Chapter 3
Juno did not bark.
That was the thing Stuart noticed first and the thing he thought about for a long while afterward, because a dog that barks at a door is a dog that has decided the thing outside is a stranger,
and a dog that gets up silent and puts her nose on the crack and goes rigid has decided something else entirely.
She had done it once before, in a kitchen in June, when a man stood at the edge of a timber line four hundred yards off and did not come across.
"Camille," Stuart said.
She was awake before he finished the word, which was how she had always been, and she came off the wall with the Lebel already in both hands and did not ask one question.
"Where."
"Door."
"The dog says?"
"The dog says."
Camille looked at Juno for two seconds and then she went flat along the wall to the shuttered window on the north side and put her eye to the gap where the shutter did not quite meet the frame.
Stuart put his hand on the table.
"You're not going anywhere," he said to the young man on it.
"That's a joke."
"It wasn't meant as one."
"I would like to point out," Kestrel said, "that I am about to be the only man in this room who cannot run, and I would take it kindly if somebody put something in my hand."
"No."
"Mister Redman."
"No," Stuart said. "And I'll tell you why and it isn't what you think. If this goes bad tonight and there is one gun in this hall and it is in your hands, then tomorrow this town votes on a Kiln man who was armed in its own hall at two in the morning, and it will not matter what you did with it.
Lie there."
Kestrel shut his eyes.
"That's a hard thing to say to a man."
"You said harder to me in a field."
Camille came back off the shutter.
"There is nothing," she said. "There is the lane, there is the snow, there is no track. I can see two hundred feet and the light is bad and the snow is old and hard and I am telling you that a man could cross that lane and not leave me one thing to see."
"Where's the watch?"
"North corner and the gap. Two on, and it is Sorenson's hour, and I heard him ten minutes ago on the boards."
Stuart went to the door and put his hand on the bar and did not lift it.
"Juno," he said.
The dog did not look at him. Her nose was on the crack of the door and her back legs had gone wide and braced and the ruff at her shoulders was standing up in a line all the way down.
"North or south."
She did not move.
"She will not answer you through a door," Camille said. "Nobody can smell through a door. She has something and it is coming under it and she cannot tell you where it is from."
Stuart thought about that.
Then he did a thing that he was not proud of and would not have done in daylight, which was to go down on one knee beside the dog and put his face near the floor and take a breath through his nose at the gap under the door.
Cold. Snow. Woodsmoke.
And under it, faint and perfectly clear once he had it, the smell of a horse.
He stood up.
"There is a horse in this town," he said.
Camille's head came around.
"That is not possible."
"There is a horse in this town, Camille, or there was one in that lane inside the last hour, and I want you to think for about four seconds about what it means that neither one of us has heard it."
"Muffled."
"Sacking on the feet," Stuart said. "Four bags and cord. It's an old thing and it works and I have not thought about it in twenty years."
The Crossing had nine horses.
It had nine and all nine of them had been in the long shed at the south end since the first week of December, because that was what you did with horses in a winter like this one, and every person in the valley knew where every one of them was, and none of them wore sacking.
"Then it is his," Camille said.
"It's his."
"The one behind him."
"The one behind him." Stuart put his back against the door.
"Who has been eleven days on a crust in dead air with a horse, and has been careful enough not to be seen by a town with four on watch, and has come down that lane tonight at two in the morning and stopped near enough to this building for a dog to have him."
"Why stop."
"Because he doesn't know which building," Stuart said.
That was it. He felt it drop into place.
"He's been behind that boy nineteen days and he has watched him walk into a valley with twenty-six chimneys in it and he does not know which roof they put him under, and there is no way to find out from a ridge, and so tonight he came down to look."
Camille's face did something unpleasant.
"He is walking our lane."
"He is walking our lane, and he has got sacking on his horse's feet, and if he finds what he is looking for he is going to go away quiet and come back in the daylight with whatever he has got."
"Then we take him now."
"Yes," Stuart said. "We do."
They did it badly.
