Chapter 12 #2
But the dry sun-cured timber of the place had its own ideas about the matter, and the roof was well alight now, the flames standing up orange through the smoke and the whole black column of it going up straight as a plumb line into the dead-still morning air with not a breath of wind to lean it over.
He watched it burn, and more than the burning, he watched the road and the streets that fed it, and he watched to see who came.
The sheriff came first, and he came at a dead run, heavy as he was, which told Abe the man hadn’t been far off when it went, had maybe even been on his way to the stable for reasons of his own.
Three deputies strung out behind him, two of them coming in off the north street and the third in from the direction of the church.
They pulled up short of the building, all of them, at a distance that said they understood about the cartridges cooking off inside it and had no intention of making the morning any worse by playing the hero in front of it.
Then Nash. In from the north on the tall gray, and the gray had not been in that stable, because a gray like that wasn’t the kind of horse a man kept padlocked in the dark with his rifles and his powder.
He brought the animal up to the fence and sat it and looked at the building going up, and Abe, two hundred yards off and reading him through the leaves, could read the look on the man even at that distance, and the look was not surprise.
The look was arithmetic. A man standing in front of a fire and doing sums in his head about what it cost him and who had lit it and what came next.
And not one Nuestra Tierra man among the lot of them. Not a single one come running to the burning of the very building that held their freight.
Which told him something, the lack of them. A man doesn’t stay clear of his own freight burning to the ground unless the staying clear serves him better than the saving of it would.
Either word had reached them already, wherever they were, and they’d judged there was nothing left worth being seen at, or they’d been warned off before the match was ever struck.
Either way somebody had done their thinking for them, and that somebody was a thing he hadn’t the whole of yet and would have to come back to.
He was watching Nash lean down off the gray to say a thing to the sheriff, and starting to think about easing himself down out of the tree before the crowd thickened, when he caught the other one.
Fifty yards off to his right and below him, down in the brush at the field’s edge, a man stood and watched the fire with the same flat measuring care that Abe himself was giving it. Not a townsman who’d heard the blast and come hurrying to gawk at it.
The townsmen were gathering at the fence in a knot, the way people knot together at a shared calamity, talking across one another, pointing, the social animal in its element.
This one stood well off and alone, and he wasn’t drifting in toward the others the way a curious man drifts, and he’d set himself with his back against the trunk of a big post oak, which is precisely where a man puts himself when he wants something solid at his spine, a clean look at the open ground in front of him, and a fast way out of it at his back.
Abe studied him through the leaves. Tall. Lean to the point of gauntness. Long hair gone past needing a cut and a patchy uneven beard, the whole look of a man who’d been living out of doors or close to it for some good while.
The clothes had been decent once and had been worn well past decent, the particular shabbiness of a man who’d had better and lost the circumstances that kept him in it.
And he was white, and he stood there in the brush watching Nash on the gray horse the way a man watches another man he knows, and has reason to watch.
A marshal up in Arkansas had given Abe the bones of that face, dry, the way a marshal gives a description, height and coloring and the broken nose.
A bartender in Laredo had hung some meat on the bones for the price of two whiskeys.
And a woman in Matamoros, who’d had no reason to lie and several to tell it true, had set the bartender straight on a particular or two.
The long jaw. The nose broken once and set a little off true. The pale eyes set close in under a heavy brow.
For a year Abe had carried that assembled face folded away behind his own and taken it out on the slow nights to study by firelight, and the man down there in the brush was wearing it, every line.
Thinner now than any description had it.
Older by a good deal more than two years had any right to make a man.
But it was the face, down to the small crook in the nose, and there was no daylight left to be found between the one he’d carried a year and the one standing fifty yards below him at the edge of the field.
Samson Jennings.
Abe came down out of the oak slow, setting each hand and each boot to the bark and trusting his weight to it only once it was set, his eyes never leaving the man below the whole way down. The man hadn’t moved. The fire held him the way it held everyone.
Abe reached the ground and stood a moment in the screen of the trunk and let his legs settle under him, and then he started across through the field toward the brush, wide and easy and slow, swinging well out and coming around to approach from the south so that the man’s whole attention stayed fixed on the burning stable and the men gathered at the fence beyond it, and not on the open ground at his own unguarded back.
He came into the brush thirty yards below and to the south of the man and stopped and stood still and looked at the profile of him against the firelight, and he was sure, past any last doubt of it, sure.
He stood in the brush and watched Samson Jennings watch the thing burn, and he let him watch it a while longer, and he made no sound at all.