Chapter 13 #2
"Head of the column is the men. Three of them. Then rows one through four. Then two men. Then rows five through seven. Then two men. Then rows eight through ten and the short row. Then four at the back with the cart."
"Where's the book."
"The book walks at the head, always, and it has never once been anywhere else."
"How far is the head from the tail."
"On that road, with a hundred and eleven people, four hundred yards," Kestrel said. "More at the end of the day. By four miles they will be strung to six hundred."
"So the man with the book will be six hundred yards from the back."
"Six hundred yards and around three bends," Kestrel said, "and that is the only piece of luck in this whole business and I want everybody to understand that it is the entire plan."
Josiah Tarp said, "Which row."
"Eight or nine," Kestrel said. "Not ten. Ten is short and gets looked at."
"Why eight."
"Because eight has got the Brantner woman in it and she is fifty-four and she has been walking slowly for a year and nobody looks at row eight anymore." Kestrel stopped. "And because she is the one who will not scream when a man she has not seen in eleven days walks in out of the rocks."
"You're sure."
"I am not sure of one thing in this world," Kestrel said. "But she has got a boy of fourteen in row nine and she has been keeping her mouth shut for five years for him, and a woman like that does not make a noise about anything."
Stuart said, "How does he get in."
"That is the part I cannot do for you," Kestrel said, "because in five years nobody ever tried."
Pierre Aubert had been drawing in the dirt with a stick.
"I can do that part," he said.
They went down off the ridge at eleven.
It took two hours and it was an awful two hours and it was all sidehill, and Camille went with one arm and Stuart went with one hip and Bride Kelsall went behind Kestrel's sledge holding the back of it on the steep parts with both hands and her boots braced.
Pierre Aubert brought them down a fold that was not a trail.
"There is a slide here," he said. "It came off in the second spring and it has never grown over, and from the road you cannot see up it because the angle is wrong, and I have come down it four times."
"You have been in that canyon."
"I have been in that canyon eleven times."
"You never said."
"Nobody ever asked me a question I could answer with it," the old man said. "That is the whole trouble with a man who has been out here alone for two years. I have got a very great deal in my head and no idea which parts of it anybody wants."
They came out at the bottom at ten past one.
The creek road ran east and west forty feet below them at the bottom of the fold, and the narrow place was three hundred yards up to the west, and Stuart Redman lay in a scatter of loose rock and looked at the only road between a wall and a yard for the first time.
It was worse than the old man had made it sound.
Ninety feet of broken face on the north side going up into the light, and the shelf at forty feet with the crack behind it running sixty feet along, and the creek black and open under the south side, and the road between them barely wide enough for a wagon.
"Ames is going to love it," Camille said.
"Ames is going to have a great deal to say about that shelf," Stuart said, "and none of it is going to be about loving it."
They put Josiah Tarp in at a quarter to two.
He went out of the rocks and down the fold and lay in the bottom of it with a blanket over his head that Bride Kelsall had rubbed in ash and creek mud for eleven minutes, and the rest of them went back up forty feet and got down behind the slide rock.
Nobody said goodbye to him.
Stuart had decided that on the ridge and had told everybody and had been right, and the last thing anybody said to Josiah Tarp was Kestrel, from the sledge, who said, "Row eight. The Brantner woman. And do not say my name to anybody but Fenna."
"I know it."
"Say it back."
"Row eight. Brantner. Fenna and nobody else."
"Go on then."
The column came into the narrow at eight minutes past two.
Stuart heard it before he saw it and the sound was the worst thing he had heard in five years, because it was not a sound of suffering at all.
It was the sound of a hundred and eleven people walking on gravel, unhurried, in step with nothing, and somebody near the front was talking in a normal voice about the weather.
The head came through.
Three men, and then a fourth walking alone with a canvas backed ledger under his arm, and Stuart put the glass on him for the first time at forty yards and looked at Mathis Aubert.
