Chapter 5 #2
"You been at this long?" David asked, more to round out the picture than out of real curiosity.
"Since fall. Started as just us trying to get across ourselves. Turned into this once word got around that it was passable." He shrugged, like the whole arrangement still mildly surprised him. "Beats fighting over it every time somebody new shows up."
"You can ride north if you don't like the price," he said. "There's another bridge, far as I know."
"How far?" David asked.
"Thirty miles or so. Can't tell you if it's standing. Haven't had anybody come through that way in a while."
David let a beat pass before he asked the next one, keeping his voice as idle as he could make it. "South?"
The man looked at him a moment before answering, like he was deciding whether the question meant anything.
"Old county bridge about fifteen miles down.
Was standing last fall. Road to it's bad, and nobody's kept it clear the way we've kept this one.
Could be fine. Could be washed clean out by now. I wouldn't count on it."
David nodded like the answer meant nothing more to him than the first one had. He'd remember the southern bridge when they came back this way.
While one of the other men went to check the boards on the damaged section, the first man settled into the kind of talk that came naturally to anybody minding a crossing all day.
"Where you headed?"
David let it sit a beat. Karen answered before the silence turned into its own kind of answer.
"Charlotte."
The man glanced over the horses again. "Long ride."
"That's what I'm finding out," Karen said.
"What takes you there?"
"My brother."
"He there?"
"Last we heard."
"When was that?"
"Before winter."
The man nodded slowly, like that lined up with plenty of stories he'd already heard this spring.
"Why four horses?" he asked.
Karen nodded at Whiskey. "That's his."
Not for him. His. David caught the difference. Karen had made Mark sound like a real person without adding another word.
"You know he's alive?" the man asked.
"No," Karen said. A beat. "That's why we're going."
The man's face softened at that, the way David had seen faces soften more than once this past year at the mention of somebody gone looking for somebody else. He'd probably lost people of his own. Most everybody had.
"Hope you find him," he said.
"So do I," Karen said, and there was nothing false in her voice at all, which was the strange thing about the whole arrangement. Mark didn't exist. The hope behind the lie was real enough for both of them.
"Where you coming from?" a second man asked, stepping up beside the first with the easy manner of somebody used to working a toll.
"West," Curtis said.
The man smiled a little. "Lot of west out there."
"We're from the far part," Curtis said, and David nearly glanced at him before Karen smoothed it over.
"Small farming place," she said. "You've never heard of it."
"Got a name?"
"Not really. Few families along the same stretch of road. Never got around to naming it."
The man accepted that easily enough — plenty of scattered places like that these days, nothing worth remarking on.
"Doing all right out there?" he asked.
"Barely," Karen said.
Nobody mentioned livestock. Nobody mentioned stores, or how many families, or anything that made the place sound worth a stranger's trouble to go looking for.
David listened to the whole exchange without adding to it, satisfied that between Karen's plain answers and Curtis's flat ones, they sounded exactly like what they wanted to sound like — poor enough not to be worth robbing, and dull enough not to be worth remembering past the next traveler who came through.
A third man, younger, came over to look at the horses before they started across.
"Lead them if you want," he said. "Most ride through. Just don't stop in the narrow part, whatever you do."
David studied June a moment, then decided to stay mounted. She'd carried him through worse than a damaged bridge deck, and she trusted his hands more than she'd trust a stranger's advice shouted from the bank.
"Let Whiskey follow on the lead," David said, mostly to himself.
Karen looked toward Waylon's ears, already swiveling at the sound of the river. "What about him?"
"Let him follow June," Curtis said. "He's not going to argue about it."
Willie was a different matter. He stood with his ears working, staring down at the water moving fast beneath the gap in the railing, unwilling to commit his opinion on the whole business one way or the other.
Curtis talked to him low, one hand on his neck, no jerking at the bit, no raised voice. "Nothing to see down there that concerns you."
Willie didn't look convinced, but he didn't fight it either.
David settled the order in his head — June first, Whiskey on the lead behind her, Waylon and Karen next, Curtis and Willie at the rear.
