Chapter 12
Nobody moved on that trail for a long moment.
The bell came down the wind a third time, six and six, and then it stopped, and the sound of it went out of the breaks slowly the way sound does in cold air, and then there was nothing at all but fourteen people standing in a draw with two handcarts and nine hundred pounds of powder.
"Everybody sit down," Stuart said.
"Sir?"
"Sit down. Right where you are. Ames, get the chocks under those wheels first and then sit down."
They sat down.
He did it because he had watched himself stand up on a bench at eleven at night eight days ago and make a decision inside four minutes that turned out to be wrong, and he had promised himself on the Greer grade that he would never do it again,
and this was the first time the promise had cost him anything.
"Nobody says a word for two minutes," he said.
They gave him two minutes.
Then he said, "Josiah. Kestrel. One at a time and do not help each other. Josiah first, because he has been out of that place eleven days and you have been out of it seven weeks."
Josiah Tarp had his hands between his knees.
"Say what the bell is."
"It is the yard bell on the scale house," he said. "It has been there since before. It is the one that used to call the shift."
"And six and six."
"Six and six is the muster," Josiah said. "It means every person is out of the wall and down at the mouth and standing in the yard in their rows and the count has come out right."
"How often does that happen."
"Twice a year," Josiah Tarp said. "Spring and fall. It is for the inventory. They bring everybody down and they count them in the yard and they put it in the book and then they walk them back up."
"Twice a year."
"Twice a year in five years, sir. May and October. I have stood in it nine times."
Stuart turned his head.
"Kestrel."
"He is right about all of it," Kestrel said, from the sledge.
"Is it ever rung in February."
"No."
"Not once in five years."
"Not once in five years," Kestrel said, "and I ran the ledger for two of them and I would know, because the muster is the one thing in that whole place that goes in the book in my hand and nobody else's."
"Then what is it."
Kestrel looked up at the ridge line and did not answer for a while.
"It is a departure," he said.
Ames Pruitt said, "Say that in words the rest of us have got."
"They ring six and six when everybody is out of the wall and the numbers are right," Kestrel said. "The reason that only ever happens at a muster is that there is only one other reason to have everybody out of the wall at once, and in five years there has never been one."
"And now there is."
"And now there is."
Pierre Aubert had said nothing at all.
He was sitting on a rock with a dog's head against his knee and he had his hat off, which Stuart had never once seen him do outdoors, and he was looking at the ground.
"Old man."
"I am here."
"You have sat above that mouth with a glass for two years."
"I have."
"Then tell me what a hundred and eleven people standing in a yard at the mouth in February looks like from the top."
Pierre Aubert put his hat back on.
"It looks like the last morning," he said.
The line went quiet.
"Say the whole of it," Stuart said.
"There are three roads out of that mouth," the old man said.
"There is the creek road up to the wall, which is eleven miles and is theirs. There is the old grade east along the breaks, which is a wagon road in July and a river of mud in November and is nothing at all in February. And there is the low road south to the Salmon,
which is the one nobody uses because it goes to a country with nothing in it."
"And?"
"And I have watched that yard for two years and the people from behind the wall come down to it twice a year and go back up," he said.
"I have never once seen them come down and stay down. There is nowhere for a hundred and eleven people to sleep at that mouth. Four bunkhouses that hold twenty, and thirty men of their own already in them, and two of those bunkhouses are ash since the twenty-fifth."
"So they cannot stay."
"They cannot stay one night," Pierre Aubert said. "Not in February. So they are standing in that yard this afternoon for one of two reasons, and I want to say both out loud and I want somebody to argue with me."
"Say them."
"They are about to be walked somewhere," he said, "or they have been brought down to be counted one last time before something is done to the number."
Nell Fairweather said, very quietly, "Cottonwood."
"Cottonwood," the old man agreed.
Iris Wendt said, "What happened at Cottonwood."
"Forty people and eleven chimneys and no roofs and nothing in it," Kestrel said. "No pots. No nails. No bodies. That is what I walked past on the sixth day and I have never been able to make it mean anything good."
"Then it means they walked them somewhere."
