Chapter 4
Nobody said anything for a long time.
The fire in the Hall had been banked for the night and the lamp on the bench was turned down to a bead, and three men and a book sat in a circle of light about four feet across in a room sixty feet long.
Davey was the one who spoke first, and what he said was not what Stuart expected.
"Fifty-three," he said.
"Yes."
"That was the count in February."
"That was the count in February," Stuart agreed.
"So somebody wrote this town down eleven months ago."
Stuart put both hands on the edge of the bench and held on to it.
He had gotten to the same place about four seconds ahead of Davey and had been waiting there since, hoping somebody would come along and show him the road out of it, and nobody had.
"Somebody wrote this town down before the new people came," he said.
"Before March."
"Before March. Before the Kiln. Before that boy on the table ever heard my name."
Kestrel said, from the table, "Say the year."
"What?"
"The page has got a year on it somewhere. Look at the top."
Davey turned the book toward the lamp and went up the page with his thumb an inch off the paper the way he did with everything he read, and stopped.
He did not say it.
"Davey."
"There's four columns on this page," Davey said. "There's the place, and the number, and the word, and there's a date at the head of each block."
"And?"
"The block this town is in is headed the ninth of February," Davey said. "Year before last."
Stuart sat down on the bench very slowly.
"Two years."
"Two years."
"Somebody has had this valley in a book for two years."
"Somebody has had this valley in a book for two years," Davey said, "and wrote down fifty-three, and wrote nothing beside it, and came back in December of this year and corrected it to eighty-seven."
He closed the book on his own finger and held it there.
"And the correction is right," he said. "That's the part I cannot get past. Eighty-seven is right. It was right on the second of January and it was right this morning and I am the man who counts this town and I am telling you that number is not an estimate."
"He counted chimneys."
"You do not get eighty-seven out of chimneys."
"No," Stuart said. "You don't."
They sat with that.
Camille came in at eleven and looked at the three of them and read the room in about a second and a half and did not ask.
"Show her," Stuart said.
Davey showed her.
She read the page twice and then she went back and read the whole column of places, and her lips moved on the last two, and then she straightened up and said one word in French that Stuart did not need translated and had heard before.
"Vinegar Hill," she said. "Held."
"I saw it."
"Forty-one. Held." She put her finger down on the page and tapped it twice, hard. "That is the correct number, Stuart. That is exactly the number of that town in April."
"I know it."
"Then somebody has been in that valley too."
"Somebody has been in every valley on that page," Stuart said, "and I have walked four of them and I have never once seen a man on a ridge, and I have been walking mail north for two years with my eyes open."
"You would not see this one," Camille said. "I stood in his camp today. I have not seen a camp like that since my father."
Davey put the book down flat on the bench.
"I want to say the thing nobody has said," he said. "There is a word beside every place except this one."
Stuart had been waiting for somebody to notice that.
"Yes."
"Cottonwood is weighed. Reubens is weighed. Greer is held. Kamiah is left. Vinegar Hill is held." Davey looked up. "The crossing south of the Camas, fifty-three, correction eighty-seven. No word."
"No word."
"So we have not been decided."
"We have not been decided," Stuart said, "as of whenever he wrote that, and he wrote the correction in December and he sat on our bench for eleven days after it, and he is deciding right now on a horse somewhere north of here."
Kestrel spoke from the table.
"He is not deciding," he said.
Stuart turned around.
"Say that again."
"He does not decide." The young man's voice was thin and it came out slow and he had to stop twice. "That is not what the book is. The book is for a man to take to somebody else, and the somebody else says the word."
"Then who says the word."
"Ammon says the word," Kestrel said. "That is the whole of the job. The man on the horse rides and looks and counts and writes, and twice a year he brings the book in, and Ammon reads it at a table and says held or weighed or left, and the man writes it down and goes back out."
Camille said, "Then the book should not be here."
"No."
"The book is on your saddle. It is not in this Hall."
"That's a different book," Kestrel said. "That's mine."
Stuart came and stood over him.
"Say the whole of that."