He was forty-four and he looked sixty.
He was gray to the skin the way his father was gray to the skin, and he had a good coat and a good hat and he walked with his head down and his eyes on the ground eleven feet in front of him, and he did not look at the rock face once.
Beside Stuart, Pierre Aubert made no sound at all.
The rows came.
They came in elevens and they came slowly and Stuart Redman lay forty feet above them and made himself look at every face, because he had decided on the ridge that if he was going to spend other people's lives on this he was going to know what he had bought.
Row one. Row two.
An old woman in row three being carried on the arm of a girl of about sixteen.
Row four, and a man in it who was carrying a child on his shoulders and had put his hand up over the child's head where the rock came in close, which was a thing a man does without thinking and which nearly took Stuart's legs out from under him.
Two men.
Rows five, six, seven.
Two more men.
And then a gap of about eighty yards, exactly the way Kestrel had said, and then row eight came into the narrow strung out and slow with a woman of fifty-four at the outside of it.
Josiah Tarp came out of the bottom of the fold.
He did it well. Stuart had not expected him to do it well and had spent an hour making his peace with it, and the boy came up out of that ditch with a blanket over his head and got into the road behind row eight and simply walked.
He did not hurry.
He walked eleven feet behind the row for about forty yards and then he came up on the outside and got in beside the Brantner woman, and Stuart watched through the glass and saw the exact moment she knew.
Her head came around about four inches.
That was all. Four inches, and then it came back, and she kept walking, and her hand came out and took hold of the sleeve of the boy beside her and moved him one step in toward the middle of the road.
"Oh," Camille said, very quietly.
"Yes."
"She moved him to the inside."
"She moved him to the inside," Stuart said, "where the men do not walk."
Nobody at the head of that column turned around.
It took the tail eleven minutes to clear the narrow and then it was gone up the road to the west, and the sound of a hundred and eleven people walking on gravel went out of the canyon slowly, and then there was nothing in it at all but the creek.
Bride Kelsall said, "Is that it?"
"That's it," Stuart said.
"That does not feel like anything."
"No," Stuart said. "It never does. That is the whole trouble with it."
He put his forehead down on the back of his hand for a second and then picked it up again.
"Camille."
"Yes."
"Time."
"Twenty-one minutes past two."
"Then we have got until about four o'clock before anybody counts anything," Stuart said, "and we have got to be somewhere else by then, and the somewhere else is a cart coming down a draw two days east of here with eight hundred pounds on it."
They went east at three.
They went along the north side of the canyon on the old man's fold and then up onto the bench, and they made four miles before dark and camped in a fold with no fire and nobody slept much.
At eleven at night Camille shook Stuart awake.
"There is a light."
He went up.
Away west, at the head of the canyon, four miles up, there was a glow on the underside of the overcast that had not been there at dark.
"That's the wall," Pierre Aubert said.
"What is it."
"That is every lamp in that place lit at once."
Stuart watched it for a long time.
"Then the count came out wrong," he said.
"The count came out wrong."
"And they have got them at the gate."
"They have got them at the gate," the old man said, "or they have got them inside and they are doing it again by lamp in the yard, and either way nobody in that valley is asleep tonight and my son is standing in the middle of it with a book."
Camille said, "Is that good or bad."
"I do not know," Pierre Aubert said.
They reached the narrow place on the fifth at noon and the cart was already there.
That was the thing Stuart had not allowed himself to hope for, and he came down the last of the fold and saw two handcarts parked nose to tail under the rock face and six people sitting on the ground eating, and he sat down on a rock and put his hands over his face for about four seconds.
Ames Pruitt came over.
"You are a day early," Stuart said.
"We walked at night on the crust," Ames said. "Iris said the ground would go soft on the sixth and she was right and we would have lost a wheel in it, so we walked from nine until four two nights running."
"How is it."
"It is the best thing I have ever seen in my life," Ames Pruitt said, and he did not smile when he said it.