"It means somebody walked somewhere," Kestrel said. "Forty went out of Cottonwood and I have counted the stock columns in that ledger four times and the number that came into the Ninemile that summer was thirty-one."
Odile Sorenson said, "Nine."
"Nine," Kestrel said.
Nobody said anything for a while.
Stuart got up.
"All right," he said. "Now I am going to say the thing that everybody here is already thinking, and then we are going to argue about it properly, and nobody is going to be careful with me."
"Say it."
"Two days," Stuart said. "The old man's rock is two days east at the pace of these carts. Whatever is happening in that yard is happening this afternoon. We are not going to get there in time to do one single thing about it."
He looked down the line.
"And the plan we left home with is dead," he said.
"We came out here to close a road in front of a column. There is not going to be a column on that road. If they walk south to the Salmon, we are a hundred miles out of position. If they walk east on the old grade in February they will not get eleven miles and we will be behind them and not in front.
And if they are not walking anywhere at all, then the road does not matter and never did."
Ellery Halloran said, "Then why are we still pushing nine hundred pounds through a draw."
"That is exactly the question," Stuart said, "and I want it asked out loud by a man who has got a town behind him, and I am glad it was you."
They argued for an hour and ten minutes in a draw in the breaks.
It was the best argument Stuart ever heard anybody have and he said so afterward, more than once, and the reason it was good was that not one person in it was arguing for what they wanted.
Iris Wendt spoke first and she spoke against going on.
"I have hauled powder for nine years and I am going to tell you the ugly part of my trade," she said. "The thing about a shot is that it happens once. You get one. You put it where it is going to do the work and you fire it and then it is gone forever and you have got nothing left but a hole."
"So?"
"So we have got one shot and we do not know where the work is," she said. "And I have seen men waste a face because they could not stand to sit on a loaded hole another day, and I will tell you that sitting on it is harder than firing it, and that is why they do it."
Ames Pruitt said, "I want to agree with her and then say something else."
"Go."
"She is entirely right that we do not know where the work is," he said, "and I want to point out that we will not know where the work is by standing in this draw either, and that the closest place to find out is forward."
Cobb Halloran, the east side man with no relation, said, "Then we are going forward because we cannot think of anything else."
"That's a fair way to put it."
"It is a poor reason."
"It is the reason most things get done," Ames said.
Nell Fairweather had not sat down.
"I want to say something and it is going to be ugly," she said.
"Say it."
"I have been nought for four," she said.
"Reubens, and the Salmon place, and Lawyer's Creek, and Winchester. Four towns and two years and I got to every single one of them after, and the reason I got there after is that every single time I stopped somewhere on the way to work out whether I was doing the right thing."
Nobody said anything.
"I am not saying that to make anybody feel bad and I am not saying it about anybody here," Nell said.
"I am saying it because I am the only person in this draw who has done this before and failed at it four times, and I have thought a very great deal about why, and the answer is not that I was slow. I walked fast. The answer is that I kept stopping to be sure."
"And what should you have done."
"Gone," she said. "Every time. Gone and been wrong and gone again. Being wrong four days early is a thing you can walk back from. Being right four days late is Reubens."
Stuart said, "Then you are for pushing on."
"I am for pushing on with the people," Nell Fairweather said, "and I do not care one bit about the carts."
That was the thing that broke it open.
Pierre Aubert lifted his head.
"Say that again."
"I said I do not care about the carts."
"No. The first half."
Nell looked at him.
"I am for pushing on with the people," she said.
The old man got up off his rock.
"Then split it," he said.
Stuart came around.
"Say it."
"You have been standing in this draw for an hour arguing about one party because we have only ever had one party," Pierre Aubert said.
"We are fourteen people and two carts and a sledge and five dogs and we have been moving at the speed of nine hundred pounds of powder on wheels since we left Greer, and the powder can only ever go one place."
"To the rock."
"To the rock. It cannot go to the mouth. It cannot go up a creek. It cannot go anywhere there is not a road, and there is exactly one road it can go on and we know where it is."
He turned around. "So send it there. Send it there with the people who can do something with it and let them go at the speed of the carts, and let everybody else go at the speed of a person."
"To where."