Chapter 14 #3
Cass thought about it.
"Okay," she said.
Shyla caught Burner's eye across the fire and gave him a look that was so exactly Weathers that he had to look away.
They left the basin at dawn on the eighteenth of October.
Seventy-two people in a line a quarter mile long, with four litters and eleven improvised sleds and every single thing they owned on their backs, going northeast into country that none of them but Halloran had ever crossed.
It snowed on them for the first six hours.
They made nine miles the first day, which was better than Burner had feared, and camped in a stand of timber with no fires, and nobody complained about the cold.
On the second day they made eleven miles and turned south.
On the third day, at about two in the afternoon, with the whole line strung out along a bench above a frozen creek, Priest came running back down the column from the point and his face was white.
"There's a man ahead," he said. "On the trail. Sitting down in the middle of it, in the open, waiting."
Burner went forward with Sable and Halloran and forty people watching from the bench.
Four hundred yards up, where the bench narrowed to a neck between the creek and a rockfall, a man was sitting on a flat stone in the snow.
He had no hat.
He had a canvas barn coat and his hands were resting on his knees and there was no rifle anywhere near him, and he was sitting exactly in the middle of the only route through, and he had been there long enough for the snow to settle on his shoulders.
Burner put the glasses up and looked at Halstead's face for the first time in his life.
The man lifted one hand, unhurried, and beckoned him forward.
"Don't," Halloran said.
"I know."
"He's sitting in the one place on this whole bench where four men in that rockfall could take you and nobody down here could do a thing about it."
"I know that too."
Burner put the glasses down and looked at the neck.
It was about sixty feet wide with the frozen creek on the left and a rockfall on the right that went up a hundred feet in broken slabs, and it was the only way through for a column with litters, and it was exactly what he would have picked.
"Sable," he said. "Get four people up on the far side of the creek and get them level with that rockfall. Not above it, level. Tell them not to shoot at anything, tell them to be visible."
"Visible?"
"I want him to know they're there. That's all."
She went.
"You're going up there," Halloran said.
"Yes."
"Say why, because I'd like to understand it before I have to explain it to seventy-two people."
Burner watched the seated man.
"Because he's out of time and he's sitting in the snow," he said.
"Three weeks ago he was leaving notes and sending men to gates. Now he's sitting on a rock in the open at four hundred yards where any one of nineteen rifles could try him. That's not a man managing a system. That's a man with nothing left in the bag."
"Or it's the best ambush he's ever set."
"Or it's that," Burner agreed. "But he's got four men and we've got seventy-two people on a bench and he's watched us walk up it for an hour. If he wanted a fight here he'd have started it in the first ten minutes, in the narrow part, when the litters were on the ice."
Halloran was quiet a moment.
"What do you want from me?"
"Hold the column here. Nobody comes forward. If it goes wrong, don't come and get me, go back down the bench and around by the creek bed, it'll cost you four hours and it's passable with the sleds."
"Burner."
"And if he stands up and walks away from that rock," Burner said, "nobody shoots him in the back. I want that said out loud to every rifle on this bench and I want it said now."
Halloran stared at him.
"Why in God's name not?"
"Because I don't know what he's going to say yet," Burner said, "and because if we do that in front of seventy-two people, then there's seventy-two people who watched us do it, and they'll all remember it for a very long time."
He walked up the bench alone.
It took four minutes and they were among the longest of his life. The snow squeaked under his boots. The rockfall on his right got bigger and more full of places a man could be, and he did not look at it, because looking would not help and would be seen.
He stopped at fifteen feet.
Halstead did not get up.
Up close he was older than the glasses had suggested. Late forties, maybe fifty. Gray coming in at the temples and a face that was nothing in particular, the face of a man you would not look at twice in a store.
He had lost weight recently. Burner could see it in the way the coat hung.
"That's close enough," Halstead said. "For both our sakes."
Burner stopped.
"You've got four people moving up the far bank of the creek," Halstead said. "That was well done. I'd have done the same."
"You've got men in that rockfall."
"I've got two men in that rockfall and one of them is Cutter, who you would not enjoy."
Halstead said it without any emphasis at all.
