Chapter 3 #2
She had it for about four seconds, a rider coming across an open crusted field in the light of a burning lamp at eighty yards, broadside, no wind for eleven days, and Camille Aubert had made harder shots than that three times in her life.
She did not take it.
Stuart came up the lane with his hip screaming and found her getting up off the rail with the rifle in the crook of her arm and the horse already a shape going into the timber half a mile out.
"Camille."
"I know."
"You had him."
"I had him for four seconds," she said. "Do not tell me what I had. I know what I had better than you do."
"Then why."
She turned around.
"Because he is the only thing in this valley that knows where the other one is," Camille said, "and because a dead man on a crust at eighty yards tells you nothing at all, and because Stuart,
I did not know for one single second of those four whether that was a man from a place or a boy from Vinegar Hill on somebody's horse."
Stuart stood in the snow.
"That's the right answer," he said.
"It is not the right answer. It is the answer I chose and I am going to have to sit with it, and if that man comes back over that field in March with eleven other men I will have to sit with it then too."
She snapped the bolt closed on a round she had never fired.
"Do not comfort me about it. I hate it."
The town was in the lane.
Forty, fifty people, half of them in blankets, and Davey coming down the middle of it barefoot in the snow with a lever gun and his shirt not buttoned, and Maddie standing on the Hall step with her arms out like a woman holding back water.
"Nobody in that Hall!" she was shouting. "Nobody in that Hall, there is a man on that table and the first person who comes through that door and lets the cold in is going to answer to me for the rest of his life!"
Davey got to Stuart.
"What."
"One rider. Sacking on the hooves. He's gone north into the timber and he will be over the bench by first light and there is not one thing we can do about it tonight."
"North?"
"North," Stuart said, and heard the problem in his own mouth as he said it.
Davey heard it too.
"The boy came from the north."
"The boy came from the north."
"And you told me the place is south."
"I told you what he told me," Stuart said. "South and east, eleven or twelve days. And the man who has been walking behind him for nineteen days just went north out of my town at a gallop, and I have got no explanation for you at all, and I want that written down the same as everything else."
Davey looked at him for a moment.
"Sorenson rang four," he said.
"Sorenson did exactly right."
"Stuart."
"He did exactly right," Stuart said, loud enough for the lane.
"I want that said out here where people can hear it. There was a man in the open in the middle of the night and a light in his hand and Sorenson could not see one thing else from that platform, and he rang the bell he is supposed to ring.
If he had held it and that had gone the other way you would be burying somebody in the morning."
Sorenson was standing at the bottom of the platform ladder with his face the color of the snow.
"I cost you him," he said.
"You cost me a man on a horse."
"You had him and I rang a bell."
"I did not have him," Stuart said. "Let me tell you what I had. I had a lamp, and a bad hip, and eleven feet, and no gun, and about four seconds. I had nothing. What I had was a plan that was going to work at about two chances in ten and you took it down to zero,
and I want you to hear the second half of that sentence and not the first."
"That is not making me feel better."
"It is not meant to make you feel better," Stuart said. "It is meant to be true. Go get warm. You have got a hand shaking and it has been out here twenty minutes in a shirt."
They found the horse's line in the morning.
It came down off the bench on the east side and crossed the ditch and came into the town through the gap, and it had come in at a walk on sacking and gone out at a gallop, and it had gone out north, and it had kept going north,
and Stuart and Camille and two others followed it four miles into the timber and lost it on a shelf of blown rock where there had never been snow to hold anything.
But there was a camp.
It was a mile and a half out on the bench and they found it because Juno found it, and it had been there eleven days.
Stuart stood in the middle of it and felt something crawl up the back of his neck.
"Eleven days," Camille said.
"Eleven days."
"He has been sitting here since before the boy came in."
"Before."
"Stuart." She crouched by the fire pit. "This has been used and cleaned four times. Four separate fires, and each one dug out and the ash carried off, and look at the pit. It is under the rock and it is under the overhang and he burned dry fir and he burned it small."
"So nobody in that valley saw one wisp."
"Nobody in that valley saw one wisp."
Stuart turned all the way around.
It was a good camp. It was the best camp he had ever seen, and he had seen a great many, and every single thing in it had been done by a man who was not in a hurry and did not expect to be found.
And from the lip of it, standing where the man had stood, you could see the whole of the Crossing.
Twenty-six chimneys. The Hall. The gate. Shawna Hennefresy's lamp in the window at the end of the lane, which had been burning every night since June.
"He was not following the boy," Stuart said.
Camille looked up.
"He was here first," Stuart said. "Say it out loud, because I need to hear somebody else say it."
"He was here first."
"He was on this bench before that boy ever came out of the north, watching this town, with a big ledger on his saddle, and the boy walked nineteen days and came in through a field and led him nothing, because he was already here."
"Then what was he doing."
"Counting us," Stuart said.
They went back down at noon in the still gray hours and Stuart did not say a word for the whole four miles.
There was a meeting that night and it was not the meeting.
Davey called it a report and made a point of the word, and stood at the head of the long table and gave the town exactly what had happened, in order, with nothing added and nothing shaved.
He said that a man had come in off a field on the ninth.
He said the man had asked for Stuart Redman by name.
He said that a rider had come down the lane at two in the morning on the tenth and had been driven off and had gone north, and that a camp had been found on the bench that had been in use for eleven days, and that the camp predated the man on the table.
And then he said the other thing, because he had told Stuart at four o'clock in the afternoon that he was going to say it and that Stuart was not going to talk him out of it.
"The man in that Hall came off the Kiln," Davey said.
Seventy-odd people in a long room and not one sound.