Chapter 4
Josh Bodine had kept his oath for fourteen years, and breaking it now nearly closed his throat.
He sat across the lamplight from a boy with Eldon’s jaw and Vallie’s worried eyes; the map lay between them on the dusty table, and there was no road back from this.
He’d kept the oath because keeping it was the last thing he could do for Eldon.
But Eldon had been fourteen years dead, and his boy had grown and was asking. So, he told it.
“It was the fall before they died,” he said.
“Eldon come to me one evening with his face lit up like Christmas morning. He’d been up Clear Creek Canyon after elk, twenty miles west of here, way back in the high rocks where nobody runs stock and nobody’s got reason to go.
Said his dog had gone down a slot after a rabbit and Eldon’d squeezed in after to fetch him. ”
Josh turned his cup slowly between his scarred hands. “Came out in a little cave. And the wall of it, boy, the way he told it, the wall of it was threaded through with gold like fat in a side of bacon. Just lying there in the rock. A man’s whole fortune and ten men’s besides.”
The boy said nothing. He had a stillness about him that Eldon never had. The docks, maybe. Or the trunk.
Josh saw it yet, plain as the boy’s face in front of him.
Eldon at this very table with mud still on his boots and his eyes shining, talking too fast, spilling coffee because his hands wouldn’t hold still.
Vallie standing in the kitchen door with a dishtowel, half scared and half laughing at her husband carrying on like a boy who’d found a colt in the barn.
The little Nate asleep in the back room, all of six years old, with no notion the world was turning under him. A good night. The last good night before the worst year of their lives, though none of them had the sense to know it then.
“Your daddy weren’t a greedy man,” Josh went on.
“I want you to hear me on that. He wasn’t dreaming about velvet coats.
He was dreaming about you, and your ma, and never having to worry whether the beef’d bring enough to last the winter.
Said the first thing he’d do was send you east to a proper school, so you’d have letters and numbers and a chance at a life that didn’t break a man’s back by forty.
He told one living soul on this earth, and that was me, because we’d been friends since we were younger than you, and he had to tell somebody or burst.”
A rough sound that was almost a laugh. “Made me swear, same as I made you promise just now. We were going to work it quiet. Take it out slow, a little at a season, so nobody’d ask where a poor rancher got rich.
Eldon had a head on him. He knew gold draws wolves the way blood draws flies.
He just never figured how fast they’d come, nor how close one already stood. ”
“But somebody asked anyway.”
“Somebody always does.” Josh rubbed the back of his neck, the old shame rising in him like creek water in spring.
“Eldon got careful, toward the end. Too careful, I thought at the time. He drew this.” He laid two fingers near the map, not on it.
“Drew it twice, matter of fact. Showed me the one, then burned it in front of me so there’d be no copy lying about.
The other he sealed up and mailed clear back to Boston, to your grandpa, where no Colorado man could ever lay hands on it.
He’d got it in his head somebody was watching him.
Said he’d felt eyes on him in town. I told him he was spooking at shadows.
” The words came hard. “I was wrong. He weren’t spooking at nothing. ”
The lamp guttered and steadied. Outside, the dark pressed against the broken shutters, and the night birds had gone quiet.
“How’d this Chambers come into it?” the boy asked.
“The assay office.” Josh’s mouth twisted.
“Eldon took a pinch of dust in to be sure of what he had. Just the once. Told the assayer it come from a played-out claim up north, but the assayer was a drunk and a talker, and Chambers buys talk the way other men buy whiskey. I’d lay every dollar I’ll ever see that’s how he heard there was new color in this county and a poor rancher sitting on it. ”
He looked at the dark stain by the door; he couldn’t see in the lamplight but knew was there. “He’d have come asking first. Friendly. Offered to buy the land, most like. And when your daddy wouldn’t sell and wouldn’t say, he come back that night to take the answer out of him by force.”
He had to stop. The next part he had carried in his chest for fourteen years, heavy and cold and never once set down.
“I should’ve been here,” he said, low. “Eldon asked me to come for supper that night and I begged off. Had a heifer down with milk fever, and I stayed home to nurse her. A cow.” His voice cracked on it.
“I stayed home for a cow, and they died alone, and you in that trunk. If I’d been here with my rifle, there’d have been two guns in this house instead of none, and maybe. Maybe.” He shook his head hard. “I’ve said maybe to myself ten thousand nights, boy. It don’t change a thing.”
