Chapter 13
Burner did not move for a second.
"Friday morning," he said.
"About nine o'clock."
"That's four days ago."
"Yes."
"We walked that ground in two days with a litter and a woman with a hole in her and twelve people who hadn't eaten." Burner's mind was going very fast and very cold. "Five men on foot with nothing to carry could do it in a day and a half."
"They could."
"So he's been here since Saturday."
Sparrow closed his eyes.
"Since Saturday afternoon at the outside," he said. "That's what I've been walking with in my head for two days and it's the only reason I didn't lie down in the rocks on Sunday night, which I wanted to do very badly."
Burner stood up.
Twenty people were standing behind him in the timber, and he turned around and looked at all of them and made his voice do the thing it had learned to do in the last three weeks.
"Nobody runs," he said. "Nobody shouts. Brill, get Halloran and Otway and bring them here, walking. Priest, find Sable and Teague. Everybody else, go back to what you were doing and keep doing it where you can be seen doing it."
"What's happening," somebody said.
"I don't know yet," Burner said. "And that's exactly why nobody's going to run around this basin looking like they've been told something."
They came, and they stood in a knot under the spruce with Sparrow sitting against the tree, and Burner laid it out in ninety seconds.
Halloran's face went gray.
"Four days," he said.
"Yes."
"He's been watching us for four days."
"Maybe. Maybe two. He'd have gone to the canyon first because that's where the camp was and that's where his own eleven men were, and he'd have watched that for a day before he understood it was a shell." Burner shook his head. "Call it Sunday. Call it two days he's had eyes on this basin."
"Then why hasn't he done anything?"
"He has," Burner said. "He's watched. That's what he does. And he's got five men against seventy-two people and nineteen rifles, and there's exactly nothing he can do about that with a rifle, so he hasn't tried."
"Then what's he doing?"
Burner looked out at the basin.
Thirty-eight people who had carried everything they owned nine miles and then four more.
Twelve out of a shed who had spent a month being told where to stand.
Seven who had walked twenty-six miles and come back with burns and holes in them.
A nurse working on a gut wound in a tent.
Two nine year olds who had been in a yard four days ago and were now sitting on a log with a girl teaching them to knit.
Seventy-two people who had not slept properly in a week, in a basin with no walls, on the twenty-ninth of September.
"He's waiting for us to come apart," he said.
Otway said, "That's a long wait."
"No it isn't."
Burner crouched down and drew in the pine duff with a stick, because it helped him and because it gave the four of them something to look at that was not each other.
"We've got two and a half months of food for seventy-two," he said. "Halloran said that himself two nights ago in front of everybody. That's the twelfth of December."
"We've got hunting."
"We've got hunting for a camp of twenty. Not seventy-two. Not with nineteen rifles that mostly can't shoot and three hundred rounds between all of them."
"There's the greenhouses," Brill said.
"The greenhouses are panes of glass in a wheelbarrow nine miles away in a burned camp," Burner said. "And even if we had them up by the end of October, which we won't, we'd be looking at greens in February."
Halloran sat down heavily on a rock.
"Say what you're actually saying."
Burner put the stick down.
"He doesn't have to fight us," he said. "He never had to. He's got five men and we've got seventy-two, and in about six weeks we will start arguing about food, and in eight weeks somebody will suggest that the twelve people we brought out of that shed are twelve mouths that weren't in the plan,
and in ten weeks there will be people in this basin who have worked out that a smaller camp eats longer."
Nobody said anything.
"And that's before the first person gets sick," Burner said. "That's before the first child dies of something Weathers can't fix, and somebody stands up and says we had three buildings and a spring and two greenhouses three weeks ago and now we're in a field."
"They'd be right," Otway said.
"They'd be completely right. That's the problem." Burner looked up at them. "He doesn't have to do a thing. He just has to be alive in November when we start eating into the last of it, and then he walks in here and offers somebody a deal."
"Nobody would take it."
"Somebody always takes it," Sparrow said from the tree.
They all looked at him.
He had his burned hand held out from his body and he was gray with pain, and he said it without any drama at all.
"Eleven times," he said. "That's how many of these I've done. And in nine of them somebody came out to meet me before I ever got to the gate."
