Chapter 1 #2
"There it is." Charter's voice changed. It did not get louder. It got flatter, and the warmth went out of it like heat out of a rock at sundown. "There it is. Man don't need to ask. Man speaks for her. Because that's what she is to you, ain't it. She's a thing on a shelf."
"You're at my fence," Tom said. "Not in my house. Remember which."
"How old are you, fella?"
"Forty two."
"And her?"
Kindra said, "Thirty two."
"Ten years." Charter put his hat back on and settled it with two fingers, taking his time about it.
"Ten years. I know exactly how that went. I have seen it a hundred times and it went the same hundred ways. You were thirty one and established and she was twenty one and pretty and dumb, and you got her up a mountain where there's no other men to look at,
and now here she stands eleven years later doing your laundry and holding your spare gun."
"Get off my land."
"It's true though, ain't it? Dumb blonde in a dooryard. Didn't know enough at twenty one to run."
Kindra brought the Ruger up.
Not fast. That was the thing Tom would think about later, lying awake. She brought it up slow and level and deliberate, the way you'd raise a lantern to see something better, and she stopped it at the old man's belt buckle and her finger stayed straight along the frame.
"Dumb," she said.
"Ma'am, I only meant."
"You said four women in eight months and three of them were dead." Her voice was perfectly even. "So say what you actually came up this trail to say."
"Now that is not fair."
"You came up the river. You didn't come down the ridge with the fires on it, you came up the river, in the afternoon, calling out loud enough to be heard a quarter mile."
Kindra tilted her head. "A man alone in a country full of people who'd kill him for his boots doesn't announce himself. Unless he's already decided how the next ten minutes go."
Chip Charter stood very still.
His left hand was eleven inches from the butt of the .44 and his right hand was closer than that to the SP101, and Tom saw him notice where his own hands were.
"Mister," Charter said slowly, "your woman is not dumb."
"No," Tom said. "She isn't."
"That is a considerable relief to me, because in about four seconds I was going to have to explain something to you both, and I would rather explain it to somebody who can follow it."
The old man lifted both hands away from his belt, wide and high, and the grin was entirely gone now.
"I didn't come up this river to trade salt."
"Hands stay up," Tom said.
"Hands are up."
"Kindra."
"I've got him."
"I know you do." Tom moved sideways along the fence, out of her line, until he was standing at the old man's right shoulder where the SP101 was. "Reach across with two fingers. Left hand. The little one first."
"The little one's my close work."
"That's why it goes first."
Charter made a sound that was almost a laugh.
He reached across his belly with his left hand, thumb and forefinger only, and lifted the Ruger out by the butt and held it away from his body.
Tom took it. Three inch barrel, five rounds of .357, the bluing worn to gray at the muzzle from a thousand draws.
"Now the cannon."
"You're going to give these back."
"Depends entirely on the next five minutes."
Charter drew the Smith across and out, slow, and Tom took that too, and the weight of it surprised him. Eight and three eighths inches of barrel. Old gun. Somebody's grandfather's gun.
He set both on the chopping block behind him, out of reach of everybody.
"Talk," Tom said.
"Can I put my hands down?"
"No."
"Well, that's going to make this a long story." Charter kept them up. "Ask your question."
"Who's on the ridge?"
The old man's head came around, and for the first time all afternoon he looked genuinely surprised.
"You saw them."
"Six fires. Last night."
"Six." Charter's mouth worked. "Six is new. Two weeks ago it was three."
"Who are they?"
"They call themselves the Yard." He spat into the grass.
"Started at the state prison outside Deer Lodge. Now, I want to be fair, because I have known some men who went to prison and most of them were just unlucky. It ain't the convicts that's the trouble. It's the eleven or so who run it, and what they figured out."
"Which is what?"
"That you don't have to grow a damn thing if somebody else grows it for you."
Charter looked at the garden, the root cellar door, the smoker chimney, the eleven cords stacked in the woodshed, and Tom watched him look.
"They ain't raiders, exactly. Raiders burn a place and move on. These boys did that in the spring and they learned it was stupid, because then there's nothing there next year."
"So what do they do."
"They tax you." Charter said it flat. "They come in, they count what you've got, they take a share, and they tell you what a good little farmer you are and they'll be back at the thaw. Second visit, the share's bigger. Third visit there ain't a share,
there's just them living in your house and you sleeping in the woodshed, if you're any use, and if you ain't any use then you ain't anywhere."
Kindra had not moved. The Ruger had not moved.
"How do you know all this," she said.
"Because I spent nineteen days with them in July."
"Doing what."
"Trapping," Charter said. "They wanted meat and I wanted to not get shot. So I brought them rabbits and I kept my ears open and I ate their beans and on the twentieth day I walked down to the creek to check a set and I just kept walking."
"Why?"
"Because of what was in the barn at the Hendricks place."
Nobody said anything.
Charter's arms were starting to shake, held up that long, and Tom did not tell him to put them down.
"You know what I mean, fella," the old man said quietly. "You know what men like that do with a barn."
Tom knew.
"Put your hands down," he said.
Charter dropped them and shook out his wrists.
"They sent you," Kindra said.
"No."
"You came up the river announcing yourself and asking to sleep in the woodshed, which is nineteen feet from that door bar. You came with salt, which is the one thing every family in this country is out of by September. That's a scout's kit."
"It is exactly a scout's kit," Charter agreed. "It is the kit I built to be a scout, back in August, when I thought I was going to have to go back to them and buy my way in with somebody else's smokehouse."
"And now?"
"And now I have spent five weeks walking this river and finding eleven places and all eleven of them were already empty."
He looked up the bench at the cabin. "Doors open. Gardens dug up. One of them had the laundry still on the line, ma'am, gone gray with weather, and I stood there and I looked at a little girl's dress on a line and I could not make myself go inside that house."
The wind moved through the lodgepole above them.
"Yours is twelve," Charter said. "Yours is the first one in five weeks with smoke coming out of it."
Tom looked at his wife.
Kindra's arm had come down at some point. He had not seen when.
"Why us," Tom said. "Why walk up here at all."
"Because you're the last ones left and because I am sixty one years old and my knees are gone and I cannot winter alone in a wickiup again. I did it last year. I ain't got another one in me."
The old man's jaw set. "I came up here to see if you were worth attaching myself to. If you'd been fools I'd have taken what I could carry and gone. If you'd been cruel I'd have gone anyway. And instead I found a man who made me stop at a fence and a woman who read me in nine seconds,
and I will tell you honestly that is the first hopeful thing that has happened to me since the lights went out."
"So you insulted her."
"I did."
"Why."