Chapter 14
They carried Rowe in on a coat and Weathers had him on a table in four minutes and Burner stood outside the tent in the snow and did not go in, because there were already three people in there and a fourth would only be in the way.
Halloran came and stood beside him.
"Is it a trick?"
"I don't know."
"That's not like you."
"It's exactly like me," Burner said. "I've been guessing for three weeks and calling it knowing and it nearly cost us twelve people at that fence. Ask me again in an hour."
He looked out at the firebreak.
There was one set of tracks on it. One. Coming out of the timber in a wandering line that doubled back on itself twice, the track of a man who had been walking on the edge of consciousness for a long time.
"Four people out," he said. "Brill, Priest, Otway, Sable. Backtrack him to the timber edge and no further, and I want to know if anybody walked him in and stopped."
"And if somebody did?"
"Then we'll know it's a trick."
They came back forty minutes later.
"Nothing," Sable said. "He came down off the shoulder alone. We followed it three quarters of a mile and it's one man the whole way, and he fell down nine times."
"Any sign at all of others?"
"There's nothing else on that snow but deer."
Burner nodded slowly.
"Then either it's not a trick," he said, "or it's a very good one."
Weathers came out at seven in the morning with her sleeves rolled and her forearms red to the elbow and stood in the cold breathing for a while before she said anything.
"He'll live," she said. "Probably. Two fingers off the left hand, taken with something that wasn't sharp, about five days ago, and infected. Four ribs. Something wrong in the belly that I can't see and don't like. And he's been walking for four days with no coat."
"Four days," Halloran said.
"That's what the frostbite says. He's lost most of two toes."
"Can he talk?"
"He's been talking all night. That's the problem." Weathers rubbed her face. "He won't stop, and about a third of it is fever, and I can't tell you which third."
"Can I see him?"
Weathers looked at Burner for a moment.
"He's been asking for you since we got him inside," she said. "He asked for the one from the grass eleven times. That's a man who has been thinking about you for a long while and I want you to walk in there knowing it."
The tent was hot and smelled of infection.
Rowe lay under three blankets with his ruined hand wrapped and elevated on a rolled coat, and his eyes were open and glassy and they found Burner the second he came through the flap.
"There you are," he said.
Burner pulled a crate over and sat down.
"You were on the gate," he said.
"Two years." Rowe's voice was shot to pieces. "Gate, fuel, the shop. He trusted me with the fuel. Do you understand what that means down there? There's four of us he'd trust with fuel and I was one."
"And then?"
"And then you burned it."
Burner did not look away.
"Yes," he said.
Rowe laughed, which turned into coughing, which went on a long time.
"I'm not here about that," he said when he could. "I want that clear. I'm not here to tell you that you ruined my life, though you did. I'm here because of what happened after."
"Tell me."
"The tanks went at about one in the afternoon and the shop went at two and the whole thing was done by dark," Rowe said. "Three trucks. Two of them burned where they stood and the third had the hood off it and no distributor and a cut line, and I'd like to know who did that."
"A man who's asleep in a tent forty feet from here."
Rowe closed his eyes.
"Sparrow."
"Yes."
"I told him." Rowe's mouth worked. "I told him in August he was going soft and he told me to mind my own business and we didn't speak for a month. I want you to know I liked him. Everybody liked him, that was his function."
"Go on about the yard."
Rowe pulled himself back.
"It burned. Everything burned that could. The block building stood, the fence stood, the well stood, the shop's a steel frame and a floor and about nine hundred pounds of tools that are still there because tools don't burn, they just get ugly."
Burner's attention sharpened.
"The tools are there."
"Where would they go? The mechanic's bench is a lump of slag but everything that was in a steel drawer came through it." Rowe's eyes moved to him. "That's what you want, isn't it. That's why your face changed."
"Keep talking."
"Halstead came back on Sunday," Rowe said. "He'd been four days gone and nobody knew where, and he walked in through the north gate at about noon on the Sunday with four men and he looked at four hundred acres of black and he did not say one word."
"For how long?"
"Two days."
Burner waited.
"He didn't speak for two days," Rowe said. "That's not an expression. He ate, he slept, he walked the fence line, he went in the block building and came out, and he did not say one word to any living person until Tuesday morning."
"And on Tuesday?"
"On Tuesday he called us all into the yard and read a list."
