Chapter 12
Burner stood on the saddle and listened to the bars.
They did not stop. That was the thing. In fourteen drills at the Kettle the pattern had always been three notes and a pause and three notes again, and this was one continuous hammering, somebody beating iron with no rhythm at all, which was not a signal to the camp.
It was a signal to whoever was out there.
"That's Halloran," Brill said beside him.
"Or it's somebody standing over Halloran."
"It's four miles. We can be there by dawn."
"We can be there by dawn with twenty people who haven't eaten since yesterday and a woman on a litter," Burner said, "and we can walk into whatever that is in the dark without knowing one single thing about it."
He watched the torches.
They were moving east along the base of the mountain toward the canyon mouth, eleven or twelve of them, spread out over maybe two hundred yards, and they were moving slowly and they were not trying to hide.
"Why would he light torches," Sable said. "He's got the dark. The dark's free."
"Because he's not attacking."
"Then what is he doing?"
Burner watched a long moment more.
"He's showing them how many he's got," he said.
They came down off the saddle and went east along the bench, and it took four hours because of the litter, and the whole way the bars did not stop.
At half past six, with the sky going gray behind the peaks, they came up the last rise and looked into the flat below the canyon mouth.
The torches were stuck in the ground.
That was the first strange thing. Twelve of them, driven into the gravel in a wide arc two hundred yards out from the forty foot gap, still burning, and nobody standing near any of them.
The second strange thing was the fire.
There was a camp fire burning in the middle of the arc, a good one, built properly with a reflector wall of stacked rock behind it, and there were men sitting around it. Burner counted nine. They were eating. One of them was lying down with his hat over his face.
They had made camp in the open in full view of the canyon mouth, two hundred yards from people who had rifles, and they were having breakfast.
"That's insane," Otway said.
"No it isn't."
"They're in the open."
"They're in the open at two hundred yards knowing that a camp with two good rifles and nine bad ones will not open fire on nine men eating breakfast," Burner said. "And they're right."
"Why?"
"Because if Halloran shoots first, then he's started it, and every person in that canyon has to live with having started it. And Halstead knows that about him after six days of watching how that camp makes decisions."
He put the glasses up.
The canyon mouth was barricaded. Somebody had spent four days on it, and it was better than Burner had expected, a wall of stacked rock and deadfall about chest high across the whole forty feet,
with two firing positions built into it and a gap at the north end that could be closed with a rolled log.
Behind it, up on the wall, two shapes were lying in the rocks.
And in the gravel behind the barricade, a man was standing with a length of pipe, beating three iron bars hanging from a frame, over and over.
"That's Halloran," Brill said.
"Yes."
"Why is he doing that?"
Burner watched.
Halloran struck the bars eleven more times and then stopped, and stood there with the pipe hanging from his hand, and then started again.
"He's been doing it all night," Burner said slowly. "Four miles away I heard it start at two in the morning. It's half past six."
"That's four and a half hours."
"Yes."
And then he understood, and something went cold all the way down his spine.
"He's not signalling," he said. "He's masking."
"Masking what?"
Burner swung the glasses north, along the canyon wall, up to where the rock went dark and broken above the north cave.
There's a game trail out of the north cave. It's eleven inches wide in one spot and there's a fall on it and I would not send a child up it except to save their life.
"The back door," he said.
They came into the canyon from the north an hour later, over the shoulder, down a slope of loose rock that took the litter forty minutes to descend, and a boy of about fourteen with a shotgun nearly killed all of them before Brill shouted her own name four times.
The canyon was almost empty.
That was what Burner saw first and it stopped him in the gravel.
The floor of the box canyon had held fifty-one people four days ago and now it held perhaps a dozen, and the fires were out, and the stacks of carried goods were gone, and there was a strange emptiness to the place like a house after the furniture has been moved.
Weathers came out of the south cave at a run.
She went straight past Burner to the litter without a word to anybody, and had Delacroix's coat open in about eight seconds, and then she stood up and looked at Burner with an expression he had never seen on her.
"How long?"
"Yesterday, one in the afternoon."
"Eighteen hours."
"Yes."
Weathers turned and started shouting orders at people, and four of them came running, and Delacroix went into the south cave and Burner did not see her again for a day and a half.