The shame of it had worn a groove in him these fourteen years, deep as a wagon rut in clay.
He’d buried his only friend and the wife who’d fed him Sunday dinners and never once said an unkind word, and he’d done it knowing he might have stood between them and the bullets and chosen a sick cow instead.
There was no penance for a thing like that. A man just carried it and went on and hoped the carrying counted for something in the end.
He looked at the boy now and understood that this, maybe, was what the carrying had been for. To be here. To be ready this time, when it mattered. The boy watched him. No blame in the youthful face, only a hard sorrow that matched his own. That was the worst of it.
“He shot them,” the boy said quietly. “And then he tore the house apart looking for this.” He touched the edge of the map. “And it was already in Boston.”
“Already gone. Two weeks gone, in the mail.” Josh nodded slowly. “He killed the only two people who knew where that gold was, and he never got the one thing he killed them for. He’s been hunting it fourteen years and never found it. I’ve heard he keeps men poking around that canyon yet.”
He almost smiled, and there was no kindness in it. “It’s been driving him mad, I’d wager. The gold he murdered for, sitting up there in the rock, laughing at him.
“In the last weeks he changed,” Josh said.
“My Eldon, who never feared a living man. He took to riding with his rifle across the saddle to go to town. Took to looking back over his shoulder. One Sunday, he gripped my arm and said, ‘Josh, if anything happens to me, you mind my boy, you hear,’ and I laughed at him and told him he’d outlive us both. ”
He set his jaw against the ache of it. “Three weeks later, he was dead. A man knows when the wolves have got his scent. He knew. I just wouldn’t let myself believe him.”
They bent over the map together then, the two of them, heads close in the lamplight.
Josh traced the creek line with a blunt finger and named it.
Pointed out the bend where the canyon narrowed, the slot in the rock, the steeple-shaped formation Eldon had described to him that lit-up autumn evening so long ago.
He knew that country. He’d hunted it as a younger man, before his knees gave out on the steep ground.
The ledge trail, the river crossings, the place where the walls drew in so closely that two riders couldn’t pass abreast. It matched.
Every mark of it matched the country he’d known all his life, and that was the thing that turned his belly cold because a true map to a true fortune was a thing men would kill for, had killed for, would kill for again.
“It’s real,” Josh said softly. “Lord. It’s real, and it’s still up there, and you’re holding the only map to it in the world.”
“Then we tell no one.” The boy folded the paper along its soft, old creases and slid it back inside his coat.
“Not the Thornhills. Not your nearest friend. As far as any living soul knows, my grandfather left me a deed and a sentiment. I’ll go at Chambers another way first and let him keep thinking the gold died with my father.
The day he learns I have this is the day he’s got no reason to leave me breathing. ”
Josh looked at him a good while. “You think clear for a young one.”
“I had fourteen years to think.” The boy’s jaw set. “Mostly about this.”
They talked the rest of the night away, the way Josh and Eldon used to, plans and worries and the shape of the days ahead, and Josh felt something he hadn’t felt since the morning they buried his friend. Not gladness. But a use for himself. A debt he might finally pay.
The window had gone gray, dawn coming up behind the eastern grass.
He pushed up stiffly from the chair to start the morning fire and went past the front window with the empty cup in his hand.
There in the soft mud of the flower bed his Vallie had planted twenty years gone, beneath the sill, pressed deeply and fresh, were the prints of a man’s boots.
Toe in to the glass. Two of them, side by side, where a man had crouched the whole night through.
The cup slipped in Josh’s hand, and he caught it before it fell.
The cold went through him head to heel, the same cold he’d lived in for fourteen years, the cold of being one beat too slow to matter.
They hadn’t even thought to draw the curtain.
An old fool and a young one, leaning into the lamp, naming the canyon out loud, naming the gold, naming Chambers, and all the while a man on his belly in Vallie’s flower bed soaking up every word like a sponge.
He knew, without being told, whose man it would be. The same kind of man who’d put two prints in the mud and a bullet in his best friend and never lose a wink of sleep over either.
“Boy,” he said, and his voice came out strangely and thin. “Boy, come here. Somebody’s been at this window. Crouched right here in the dark the whole night through, listening.”
He stared at the toe prints pressed deep in his dead friend’s flower bed, and the dawn coming up behind the grass did nothing to take the cold out of him. “To every blessed word we said. The gold. The map. All of it. They know, Nate. By breakfast, Chambers’ll know we know.”