Chapter 11
Stuart counted them a third time and got sixteen, and then he stopped counting and put the glass down.
"That's not a number," he said.
Odile Sorenson was standing at his shoulder with her hands in her sleeves. She was nineteen and she had not said four words since the ditch line.
"I counted eleven."
"You counted eleven and I counted eleven and then I counted nineteen and then I counted sixteen," Stuart said, "and that is because they are not fires."
"Sir?"
"Go and get the old man."
Pierre Aubert came up the bench slowly with a dog at his heel and took the glass and did not use it for a long moment. He looked at the black line with his own eyes first, the way old men who have been outside for four years do, and then he raised the glass.
"Ah," he said.
"Say it."
"They are fires," he said. "They are simply not campfires."
"Then what."
"They are burning what they cannot carry."
Stuart took the glass back and looked again, and now that somebody had put the shape on it he could not unsee it.
They were not spaced like men. They were spaced like buildings.
They came on in a ragged line along about four miles of the breaks and they did not move and they did not go out, and two of them were very large.
"That's the Ninemile."
"That is not the Ninemile," Pierre Aubert said. "The Ninemile is eleven miles up a creek behind a ridge and you cannot see one spark of it from this bench or any other. That is the mouth."
"What's at the mouth."
"Sheds. A loading yard. A mill office and four bunkhouses that they built in the second year for the men who work the low ground."
The old man's voice had gone flat. "There are about thirty people who live at that mouth all year and they are the outer ring and they have never been behind the wall in their lives."
"And he's burning it."
"He is burning it, and he is doing it on the twenty-fifth, which is the day he told a boy with a bedsheet to tell you he was going east."
Pierre Aubert lowered the glass. "Mr. Redman, I have been wrong about a great deal this month and I am about to be wrong out loud again, and I would rather be wrong out loud than quiet."
"Say it."
"He is not going east."
Stuart stood on the bench in the cold and let that land.
"He told a room full of us he was going east on the twenty-fifth."
"He told a boy he was throwing away," the old man said. "And then he lit four miles of the breaks on a clear night where a man on any bench in this country can see it, and he did it on exactly the day he said, and he has given you a thing to look at that you cannot argue with."
"That's a long way to go for a lie."
"It is a very cheap lie," Pierre Aubert said. "Those buildings were going to be abandoned either way. He has spent thirty people's houses to buy a fact, and the fact is that you are standing on this bench at eleven at night believing you have got nine days."
"And I haven't."
"I do not know what you have got," the old man said. "That is the honest answer and it is the worst one. But I have looked at that line twice and there is one thing wrong with it and I want to say it before I lose my nerve about it."
"Go on."
"There is no fire at the mill," he said. "The two big ones are the log deck and the fuel shed. The office is not burning and the bunkhouses are not burning and the scale house is not burning, and a man who is leaving a place burns the roofs first because roofs are what another man uses."
"So he's coming back to it."
"So he is coming back to it, or he never left it," Pierre Aubert said, "and either way there is no wagon road east out of that mouth in February and I have known that for two years and I did not say it four hours ago because I was looking at a fire like everybody else."
Stuart went down the bench and woke the whole camp.
He did it himself, one at a time, quietly, and he had them all in the roofless barn in eleven minutes with one small fire in the corner where the wall still stood, and he told them the whole of it in about ninety seconds and did not soften it.
Then he said, "I am going to ask for opinions and I am going to ask the quietest people first, because I have noticed that I do not do that and it costs me."
He looked at the Sorenson girl.
"You saw it first. What did you think when you saw it."
Odile Sorenson looked at the floor and then made herself look up.
"I thought it was too tidy," she said.
"Say more."
"They were in a line," she said. "When my valley burned in March it was not in a line. It was one and then two more and then the whole middle at once because of the way the wind went, and it was ugly, and you could not tell what was what. That is in a line and it started all at once."
"Who lights four miles of buildings all at once."
"Somebody who set them all first and then walked down the row," she said.
Nobody said anything for a moment.
"That is exactly right," Pierre Aubert said, "and it is a better answer than mine."
