Chapter 4 #2
"And you've got nineteen children."
"Twenty, as of tonight," Halloran said.
Burner looked out at the dark on the ridgeline.
"His name's Halstead," he said.
Halloran went very still.
"The one who runs them. We were in the grass above the road this morning when they stopped on our track. Four of them out of the truck, two more in the cab or the bed that I never saw. They said they were eight miles from the yard on a half tank."
"You heard him say his name?"
"His own man said it. And Halstead said something else." Burner turned and faced him. "He said everything moving northeast out here is going to the same place, and that they'd be going there themselves inside a month, and they'd collect the girl then."
The lamp shook very slightly in Halloran's hand.
"A month," he said.
"That's what he said."
Halloran set the lamp down on the woodpile because he did not trust himself with it.
"We put the harvest in three weeks ago," he said quietly. "Everything we have for the winter is in that container right now. It's the fattest this place will ever be. That's what he's waiting for. He's letting us finish the work."
"Yes."
"And he'll take it all at once, because in winter we can't regrow it and we can't leave, and then we'll have to do exactly what he wants come spring to get any of it back." Halloran let out a breath. "He's not raiding us. He's farming us."
Burner did not answer that.
Shyla came out of the far building with Weathers a while later, wrapped in a wool coat three sizes too big with the cuffs turned back four times, and she came across the yard and stood next to Burner and leaned against his leg without a word.
Weathers stopped in front of them.
"She's underweight and she's got a cough starting I don't like and there's a cut on her scalp about four days old that somebody should have cleaned," she said. "None of that's going to kill her. She'll be all right."
"Thank you," Burner said.
Weathers looked at him the way a woman looks at a horse she is considering.
"And you," she said, "are going to sleep for about fourteen hours the second you let yourself, and you're going to be worthless to anybody until you do."
She walked off.
Burner looked down at the girl leaning on his leg.
"Well," he said. "What do you think."
Shyla considered the yard, the lit windows, the four kids still running around the woodpile in the dark because nobody had called them in yet.
"The bread's weird," she said.
"It is."
"Marin said I can sleep in their room. There's six girls and there's a stove and she said the stove is right there by her bed." She said it carefully, laying it out, watching him. "She said I could have the one by the wall."
"That's a good spot."
"Are you staying?"
The whole yard seemed to go quiet, which it did not, which was only in his head.
He thought about the rock rib and the woodpile eleven feet long and the potatoes behind the shelter and a hundred and seventy rounds under a cairn of three stones, and the eleven months of silence he had built with his hands and had believed was the only thing keeping him standing.
"I'm staying," he said.
She nodded once, the way she did, filing it.
Then she let go of his leg and ran across the yard toward the woodpile and the shrieking, and Yak looked up at Burner for permission and Burner said go on, and the dog went after her.
He stood there in the cold a long time.
They gave him a bunk in the end room of the third building and he did not sleep for two hours and then slept like a dead man until noon, exactly as Weathers had said he would.
The next four days he worked.
He walked the whole perimeter of the bowl twice and drew it on the back of a Forest Service map with a pencil. He found eleven ways in and closed six of them with deadfall and rock and left five, because a place with no way in was a place where you could not see them coming.
He moved the granary. Not the container, which could not be moved, but the contents, forty-one sacks at night by lantern into a root cellar under the third building that had been used for nothing but broken tools since the lights went out,
and then he filled the container with sacks of pine duff and sawdust so that it would still weigh right when a man pushed on the door.
He picked two shooters out of the eight Halloran had named and told the other six they were going to be spotters and runners instead, and he did it without insulting any of them, which took more out of him than the walk from his camp.
On the fifth morning he was up on the north rock with a pair of binoculars checking his own sight lines when he heard boots coming up behind him.
It was the boy from the doghair lodgepole. Sixteen, maybe. Named Priest, for reasons nobody had explained.
The kid was white in the face.
"You need to come," he said. "Down at the south gap. Now."
Burner came down fast.
There were nine people standing in the south gap in a loose half circle, and Halloran was in front of them with his hands open at his sides, and beyond them, thirty feet out in the open grass, stood a man.
He was alone. He had no rifle. He had his coat open to show he had nothing on his belt.
He was about forty, with a neat beard and clean hands, and he was smiling in a friendly way that did not reach anywhere.
There was a white rag tied around his upper arm.
"There he is," the man said, looking past Halloran, straight at Burner, as though he had been waiting for him specifically. "The one from the grass."
Burner stopped walking.
"Halstead sends his compliments," the man said. "He wanted me to tell you personally that he's moved his schedule up."