Smokey he kept close along the inside edge rather than letting him range, not wanting a dog cutting across the legs of four horses on a lane barely wide enough for one at a time.
June's hooves changed sound the moment she stepped onto the bridge deck — the dull thud of dirt road replaced by something harder, hollower, with the river running loud beneath it and a thin wind cutting across the open span.
Whiskey balked at the first step, planting hard enough that the lead rope went taut in David's hand.
David didn't fight it. He let the rope go slack again, gave Whiskey a second to work out that June wasn't stopping, and felt the resistance ease as Whiskey decided following was easier than standing alone on solid ground while everyone else moved on without him.
Waylon came next with barely a hitch in his stride, steady the way he'd been steady since the first morning out.
Willie stopped.
"Come on," Curtis said.
Willie considered every bad decision available to a horse standing at the edge of a narrow bridge over moving water, and for a few seconds it looked like he might choose one of them.
Karen glanced back.
"Don't," Curtis said, and she faced forward again.
Eventually Willie decided the herd mattered more than his opinion of the bridge and started forward, ears pinned, but moving.
They reached the damaged section a few dozen feet on.
The pavement had dropped enough to be obvious under the horses' feet, and heavy planks covered the worst of the gap, worn and scarred from repeated crossings but solid under June's weight.
Through the space at the edge, David caught a flash of the river moving fast and brown below, close enough that he understood exactly why the young man had told them not to stop here.
June slowed on her own, lowering her head to study the footing before committing her weight to it. David let her take the pace she wanted. One hoof, tested and placed. Then another.
Whiskey tried to crowd up against her hindquarters, spooked by the narrowness of it, and David checked him hard on the lead, enough to remind him without escalating anything.
A piece of debris struck one of the bridge piers below with a sharp crack, and Willie went sideways — not a rear, not anything dramatic, just a hard lateral lurch that was dangerous only because there wasn't room for it. One hoof skidded on the boards.
"I've got him," Curtis said, voice tight but controlled.
"Take your time," David said, not turning around, hearing the scrape and shuffle behind him without being able to see it.
"Keep him straight," one of the guards called from the near bank.
Curtis did. Willie's feet found the boards again, and after a few more tense seconds he settled, blowing hard through his nose but moving forward.
Waylon hadn't moved at all through any of it. He stood exactly where Karen had stopped him, ears back but feet planted, and Karen sat quiet in the saddle with one hand low on his neck, talking to him in a voice too soft for David to make out the words.
Near the worst of the gap, Whiskey saw the water clear through a break in the railing and planted his feet entirely, refusing the last several yards outright.
David couldn't pull a thousand pounds of unwilling horse across a bridge by force, and he didn't try.
He turned June enough that Whiskey could see her, stopped, and waited.
June stood patient, unbothered, exactly the animal Whiskey needed to see right then.
After a long moment, Whiskey took a step.
Then another. Then he was moving again, following her the way he'd followed her every day since they'd left the Hollow.
Smokey stayed low and close through all of it, no wasted motion, reaching the far side ahead of the horses and turning to wait, tail down, watching until every one of them was off the deck and onto solid ground.
June stepped off onto dirt first. Whiskey followed. Then Waylon, unbothered as ever. Then Willie, ears still flat but moving under his own power.
Curtis swung down the moment they cleared the last of it and ran a hand down Willie's neck.
"He always that easy?" Karen asked, not quite hiding the smile.
"Until he isn't," Curtis said.
"I walked into that one," Karen said, and even Curtis laughed.
David didn't ride on right away. He stopped on the rise past the crossing and looked back at the bridge, the guards, the smoke from the chimneys beyond it.
"You're thinking about coming back," Curtis said.
"I'm thinking about not coming back here."
Karen looked back too, and David watched the moment it landed for her.
Outbound, they'd paid a little food and asked a few plain questions.
If they came back through loaded with medicine and boots and whatever else Daniel's records turned up, the toll wouldn't be the problem anymore.
Everybody at the crossing would see exactly what they were carrying.
Even honest people noticed valuable cargo, and honest people talked, and talk traveled faster than three riders and four horses ever would.
"We're invisible right now," David said.