At noon Burner walked the perimeter of the basin with Sable.
It took two hours and it was the first honest look he had given the place, and it was worse than he had told anybody.
"There's no perimeter," he said.
"No."
"That's the whole report. There isn't one. Halloran picked this because it's got no back door problem and he was right about that, and the price is that it's got eleven front doors and a mile and a half of timber edge."
"Can we fix it?"
"Not with seventy-two people and no wire and two months."
They came up onto a low knob at the northeast corner where the spruce thinned out, and Burner stopped.
There was a flat rock at the top of it with a good view down into the whole basin, and on the rock, sitting in the exact center of it, was a tin cup.
Burner stood absolutely still.
Sable's rifle came up.
"Don't," he said.
He walked over to the rock alone and looked down at the cup.
It was an ordinary enamel cup with a chip out of the rim. It had been set down carefully upright and there was a quarter inch of frozen coffee in the bottom of it, and beside it on the stone, in a neat little pile, were four cigarette ends.
Four.
Burner crouched and picked one up.
It was hand rolled, and the paper was a strip of some book page, and when he turned it over he could read three printed words on the unburned part.
He looked down into the basin.
From this rock, at four hundred yards, he could see the cook fire, the tents, the horse line where there were no horses, the spruce where Weathers had her tent, the log at the edge of the timber where three children were sitting.
He could see Shyla's red wool hat.
"Sable," he said.
She came up.
"How many days does a man smoke four cigarettes in?"
Sable looked at the pile and her face changed.
"One," she said. "If he's sitting."
"Two if he's rationing them."
"What's the cup?"
"The cup is a message," Burner said.
He picked it up and turned it over in his hands.
"He drank his coffee up here looking at us and then he left the cup on the rock where the first person to walk this line would find it." Burner set it back down exactly where it had been. "He wants me to know he was here. He wants me to know he sat down."
"Why?"
"Because it does more than a bullet would."
They went down off the knob and Burner did not touch anything else, and he made Sable walk exactly in his tracks going down, and at the bottom he stopped and stood in the timber for a long minute doing nothing at all.
"Say it," Sable said.
"I'm working out whether to tell them."
"You have to tell them."
"Do I?" He turned around. "Here's what happens if I walk into that basin and say Halstead sat on a rock four hundred yards from the cook fire and drank a cup of coffee while he watched our children. Seventy-two people stop sleeping. Every noise in the timber is a man.
In four days somebody shoots somebody's teenage son coming back from the latrine at night."
"And if you don't tell them?"
"Then I'm managing them," Burner said. "Then I've decided I know better than seventy-two adults what they can carry, which is exactly the thing that makes a man into a small king, and I have watched it happen to four men in eleven months."
Sable was quiet.
"There's a middle," she said.
"Say it."
"Tell Halloran and let him decide. That's what he's for. That's why they vote."
Burner looked at her.
"You've been here nine days," he said, "and you're already better at this than I am."
"I'm not better at it," Sable said. "I've just got less to lose by saying it out loud."
Halloran called the meeting at dusk and told them everything.
Burner had expected panic. What he got was worse, and it took him a while to understand why.
They took it quietly.
Seventy-two people sat in the spruce basin in the cold and listened to a man tell them that the one who had burned their harvest plans and killed nothing yet had sat on a rock and looked at their children, and there was no uproar at all.
It was Teague who explained it to him afterward.
"You were expecting us to be frightened," he said.
"Yes."
"We've been frightened since July," Teague said. "That's the thing people who show up don't understand. We've been frightened for two years and there's a bottom to it and we hit ours in the summer."
"What's under the bottom?"
"Tired," Teague said.
The camp did four things in the next six days, and Burner drove all of them, and by the end of it he was hated by about a third of the basin and knew it and kept going.
They cut a firebreak.
Otway laid it out and sixty people worked it, a hundred foot strip of cleared ground all the way around the camp core, which took the timber edge from a mile and a half of dark to a hundred feet of nothing that a man had to cross to reach them.
They built eleven listening posts and manned four of them at a time, rotating, day and night, three hour watches, with a rule that no watch was ever stood alone.
They moved the children.
That was the one that caused the trouble.