Chapter 14 #4
"Not today. Probably not at the yard, because eleven men behind a fence will cost you a great deal and you know it. But in February, or in March, or the first time somebody in my camp decides that ten is better than eleven."
Halstead's voice was completely level. "I've run the thing out to the end four hundred times in the last three weeks and it ends the same way every time, and it ends without me in it."
"Then walk away."
"To where?"
Burner had no answer for that either.
"So here is what this is," Halstead said. "I am going to tell you three things that are true, and you are going to believe about half of them, and then I am going to get up and walk into that rockfall and this will be the last time we speak in a way that isn't shooting."
"Say them."
"First. There are seven people in my yard who are not there by choice. Three women, two men, and two others. They have not been told anything about what is coming and they will be inside the block building when you arrive, because that is where everyone will be,
and if you put fire or anything else into that building you will kill all seven of them along with the rest."
Burner's jaw tightened.
"Second. One of them is a woman of about forty named Ferris."
Everything stopped.
"She was on the work detail until September and then she got sick and she is still sick and she is alive as of Thursday morning," Halstead said.
"I know there is a man in your camp by that name because I have watched your camp for three weeks and heard him shouting at a meeting on the thirteenth from four hundred yards. I am telling you because it will do more damage than anything else I could say."
Burner stared at him.
"Why?"
"Because now you have to decide whether to tell him," Halstead said, "and either way it costs you something."
"That's the most contemptible thing I've ever heard a man say."
"Yes," Halstead said. "And it's true, and you'd have found out in four days anyway, and this way you have four days to think about it. That is the whole of my philosophy and you are welcome to despise it."
Burner made himself breathe.
"Third," he said.
Halstead was quiet for a moment.
"The third one is for you and not for your camp," he said.
"Say it."
"You are going to win this," Halstead said. "And in about two years you are going to be me."
Burner did not move.
"You've got seventy-two people and no food and a winter," Halstead said.
"By February you will be the man who decides who eats. By next summer you will be the man who decides which camp in this valley is a threat, and there will be other camps, because there always are.
And one day you will sit down with a pencil and work out that seventy-two cannot survive and sixty-four can, and you will do it, and you will do it for exactly the reasons I did, and you will write it in a book because you are the sort of man who would."
"No," Burner said.
"That's what I said."
"I'm not you."
"You lit a mountain on fire with twelve people inside the burn," Halstead said.
"You asked a man to walk into my yard knowing what it would cost him. You stood in a ditch and made a choice about a woman in a shop and I watched you make it. Those are my kind of decisions and you made every one of them correctly."
"And I hated all of them."
"So did I," Halstead said, "for about the first eight months."
Burner stood there in the snow with four hundred yards of bench behind him and seventy-two people at the end of it.
And he understood, with a clarity that felt like cold water, exactly what this was.
"That's what you came for," he said.
Halstead tilted his head slightly.
"You didn't come to look at me," Burner said. "You didn't come to warn me about the building or to hurt Ferris, though you did both. You came to tell me that story, and you came to tell it now, four days before the yard, because you want it in my head when I'm standing in it."
"Go on."
"You've spent two years building a thing where every man who works for you gets to believe he's a clerk and not a killer," Burner said.
"And the whole thing's coming apart, and there's one thing left you can do with it, which is hand it to me. You want somebody to carry it. You want to sit in that yard in March and know that whoever's running this valley is running it out of a notebook."
Halstead said nothing at all.
"That's what the names were," Burner said. "Whitlock, Ansel, Crane, Beecher, Ward. You've been doing it since I walked up here. You've been inducting me."
The silence went on a long time.
"That's the most interesting thing anyone has said to me in two years," Halstead said.
He stood up.
He did it slowly, with his hands well away from his body, and he was shorter standing than he had looked sitting, and he brushed the snow off the thighs of his trousers in a way that was so ordinary that Burner felt something crawl.
"I'd like to say one more thing and then I'm going," he said.
"Say it."
"The girl."
Burner's hand moved before he could stop it, an inch toward the crossdraw, and Halstead saw it and did not react.
"I let her go in the grass above the road," he said. "I've told you that and I've thought about it every day since and I told you I didn't regret it. That was true when I said it."
"And now?"
"Now I'd like to be accurate." Halstead looked at him.
"If I had gone up that slope on the twenty-second of September with four men, I would have killed you and taken the child, and she would be in my yard right now, and eight men would be alive, and there would be a settlement at the Kettle paying me half a harvest twice a year for the next ten years,
and about a hundred and forty people in this valley would be alive next spring who are now going to be dead."
He let that sit.
"That is the correct count," he said, "and I have done it nine times and it comes out the same, and it is the single greatest error of my life, and I made it because I was tired and it was eight miles and I had a half tank."
"You want me to feel sorry for you."