"And they have both been told that if I stand up and put my hat on, they are to do nothing, and I am not wearing a hat, which is the joke I have been enjoying privately for about an hour."
Burner did not smile.
"Say what you came to say."
"I came to look at you," Halstead said.
"You've been looking at me for three weeks."
"I've been looking at what you do. That's different." He shifted slightly on the stone. "Sit down, if you like. Or don't. I'm not going to pretend this is a negotiation, because it isn't, and we'd both know."
"I'll stand."
"Fair enough."
The wind moved along the creek.
"How many are dead?" Halstead asked.
"Two of ours."
"Prentice and the woman. Hobbes." He nodded slightly. "That was Cutter and a man named Beale. I want to be clear that I ordered both of those and that neither of them was personal, because you will have been told otherwise by now and I would rather you had it accurately."
Burner said nothing.
"And on your side?"
"Three of yours at our camp on the twenty-third. One in the yard that Delacroix got, and I don't know his name. One that I shot in the doghair."
"Four names," Halstead said. "Whitlock, Ansel, Ollie Crane, and Beecher, who was the one in the yard. The fifth in the lodgepole was a man called Ward and he lived four days."
"Why are you telling me that?"
"Because you asked me a question and I answered it, and then I gave you the names because you did not ask for them, and I want you to notice that." Halstead's hands stayed flat on his knees. "That is the entire difference between us and I have been thinking about it for three weeks."
"There's no difference between us."
"There is, and it's smaller than you'd like, and I'd like to tell you what it is."
Burner watched him.
"Go on."
"I keep a list," Halstead said. "I have kept a list for two years. Every person I have taken something from and every person I have put in the ground. It's a notebook and it's in the block building and you will find it if you get there,
and when you read it you will assume it is the work of a monster."
"It is."
"Yes," Halstead said. "That's my point."
He looked out at the frozen creek.
"I kept it so that none of it could be an accident," he said.
"That was the whole theory. A man who writes it down cannot pretend it happened to him. I have watched every other outfit in this valley turn into animals inside of six months and I was determined that we would not, and the reason we did not is that I made everyone say what we were doing out loud,
in plain words, and write it in a book."
"You killed eight of your own men last week."
"I killed eight of my own men last week."
"For eating."
"For eating," Halstead agreed. "And it is in the book, in my hand, with the date and the reason, and the reason is written as it actually was, which is that thirty people could not survive the winter and twenty-two could."
Burner felt something turn over in him.
"Rowe made it," he said.
"I know."
"You knew when you sent him."
"I hoped." Halstead's face did not change. "I gave him a bad hand and no coat and twenty-six miles and I thought he had about a one in three chance, and I thought that if he made it he would tell you exactly what I did, and that you would understand what it meant."
"What does it mean?"
"That I am at the end of it," Halstead said.
The wind came down the creek again.
"You burned four hundred acres and two tanks and a shop and three trucks in about ninety minutes," he said.
"I have spent three weeks working out what that actually cost me and I will tell you honestly that it is everything. There is no version of the next four months where my people eat, and I have known that since the Sunday I walked back into that yard,
and I did not say it out loud for two days because I was doing the count."
"Then why the note? Why the schedule? Why December?"
"Because I needed you to believe I had time," Halstead said. "It's the only card I had left. If you believe a man can wait, you start bargaining with him. If you know he's starving, you wait him out."
"And now you're telling me."
"Now I'm telling you," Halstead said, "because you are walking seventy-two people to my yard, which I did not think anyone would do, and which means the bluff is finished."
Burner stood in the snow and did the thing he had been doing all his life, which was to refuse to be comfortable.
"You want to make a deal," he said.
"No."
That stopped him.
"I have nothing to trade," Halstead said.
"That's the part I'd like you to hear clearly. I have eleven men, four hundred rounds of doubtful ammunition, twenty-two people and eleven days of food, and a yard with no roof on the shop. There is no arrangement I can offer you that is worth anything,
and if I stood here and pretended otherwise you'd know inside of a minute."
"Then what is this?"
Halstead looked up at him.
"I'm going to lose," he said.
Burner did not answer.