Stuart admitted that afterward and admitted it out loud in a room with a lot of people in it, because there was no version of the truth in which it went well, and he had learned a long time ago that the only thing worse than a bad night is a bad night with a story built over the top of it.
The bad part was the bell.
Camille went out the back of the Hall through the wood door and around by the cellar wall, low and fast and silent, and she was gone in about a second and a half and Stuart did not see her again for eleven minutes.
Stuart went out the front.
He did it deliberately and slow and he did it with the lamp, which was the thing he had decided in the four seconds he had to decide anything, because a man in the dark who is looking for a room will look at a light.
He came down the three steps of the Hall with the lamp in his left hand held out from his body and his right hand empty, and he stood in the middle of the lane of his own town in eleven inches of packed snow at two in the morning.
"All right," he said.
His voice went out flat in the dead air and did not come back.
"There's a horse in this lane and I can smell it from forty feet and I am standing here with a lamp and nothing else, and I am going to say the whole of it once so nobody has to guess."
Nothing.
"You have been behind that boy since the Camas. You have followed a man nineteen days and you have not closed on him once, which tells me your orders are to find where he goes and not to kill him, because if it was to kill him you would have done it in the timber on the fourth day."
The smoke of twenty-six chimneys stood straight up over the town behind him.
"So you have found where he goes," Stuart said. "It's this building. I am standing in front of it and I have just told you. That's the whole of your errand and you can have it, and you can turn that horse around and take it south and nobody in this valley will put a hand on you tonight."
Away down the lane, past the third house, something shifted in the snow.
It was not a footstep. It was the sound a horse makes when it changes which leg it is resting, and there is nothing else on this earth that sounds like it, and Stuart Redman had hunted men in four winters and had never in his life been so glad to hear a large animal be bored.
"There you are," he said.
He took one step forward with the lamp.
And that was when Sorenson, up on the north corner, two hundred and forty feet away in the dark, saw a man standing alone in the middle of the lane in front of the Hall holding a light out at arm's length like a fool, and did the thing that any decent man on a watch platform does.
He rang the bell.
Four times.
Men on the road.
The valley came up out of its beds the way a valley does, which is to say all at once and badly, and in nine seconds there were doors banging at the far end of the lane and in fourteen there was a lamp lit in a window and by twenty there were people in the snow.
The horse came out of the dark at a dead run.
Stuart saw it for about a second and a half and it was the strangest thing he had seen in five years, a big dark animal coming up a lane at the gallop and making almost no sound at all, four bags of sacking beating on packed snow, and a man low on the neck of it with his head down.
He went past Stuart at eleven feet.
Stuart had the lamp in his left hand and nothing in his right and his hip had gone, and he did the only thing available to a man in that position, which was to throw the lamp.
It went end over end and burst on the shoulder of the horse.
He did not hit the man. He was not trying to hit the man. What he wanted was the thing he got, which was a bloom of burning oil in the snow and about three quarters of a second of light in the middle of a lane in the middle of the night.
And in that light Stuart saw him.
Not the face. The face was wrapped to the eyes the same way Kestrel's had been, which told Stuart that they had both learned it in the same place.
What he saw was the saddle.
It was a good saddle. Better than good. It had been a working saddle in the old world and it had been kept, oiled and repaired and kept, for five years by somebody who had decided that a saddle was worth the hours, and the near side of it carried a long scabbard with a rifle in it.
And on the cantle, tied down with cord under the man's leg, was a canvas backed book the size of a table.
"Camille!" Stuart shouted.
The horse hit the gap at the north end of the lane where the fence came in, and there was nothing there to stop it, because the Crossing had a gate on the north road and a gate on the south road and the gap was a gap,
and it went through and out into the field on the crust and it did not break through once.
Camille was in the field.
She had gone around the cellar wall and along the back of four houses and had put herself down flat behind the rail with the Lebel on the third rail, eighty yards out, which was the single best piece of work anybody did that night and she never once mentioned it afterward.
She had the shot.