context of his life and enormous in the context of the previous twenty years.
"If you have time this evening," he said, "there's a decent meal at the hotel. Better than Mrs. Connelly's. I could—" He stopped. He was not a man who trailed off. He completed his sentences. He tried again. "I would like to have supper with you. If you're available."
She looked at him. The directness of the look was unchanged — she looked at him the same way she looked at everything, with the complete attention, without management. But there was something in the quality of it that was different from the professional version.
"Yes," she said. "I'm available."
"Seven," he said.
"Seven," she agreed.
He walked north. She walked south toward the livery. The street was empty in the eight-in-the-morning way, the buildings doing their daily work of being buildings, the mountains behind everything doing their daily work of being enormous and patient.
Nathaniel Horne walked to the north end of the street and turned around and walked back and thought: I am going to have supper with a woman I have known for five days who carries a Bible in her carpetbag and argues with robbers about the division of the contents and makes me say things I did not plan to say.
He thought: I have no idea what I am doing.
He thought: that is new.