Ames Pruitt said, "Then what does it change for us."
"It changes the road," Stuart said.
"How."
"Because we were going east to get in front of a column that is moving a hundred and eleven people over the breaks," Stuart said, "and if there is no column, then everything we have got is wrong. The old man's cut is worthless. Your two hundred pounds is worthless.
We have been building a plan for three days around stopping something on a road and there may not be anything on the road at all."
Nell Fairweather spoke from the dark by the door.
"Then we are not going east," she said.
"We're going to the Greer grade," Stuart said. "That has not changed and it is not going to change, because whatever is true out here, I am not walking a hundred and forty miles with eleven people and no way to close anything."
"That is four days."
"That is three if the crust holds and you said so yourself," Stuart said, "and Greer is the only place on this whole page with the word held beside it and sixty people in it and a game warden. If there is one town in this country that is going to be standing when we get there, it is yours."
Nell Fairweather did not say anything for a moment.
"It was mine," she said.
They made Greer on the twenty-eighth at four in the afternoon.
They came down the grade with the light going and the crust gone soft and every one of them walking the last two miles on rock because the road had thawed out to gravel,
and Nell Fairweather went out ahead at a mile and put her rifle flat down in the road and walked the last six hundred yards with her hands out and her head uncovered so that anybody on the ridge could see what she was.
Nobody shot her.
There was a man on the ridge. There had been a man on that ridge since the second year and there had never once been a day without one, and that was the whole of why Greer said held.
His name was Ellery Halloran and he was fifty-eight and he had been an Idaho Fish and Game warden for twenty-six years and he came down the grade to meet them with a scoped bolt gun across his body and about nine people behind him.
He stopped forty feet out and looked at Nell.
"Girl," he said.
"Mr. Halloran."
"You have been gone two years and two months."
"Yes sir."
"And you have come back with eleven people and five dogs and a man on a sledge."
"Yes sir."
Ellery Halloran looked down the line of them, slowly, the way a man looks at a thing he is going to have to explain to sixty people in about an hour.
Then he said, "Who's the old one."
"Mr. Halloran," Stuart said, and stepped forward. "My name is Stuart Redman and I walk the mail south of the Camas, and before you decide anything about any of us I would like to say one sentence."
"Say it."
"That old man came to your town on the twenty-fourth of February two years ago and told a man named Halloran that there was a party coming with a book, and that man gave him soup and did not believe him, and it has eaten him every day since."
Ellery Halloran did not move for a long moment.
Then he took his hand off the grip of the rifle.
"That was me," he said.
"I know it was."
"He stood in that road right there," Halloran said, and he pointed with his chin without looking, "and he told me the thing about the book and the thing about the word beside the name, and I gave him soup and I gave him a blanket and I watched him walk out of this town,
and eleven days later I heard what happened at Reubens."
"Then you did believe him."
"I believed him about four hours after he left," Ellery Halloran said, "which is the most useless hour of belief a man ever had, and I have been on that ridge every day since and I have never once been able to find him to say so."
He came the rest of the way.
He stopped in front of Pierre Aubert and he did not put his hand out, because that would have been easy and Ellery Halloran was not an easy man.
"I owe you an apology in front of my town," he said. "Not out here. In there, where they can hear it. Will you take it that way?"
"I would rather not have it at all," Pierre Aubert said.
"That is not on offer."
"Then I will take it that way," the old man said.
Greer put them up.
It was a hard little place of sixty people on a bench above the river with a road out the back and a warden on the ridge, and it had been on a page in a book with the word held beside it twice, and it had never once been touched.
They fed eleven people and five dogs without being asked twice.
Stuart stood in the door of a barn at eight at night and watched Josiah Tarp eat his second bowl in a room full of people who did not know what he was yet, and Kestrel on a table by the fire with his wrapped hands, and thought about how thin the whole thing was.
Halloran came and stood beside him.
"You want the shed."
"I want the shed."
"I have had that key on a nail in my house for five years."
"Nell told us."
"Did she tell you what's in it?"
"She said two hundred pounds of something."
Ellery Halloran laughed, once, without any pleasure in it at all.