Halloran came across the gravel.
He had not slept. He had a beard of four days and a hand wrapped in cloth where the pipe had blistered it through, and he stopped in front of Burner and looked past him at the line of people coming down the north slope.
He counted them. Burner watched him do it.
"Twenty," Halloran said.
"Twelve from the shed. Seven of ours. And one."
Halloran's eyes found her.
Neve was standing at the bottom of the slope with the ring and the chain in her arms and the shackle on her ankle, and she was looking at him, and neither of them moved for about three seconds.
Then Halloran walked over and stopped in front of her and did not touch her, which Burner thought was probably the wisest thing the man had ever done.
"I'm sorry," Halloran said.
"For what?"
"For July."
Neve looked at him a long moment.
"You couldn't have stopped it," she said.
"That's not the same as not being sorry."
"No," she said. "It isn't."
And then she put the ring down in the gravel and put her arms around him, and Halloran stood there with his blistered hand held out to the side so he would not touch her with it, and made a sound that Burner turned away from.
"Where is everybody," Burner said.
They were up on the north rim, sitting on rocks, with the whole canyon below them and nine men still eating breakfast two hundred yards out from the mouth.
"Gone," Halloran said. "Most of them."
"Over the trail?"
"Over the trail."
"You said you wouldn't send a child up it except to save their life."
"That's right," Halloran said. "And then on Tuesday night a man walked up to that barricade with a white rag and told me some things, and I decided it was Tuesday."
Burner turned his head slowly.
"Sparrow."
"Sparrow."
"He's alive."
"He was on Tuesday night at about eleven o'clock." Halloran rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. "He came out of the dark at the barricade with his hands up and about four people nearly shot him and I stopped it, and he talked for twenty minutes and then he went back out."
"Say all of it."
"He said Halstead left the yard at midnight on Wednesday with eleven men on foot and no vehicles. He said the trucks were staying behind as a decoy so that anybody watching from a hill would count wrong."
"He told us that too. Yesterday morning."
"He told me thirty hours before he told you," Halloran said. "He walked from that yard to here on foot in a day and a half to say it, and then he turned around and walked back so he'd be in the yard when you hit it."
Burner sat with that.
"Why?"
"I asked him. He said that if he'd come to you first you'd have had to decide whether to believe him, and that you'd have had about four hours to do it in and you'd have chosen wrong."
Halloran's mouth twisted. "He said if he came to me first I'd have three days, and three days is enough time for a camp that votes on everything."
"That's a very clever man."
"That's what worries me."
Burner looked down at the canyon.
"So you moved them."
"I moved them Wednesday, all day, single file, up eleven inches of rock with a two hundred foot fall on it."
Halloran's voice was completely steady and his hands were not.
"Thirty-eight people including nineteen children and a boy with a hole in his hip on a litter that four men carried on their knees for the bad forty feet. It took fourteen hours."
"Nobody fell."
"Nobody fell."
"That's the best thing I've heard in a month."
"I have aged about nine years," Halloran said.
"Where are they?"
"There's a basin above the lake. It's four miles from here and it's got timber and water and no canyon walls, which means no back door problem, and it also means no gate. It's not a fortress. It's just a place with trees where thirty-eight people can be that isn't here."
"And the twelve of you?"
"Are here to make eleven men believe that fifty-one people are still in this canyon," Halloran said.
Burner looked at the barricade, at the two shapes lying up on the wall, at the dead fires spread out across the gravel in a pattern that suggested many more than a dozen.
At the iron bars.
"That's what the hammering is for."
"That's what the hammering is for." Halloran looked at his blistered hand. "Noise. Movement. Smoke from four fires. A man walking the barricade every ten minutes wearing a different coat. Sparrow told me what Halstead does, which is count, so I've given him things to count."
"How long can you hold that up?"
"Until he decides to come and look."
"And when he does?"
"Then twelve of us go up the trail in the dark and he takes an empty canyon," Halloran said, "and we're four miles away in a basin with no gate, and he's got eleven men and no fuel and no trucks and, if what you're about to tell me is true, no yard."
"No yard," Burner said.
Halloran closed his eyes.
"Say it properly."