"It's a copy." Kestrel's wrapped hands lay on the blanket where Maddie had put them and he could not lift either one. "I copied that book in October in four nights in a room with a candle, and I got through the places and I did not get through the rest, and then I left."
"You stole a list."
"I copied a list."
"You walked nineteen days in January with a stolen list in your bag."
"Yes," Kestrel said.
"Why."
The young man looked at the ceiling beam for a while.
"Because a list is the only thing in this world that a place like that cannot do without," he said, "and because I could not free anybody and I could not fight nine men and I have got no gun and no horse and a bad chest,
and I sat in that room in October and worked out that there was exactly one thing I could carry out on my back that would hurt them."
"And they know you took it."
"They know somebody took it. They know it four days after I went, because he keeps it in a box and he opens the box on Sundays."
Davey said, quietly, "Then that is why he was not chasing you."
Everyone looked at him.
"Think about it," Davey said. "You have got a man who has copied your list. You do not chase him. Chasing a man in that country is nine days of nothing. What you do is you send your rider to the one place on the list where he is most likely to go,
and you sit on a bench above it and you wait for him to walk in the front door."
Stuart felt the whole thing turn over.
"He was not counting us," he said.
"He was counting us in December," Davey said. "In January he was waiting."
"Waiting for that boy."
"Waiting for that boy. And he got him. He watched him come in off the crust on the ninth and he came down the lane on the tenth to make sure which roof, and you stood in the lane with a lamp and told him."
Stuart put his hand over his mouth.
"I told him," he said.
"You did."
"I stood in the middle of my own lane and said it's this building."
"You did," Davey said. "And I want to say a thing before you go any further down that road, because I can see where you are going and I am not going to let you walk all the way there."
"Say it."
"You had about six seconds and no gun and a bad hip and you made a play to keep a man talking instead of shooting," Davey said.
"It is the same play you made in a cut in April with nine men in front of you, and it worked that time, and everybody in this valley is alive because of it. It did not work last night. That is not the same thing as it being wrong."
"It cost us."
"It cost us a thing we did not have," Davey said. "We were never getting that horse. Camille had four seconds and she let him go and she was right too."
Camille said, "I do not want to be included in this."
"You're included."
"I am not comforted."
"Nobody in this room is comforted," Davey said. "That is not what this is."
They put it to the town on the twelfth.
Davey did it in daylight in the long room with the doors open and the fires down, and he did it with the book on the table in the middle where every person who came in could walk past and look at it, and about sixty of them did.
He read the page out loud.
He read every line of it, and the places, and the numbers, and the words beside the numbers, and then he read the last two lines and stopped.
The crossing south of the Camas. Fifty-three. Correction, eighty-seven.
"That is us," he said. "That is this valley in a stranger's book with two numbers beside it and no word, and the man who carries that book was on our bench for eleven days and is somewhere north of here this morning."
Nobody moved.
"I am not going to tell you what to feel about it," Davey said. "I am going to tell you five things we are going to do, and then I am going to listen for as long as anybody wants to talk, and then we will vote on the five things."
"Say them."
"One. The watch goes to six."
There was a sound in the room.
"Six," Davey said. "Rotated. Day and night. North corner, south gate, the gap, the shed, the cellar line, and one that walks. Everybody over fourteen stands it and I mean everybody,
and I will be standing the four in the morning myself and so will Stuart Redman and so will old Hal Brewer if he can get up the ladder."
"I can get up the ladder," Hal said.
"Two. The gap gets closed. There has been a gap in that north fence since the first year because it is where the cattle used to come through and there are no cattle, and a horse went through it at a gallop night before last and there was not one thing in his way."
"That's a week of work in frozen ground."
"That is a week of work in frozen ground," Davey agreed. "It is going to be done by the fifth day and it is going to be done in the gray hours when the cutting stops, and I will be on the bar myself."
"Three?"
"Three. Nobody goes out alone."
That got the room.
"Nobody," Davey said, over the noise. "Not to the woodlot. Not to the north spring. Not to check a snare line. Two at minimum and both of them told to somebody before they go, and I do not care how many times you have walked that draw by yourself since the second year."
"That is going to cost us half the cutting."