Rider at the Gate

He walked away across the yard, onto the commons and the street, wanting Cloud, wanting the steadiness and the quiet Cloud could give him. He intended to take Cloud back to the den far around at the hostel where he stayed.

But he felt a restraining hand on his arm—and looked around in panic. He’d not heard the rider who, soft-footed and shadowless in the dark, had overtaken him.

“Why’d you speak up for him?” It was the leader of the strangers. The one who’d spoken most.

“I don’t know. Stupid, maybe.”

“You know him.”

“He helped me once. We talked. He didn’t have to. He gave me good advice.”

“The leg hurt?”

He didn’t know how the man knew. He wasn’t limping. He started away into the shadows of the street without another word, but he didn’t see the den, he saw <rider on the hill.> He heard <gunfire echoing off town walls,> and flinched from the shot so badly he almost fell.

The rider wanted his attention. And got it, with that transmitted memory.

“Jonas is my name,” the stranger said. “Jonas Westman. You heard him louder than we did. Why?”

“I don’t know!”

“Kids do sometimes. Kids don’t know to stop. Don’t know to wall things out. Don’t know when they’re hearing and when they’re making it up.”

“I didn’t make it up. It hurt.”

“You could be a help to us. You could be a real help. Stuart knows you. You can hear Stuart. You want the high country. We can take you there.”

He didn’t know how the man knew what he wanted—or whether Cloud, who longed for the High Wild, had betrayed him… because when the man offered, he suddenly wasn’t thinking only about helping Stuart, he was thinking about why he’d gone to Stuart with his question in the first place, he was remembering that longing he had that wasn’t logic, just a condition—like dreaming about the unattainable stars. And Cloud wanted to go. Cloud wanted to take him up to the High Wild where Cloud had come from—Cloud hated Shamesey, hated the cattle, hated the town and hated the smell and the crowding; and that town was all his very junior, townbred rider could give him.

He wasn’t sure Cloud wasn’t listening now. He felt that all-over tingle of longing that wiped out every clear consideration to the contrary.

“You have a partner in camp?” Jonas Westman asked. “You got leave to take? Anybody to go with you?”

Rider conversations ran like that, when the horses were too close, mediating half of it. He didn’t know he’d agreed. It played hob with negotiations. And Jonas Westman knew his answer: he caught the echo back from Westman, a kind of confused imaging, <the house, Denis… in the streets, with the gunfire going off.> The kid would have been scared.

No. He’d have run to see, the stupid kid.

“No kin in camp,” he said, reasoning that Denis was beyond his reach. Or his harm. “In town, yeah, family, —but I could drop dead. I’m nothing to them.”

The borderer had to know the ambivalence in the anger. The hurt. The offended pride. He’d not made friends in camp. The juniors from Shamesey district, even the rider kids, were all too touchy, too protective. Everything in juniors felt raw, exposed, feelings left open to every passing opinion—and he was, right now, scared of this Jonas Westman in the same way he’d been scared going to Stuart with his questions.

And as careful as he’d been, Stuart had had to slap him down, and remind him to mind his own edges, just the same as this man was telling him—this man who’d learned everything about the aching ambition of his young, debt-plagued life in two short seconds, while he still knew nothing whatsoever about Jonas Westman except that he called Guil Stuart a friend and was, if things went wrong up there, willing to shoot Stuart and Stuart’s horse both. But this wasn’t a bad man. He didn’t think so. They’d been spooked. But they’d triedto keep the terror bottled up and not to let it loose: they’d certainly helped settle things down at the meeting.

“You going?” Jonas asked.

“Yessir,” he said, feeling he’d just stepped off a cliff. Pride didn’t let him go back on that, not even when the agreement was just a second out of his mouth. “Depending on my horse.”

“Always depending,” the senior rider said. “That’s a given. Come on. Let’s talk.”

It was harder and harder to back out, when he found himself trekking along with the stranger through the edge of the gaslight, knowing he’d talked himself into something Cloud wouldn’t let him back out of. He was sure now that Cloud knew and wasn’t saying no, not to the proposition nor to the company he was in.

<Mountains. Snow,> he kept seeing, and <gray, scudding clouds around the peaks. >

Cloud’s name, in its endless variations.

Cloud’s freedom from Shamesey smokes and the minds of cattle.

How could Cloud’s rider say no to that?

Chapter v

THE SUN WAS COMING. THAT WAS THE SURE PROOF THAT THE world had rolled on without much giving a damn. Something died, something became something else’s supper, something brand new saw the dawn, and the world was still here.

Guil Stuart became aware of that fact, sitting, blanketed in grass, against Burn’s warm and breathing side, and watching the stars go out above the plains that began at Shamesey town—watching what, in the mountains, you couldn’t see: the edge of the world, where the illusory daylight began, unraveling the night along a long seam of light.

Almost cloudless morning.

Nice day.

His leg hurt. Damn stupid, walking on it. It didn’t want to bend now. He supposed it would, once he warmed up: his legs were numb and his backside was feeling the chill seeping up through the grass mat from the ground beneath. His hands were icy cold… he’d come away with no hat, no scarf, no gloves, and he’d waked with a pale rime of frost on the ground, on the leaves of knifegrass he’d cut for a lap-robe, and on the toes of his boots. If he moved, he might lose the grass he’d so meticulously arranged, which would expose his arm and shoulder to the icy cold, while the other arm, the one against Burn’s body, was comfortably warm, so he chose not to move, and not to disturb Burn’s sleep.

It seemed not but an hour or so ago that they’d settled to rest, unable to go on, Burn aching from the effort and unwilling to take another step. Burn had settled on the ground to sleep, not Burn’s habit when the ground was this cold, but Burn’s legs were tired.

So, having been so bright as to have left his pocket matches and his glass with his guns and his trail gear (God, it was slovenly camp habits he’d fallen into lately, having no glass and no matches on him; but, hell, he hadn’t expected to be on his own in the Wild in what he stood in, either) he’d done the best he could. He’d cut the tall plains grass for a mat to keep Burn’s belly warm and for a cover for himself. He’d been too tired to weave strip-and-tie mats—the cold hadn’t been that bad, and his eyes had kept shutting while he worked.

But he’d worked up a sweat doing it. And hurt the leg, like a fool. But it was numb with the morning cold, not too bad. The side of him next to Burn was downright warm.

If he didn’t move, Burn wouldn’t.

Aby died, and the morning after, the uncaring sun came up, and the man who, alone in the world, ought to be broken-hearted, was busy preserving his own warm spot in the frosty dawn, moving his toes in his boots to be sure they would move… first small venture of his mind out of its deliberate search for pain and distraction, and it wasn’t so bad, the world wasn’t, the cold wasn’t, the sun wasn’t. It was incredible it all went on, but it did, and he found hedid, miraculously sitting on the other side of a black pit he just couldn’t look into yet.

He wasn’t interested to look. Aby was gone and there wasn’t anything profitable in that dark, crazed night past, the night he could remember only because some fool townsmen had tried to blow his leg off.