Rowe's ruined hand twitched under its wrapping.
"Nineteen men," he said. "Four women who were with us by choice. Seven who weren't. Thirty people and one well and no stored fuel and a burned yard three weeks before the first snow."
"How much food?"
"Three weeks. Maybe four."
Burner sat very still.
"Say the list," he said.
"He read eight names." Rowe's voice had gone flat. "He said them in order and he said them the way a man reads a delivery docket. And then he said, these eight will be leaving today, and there was about four seconds where everybody thought he meant leaving."
"He didn't."
"Two of them were mine," Rowe said. "Mine, I mean I brought them in. One was a kid of nineteen named Dolan who I found in a ditch outside Anaconda in the first winter and fed and taught to drive the plow truck."
Burner did not say anything.
"I stood up," Rowe said. "That's all I did. I want to be very clear that I did not go for a weapon and I did not raise my voice, because I've had four days to think about what I did and it was nothing. I stood up and I said, Halstead, no."
"And?"
"And he said, that's nine."
The tent was quiet except for the fire.
"He didn't shout," Rowe said. "He never shouts. He said that's nine and then he read out the next thing on his list like I was a line item, and four men that I have eaten with for two years took hold of me."
Burner put his hands together and looked at them.
"They didn't kill me," Rowe said. "I want to say that because you'll assume they did the same to all nine and they didn't. He's got a scale. Four of the eight were sent out the gate with nothing, no coat, no boots, in a burned valley with no food in it, which is killing a man without the paperwork.
Two were shot. Two I don't know about."
"And you?"
"He took two fingers and told me to walk." Rowe lifted the wrapped hand slightly. "He said, you've got twenty-six miles in you. He said it like he was measuring something."
Burner looked up.
"He wanted you to make it here."
Rowe's eyes came into focus properly for the first time.
"That's what I've been lying here trying to say for six hours," he said, "and everybody keeps giving me water."
He got an elbow under himself.
"He knew where I'd go," Rowe said. "There's nowhere else. Everybody in this valley knows there's one camp left with food in it and it's yours. He cut my fingers off and pointed me north and gave me four days of walking to think about what I'd say when I got here."
"And what are you supposed to say?"
"Exactly what I've said," Rowe said. "All of it. True, every word, and you can check it against anything. That's the point. He wants you to hear that he killed eight of his own men for eating."
Burner sat back slowly.
"Because if he'll do that to his own," he said.
"Then what's he going to do to you." Rowe fell back on the blankets. "That's the message. I'm the message. I've been the message since Tuesday and I've had four days of frostbite to work it out and I decided about two days ago that I was going to deliver it anyway."
"Why?"
"Because it's also true that he's down to eleven men," Rowe said, "and somebody should know that, and I'm the only person alive who can say it."
Burner sat with him for another half hour and got everything.
Eleven fighting men. Four women who had chosen it and two who had not and three others whose position he could not explain. The block building intact. The fence intact on three sides. The well good. Twenty-two people and three weeks of food on the fourteenth of October.
Two rifles per man and, Rowe estimated, somewhere under four hundred rounds in total, because the ammunition store had been in a steel cabinet in the shop and the cabinet had been in a fire.
"Cooked off?"
"Some. Most of what was in there is junk now, or he thinks it is, which is the same thing for a careful man." Rowe's eyes were closing. "He's been rationing rounds since the Sunday. Nobody hunts with more than three."
Burner got up.
"Rowe."
"Mm."
"The eight names. Do you remember them?"
"I'll remember them when I'm dying," Rowe said.
Burner stood in the snow outside the tent for a long time.
Then he went and found Halloran and Weathers and Sable and Otway and Sparrow, and they sat in the second tent with the flap tied, six of them crowded around a crate, and he told them everything.
When he finished nobody spoke for a while.
Sparrow had his burned hand in his lap and his face had gone the color of the canvas.
"Dolan," he said.
"That's what Rowe said."
"Nineteen years old. He couldn't read. I was teaching him." Sparrow looked up. "There's a book in that shop with his letters in it, if it hasn't burned."
Halloran leaned forward.
"Is any of it true?"
"All of it," Sparrow said immediately. "Every line. The two days of silence, the list, the scale, the not shouting. I've seen him do smaller versions of it four times and the only thing that's new is the size."
"It could still be a plant," Sable said. "He could have told Rowe exactly what to say."