CHAPTER 1
The man on the store porch came up out of his chair and went inside, and was back out on the boards with two others behind him before Eli had the bay past the first building.
They took him in from the rail. One of them said something short without turning his head to say it, and it went along the porch and off the end of it and down the walk ahead of him faster than the mare was going. By the time he came level with the store there were four men on that walk who had not been on it when he turned in off the road.
Three days back, at a water stop below the railroad, a freighter's cook had looked twice at the right side of his face while he was filling a canteen and had gone careful with him after that. The line along the beard was going on three years healed and it was still the plainest thing on him. The drawings never had it. The men who had seen him once and talked about it since always did.
The town was one street with a store on the left and a saloon down from it and a livery at the south end where the boards gave out. Dust packed hard in the middle and loose at the edges. A piano going in the saloon.
He read the paper on the post at the edge of the store's boards without slowing the mare for it.
It was new. The stock was clean and the ink had not gone brown at the folds yet, which put it off a press inside the month and up this road inside the week. His name across the top. Under the name a drawing with his beard on it and nothing else of him. Under the drawing the number, and under the number the line about dead or alive that had been on every one of them since Two Pines.
Twelve hundred dollars.
The paper at Two Pines had said five hundred, and five hundred was what it had gone on saying for two years after, on every station wall and store post he had passed. Eight hundred in the spring at a stage stop below the rail. Now this.
No county in this country had twelve hundred dollars to lay on one man. That money came down from the federal court at Cheyenne, and Cheyenne had it on him because he had put a federal marshal on his back in a stage road with a hat across his chest. What was new was the moving. The number had sat still for two years and had gone up twice since the spring. Somebody at that bench had taken it up again and was spending on it.
Walker Davis had wanted him alive. He had wanted it twice and had said so both times, standing up, out loud, with a hole in him on the second one. He had spent the last two words he had on turning Eli loose on that road instead, and Eli had been doing what those two words told him to do ever since, into a third year of it now.
Nobody carrying that paper was going to want him alive. That was the whole difference the number made, and it was worth more to him than the figure was.
He rode past it at the pace he had come in at.
"You've gone up again."
The voice came off his left. He gave it a moment before he turned.
The man had been standing at the post since before Eli came level with it, and Eli had seen him there and had put nothing on him. Forty or so, trimmed beard, flat hat, and no dust on him below the knee, which put him in the town and not on the road that day.
"That paper's been up since Tuesday," the man said. "I've read it four times waiting on a man to come out of that store, and I'll tell you what I worked out. Whoever set the type spelled Creed with two e's and got it right, and whoever drew the picture never saw you."
"Somebody saw me."
"Somebody described you." He came off the post and out into the road, not crowding the mare and not standing away from her either. "There's a difference and you're better off for it. I buy horses. Been here five weeks buying them and I get paid out Thursday and I go. Which means I've had five weeks of standing on that walk with nothing to do but watch who comes up this road."
"And you've got something you want to sell me."
"I don't sell information. I'd be poor at it." He put his thumb in his belt. "Man came through a week back Tuesday. Rode a good sorrel, kept her better than a hired horse gets kept, and he came to the store and stood about where you are and read that same paper with his hands behind him. Then he went along the walk asking which roads ran south out of here."
"How many are there?"
"Two. There's the graded one you came up, that runs down to the rail at Bell's Crossing, and there's the track that goes off west of the livery into the dry ground. Everybody takes the graded one. There's water on it and a station at the end of it and you can get fed." He tipped his chin a half inch west. "He took the track."
Eli let his look go the half inch the man's chin had gone. The livery stood at the end of the boards with the corral behind it, and past the corral the ground opened and went dun and there was a line through it that a wagon had not been over in a while.
"He say what he was?"
"He didn't have to. He paid the boy at the livery in federal money and he never once put his hand out to shake anybody's."
"Obliged."
"It cost me nothing to say it." The man went back to the post and laid his hand where his hand had been. "I'd take it kindly if you were down that road before my Thursday."