CHAPTER 1
The man on the store porch looked up, and held it, and went back to what he was doing.
Eli had the bay at a walk and did not change it for him. Down the boards a second man came off the saloon door frame about an inch and stopped there, and a third at the freight office turned his head and turned it back, and none of it went anywhere. There had been years when the first of those looks put four men on a walk before he was past the first building.
What they had was the shape of him. The shape was worth nothing to them without the face to set on top of it, and the face had been nine years getting away from the one they would have been holding.
He rode the length of the street and let them work at it.
The buildings sat where they had sat. Smoke over the store’s chimney, wind coming across the low cut at the end of the flat, and a woman crossing with a basket who did not look up at all.
He went down it checking, because that is what nine years does to a man’s eyes and he could not have stopped himself.
The freight office had been painted and the sign not repainted with it, so the old lettering stood a half shade proud of the boards. Six horses at four rails and not one of them tied for a quick leaving. The trough at the north end had been rebuilt in different timber than the south one, which meant something had happened to the first and somebody had paid for the second. Nobody was working outdoors on a flat afternoon in summer, and there was nothing in the weather to account for it.
He had expected to be able to say what had changed and could not, and that was the first thing about the town he did not care for.
He shifted the rein a quarter inch. The right shoulder took it the way it took everything now — a catch at the joint and then nothing, and it would be worse at first light and worse again when the cold came into the country in the fall. Thomas Lane had put that one in him at thirty yards on open ground with the one hand he had working, saying the words a marshal is required to say while he did it. The left was older and had gone quiet years ago. Walker Davis at the funnel, and Walker Davis dead on the road south of Silas the year after.
The sheriff Eli had taken on the rim four miles north of this street had been Thomas Lane’s brother.
He had that off a book buttoned inside a dead man’s coat on ground nineteen days south of here, and he had not found anybody he could say it to.
Nothing new had gone up on a post anywhere in years. Cheyenne had stopped spending marshals on him a long while back and the freight company had stopped finding men who would take the money, and for a long stretch of years there had been nothing on the road behind him that was doing it for wages.
There had been Thomas Lane, who was not doing it for wages.
Three years at it on his own money and nobody’s orders and none of it on paper anywhere, and at the end of the three years he had come up out of a wash at thirty yards on ground with nothing on it in any direction, and had said the words while he did it, which he had not had to do and had done anyway.
It went the way that kind goes, which is badly and in under four seconds. Afterward Eli sat down on the open ground with his right arm no good to him and went through the man’s coat for a name, and found a book, and read it, and had the last three years accounted for in about a minute and a half.
He left him where he lay. There was nineteen days of country between there and anybody who would have wanted to know.
Eli had never read the quiet as the end of it. He read it a good deal less that way now.
He tied the bay at the rail outside the saloon.
She was thirteen or near it. He had bought her out of a corral two hundred miles south of here in the second year for less than she was worth, because the man selling her had her down as ruined and she was not ruined, she was bored. She had stood over him on that open ground with the rein down and her ears working while he went through a dead man’s coat, and had carried him nineteen days east afterward on a shoulder that would not take the off rein at all.
She stood at a strange rail the way she stood at any other, which was one of the two or three things left that he could count on.
He pushed in through the doors.
Cards at two tables. A woman at the back saying something to a man that made him laugh and did not make the other one laugh. The boards had gone smooth at the corner of the bar where men had stood at the rail for thirty years. The light in the far corners had not improved. Whiskey and woodsmoke and the dust off a dozen coats.
Nobody looked up.
A bartender came out of the back with a crate against his hip, set it down behind the wood, and came along the bar to him. Forty-odd. Going bald and not doing anything about it.
“What’ll it be.”
“Whiskey.”
He poured it and left the bottle inside the reach of his own hand.
“You come up the south road?”
“I did.”
“Anything on it?”
“Nothing moving.”
“That’s about what I’d have said.” He put the bottle down. “Five men through that door since noon and four of them made one drink last an hour at that window. I don’t mind a slow afternoon. I mind one where everybody’s slow at once.”
Eli took a drink and let it go down.
“You passing through?”
“Maybe.”
“There’s a room over the alley if you want it. Nobody’s been in it since June.” He wiped at the rail in front of Eli, which did not want wiping. “You been in here before?”
“Once.”
“Not in six years you haven’t.” He said it comfortably. “Six years I have had this bar and I will have a face the second time it comes through that door. That’s the whole of what I’m any good at.”
“Then it was longer ago than six years.”
“It’d have to be.” He turned and set the bottle back on the shelf and came around again. “Where you headed, if it’s no trouble.”
“North a ways.”
“There isn’t much north a ways.”
“No.”
The bartender waited on the rest of it, and got nothing, and did not appear to hold it against him, and went off down the bar to where somebody had put a finger up.
Eli turned with his back against the wood and put his look across the room without moving his head more than it wanted moving.
The layout held. Front door, and a second one behind the far end of the bar with a crate standing against it, which is what a man does with a back door when nobody has ever come through one at him. Two tables in the open and two against the wall, and the two against the wall were taken, which was correct of whoever took them and probably an accident. The window ran the length of the south side and put every man in the room in silhouette to anybody standing in the street, and not one of them was sitting anywhere else.
What did not hold was the thing underneath all that, and he had no name for it yet either.