Chapter 7 #3
"Not one," Stuart said. "Count it. They took a dying man off our flat and they fixed him and they sent him back warm on a sledge with a coat we could not have bought in this valley for a year's flour. If they wanted this town they have had two weeks and a hundred and eleven chances."
Old Hal Brewer said, from the back, "And the rider."
Stuart turned around.
"The rider," he said.
"There was a man on our north bench with a ledger for eleven days and he ran north out of that gap at a gallop," Hal said. "Was that them too?"
"No," Stuart said slowly. "No, I do not believe it was."
"Then how many parties are in this valley."
"Two," Stuart said. "One on each side of us. And one of them has been counting us for a book and one of them has been sitting in the brush not coming in, and I have been treating them as one thing for five days and they are not."
Davey stood up.
"Then I am going to say the thing I have been sitting on since this morning," he said, "and nobody is going to like it."
"Go on."
"Somebody has to go south."
The Hall was quiet.
"A mile and a half," Davey said. "Out to that fire. And they have to go out in daylight in the open with their hands empty where everybody can see them, because that is the only way anybody has ever gotten anything out of anybody in this whole business,
and because they have had two weeks to do us harm and have not."
"I'll go," Stuart said.
"I know you will. That is why I am putting it to the room and not to you."
They argued it for two hours and it went the way Stuart knew it would go, and at one o'clock Davey wrote out the decision and read it back twice.
Two people. Out at first light on the seventeenth. Hands empty, no long guns, a white cloth on a pole because it was the oldest thing in the world and it still worked. Camille on the south fence with the Lebel at four hundred yards and orders she did not like.
Stuart, and one other.
"Who," said Davey.
And a voice from the wall by the door said, "Me."
Everybody turned around.
Kestrel was sitting up on the table with his wrapped hands in his lap.
"You cannot walk," Maddie said.
"I cannot walk a mile and a half," Kestrel agreed. "I can be pulled a mile and a half on the sledge they sent me back on, by the dog that pulled me here, and I will tell you exactly why you want me out there."
"Why."
"Because they have seen me," he said. "Because I am the only thing in this valley that they have already decided not to kill."
At first light on the seventeenth the wind came.
It came at about four in the morning after fifteen days of dead air, and it came out of the southwest, and it was warm.
Stuart woke to the sound of water coming off the eaves and lay in the dark and listened to it and understood in about four seconds what it meant.
The crust was going.
He was at the south gate at six with a pole and a bedsheet and a young man on a sledge and an old gray dog in a collar, and the whole town behind the fence, and the snow underfoot had gone from a floor to a thing that broke.
They went out at twenty past.
It took them ninety minutes to do a mile because the sledge cut in and Stuart had to haul on the rope with his good shoulder and stop every two hundred yards, and the old dog worked the whole way and did not complain and did not need telling.
At a mile and a quarter they came up onto the little rise above the creek brush and saw the camp.
Stuart stopped dead.
There was no camp.
There was a place where a camp had been.
There was a fire pit dug out and the ash carried off and a place where a tent had stood, and the four holes where the pegs had been were full of meltwater, and there were the prints of a great many feet and the tracks of dogs and the runners of two sledges going away south.
They had gone in the night.
Stuart stood on the rise in the warm wind with a bedsheet on a pole in his hand and felt something turn over in his chest that he did not have a name for.
"They knew we were coming," Kestrel said.
"They knew we were coming yesterday at noon," Stuart said. "They have been reading this town like a page since December."
He went down into it anyway, because there was nothing else to do, and walked the whole of it twice the way Camille had taught him, and on the third pass he found the thing they had left.
It was in the fire pit, in the cold ash, on a flat stone, weighted down with a second stone.
A folded paper.
Stuart stood over it for a long moment with the meltwater running under his boots and the wind taking the sheet on the pole, and then he crouched down and picked it up and unfolded it.
It was a page torn out of a big canvas backed ledger.
It had a nail hole in the top of it.
And it was the page of towns, the one Davey had read out loud to seventy people in the long room on the twelfth, Cottonwood and Reubens and Greer and Kamiah and Vinegar Hill, except this was the original and not the copy.
The crossing south of the Camas. Fifty-three. Correction, eighty-seven.
And beside it, where there had been no word at all, somebody had written one in fresh pencil in the last two weeks.
Weighed.