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“I don’t argue that. You go up there, you get the horse that got her, and you do one more thing for me.”
“What’s that?”
“What kind of man is Jonas Westman?”
He didn’t expect that question of all questions. He didn’t know why Cassivey asked it. He was feeling in the dark again. And he didn’t know how to put words around the answer that a townsman would understand. He drew a breath, said what said it all. “High-country rider.”
“Honest?”
“Yeah.” There were qualifications to that. “Enough.”
“Honest as Dale was?”
He shook his head. Complicated question. He wondered just what shape of beast Cassivey was tracking with his question—or whether Cassivey in any way understood any rider. Sometimes he seemed to, and sometimes not.
“Aby liked you,” he said to Cassivey, and still didn’t know if Cassivey understood him. “Jonas Westman and his brother— they’re Hawley Antrim’s partners. Hawley’s Aby’s cousin. He’d do what Aby said, as long as she put the fear in him. So they might. On a good day.”
“Aby wouldn’t steal.”
Steal. Pilfer. Town words, for relations between townsmen and riders. Different, in a camp, among riders—where some would and some wouldn’t. “If you didn’t cheat her,” he said, “she wouldn’t steal from you.”
A pause, while Cassivey relit an evidently dead pipe. “Not even if she had a chance for real, realmoney?”
“How much?”
“Three hundred thousand. Maybe more.”
He laughed, sheer surprise—tried to think how much money that would be, and it came up ridiculous.
“What’s fu
Nothing, thinking of it. It was a townsman amount of money. A scary amount of money. It was an amount of money you found in banks.
And where would a rider come near that kind of money? More, what could a rider dowith it if she had it?
Cassivey sent out another puff of smoke. “The truck that went off the road?” Cassivey said. More puffs. “Gold shipment.”
Stu
But then, Cassivey couldn’t know what he was thinking, either. Cassivey had just told him where enough money was that rich townsmen would kill each other in droves to get it.
Enough money that a rider, if he had it stashed, could take to the roads and the hills and never work again for the rest of his life— but he’d never sleep easy about it.
“Dale knew what was on that lead truck,” Cassivey said.
Now he did. Townsmen would kill each other to know what he knew.
Except that townsmen, even heavily armed, even posting guards over their sleep, and traveling with more than one truck, weren’t safe going up there into the High Wild to reach that wreckage.
Not safe from the weather.
Not safe from the rogue that could overwhelm all their defenses.
But somebody from the villages up there was inevitably going to get down to that truck. Its apparent cargo—what he’d seen in Jonas’ image—had been lumber, which wasn’t damn valuable on a forested mountainside, but just the metal in that truck had value. The engine parts. The tires and axles. Every piece of it was valuable salvage to a village. And if some village crew got to stripping it—
“Find the box,” Cassivey said. “Turn it over to the head of Tarmin Mines, at Tarmin. That’s Salmon Martines. Simple job.”
“Simple.”
“Truck went off on the downhill, on that bad turn—you know the road?”
“Seen it.” He didn’t say it he’d only seen it in Aby’s mind. Cassivey wouldn’t understand and it didn’t matter. He’d seen it in Jonas’ image. A rogue horse and that turn. Hell.
“Must be ten, fifteen trucks have gone down there.” Cassivey puffed smoke. “There, and hitting the wall at the end of the grade. Rock’s soft. Surface skids with you. Nasty, nasty turn.”
“What’s the weight?” He was suddenly in territory he knew, negotiating with a shipper, on technicalities he understood.
“More than one man can haul up a mountain. You’ll have to bring it up part at a time. Hire an ox-team and drivers at Tarmin. It’s going to take that. You ride guard on the crew, say it’s company papers you’re after, and make sure all of it gets to Martines. When the weather opens up next spring, and you’re sure you can make it down with the load, you hire that same ox-team and bring it down to Anveney. Pay’s equipment now, and a thousand in the bank. When we get that box back… I’ll drop five more thousand into your account.”
He saw why Aby had gone out of her way for this one shipper. And he knew, in one moment of revelation, whatAby had been guarding on these a
“You’re giving me the deal she had.”
“I asked her once who else I could trust, if it ever happened she couldn’t take a convoy through.”
The air in Anveney suddenly didn’t smell half so bad. “I need a rifle. Ammunition, blanket, carry-pack, flour, oil, burning-glass… couple of sides of bacon. Got to have that.”
“You’re a very modest man, Stuart. What in hell happened to your gear?”
<Gunfire. Hitting the ground. Burn.>
“No matter,” Cassivey said. “None of my business. Six hundred do it on the gear?”
“Four. She said I was honest.”
“Five. Get a pistol, too. A rifle’s not always in reach. I want you backwith my money.”
The man wasn’t just any townsman. He couldn’t be a rider. Trucker, Guil decided. Maybe a high-country miner. At least someone who’d not sat behind town walls all his life. Aby hadn’t said. Aby’d kept all her inside-buildings dealings at Anveney to herself, partly because he wasn’t interested in towns. There was just the single surface thought urging him to join her on this run. The rest—he hadn’t discussed.
This man was clearly a debt of hers. This man had asked her not to talk about his business. Somewhere, somehow, she’d owed Cassivey, in a major way. He understood it. He wondered if Cassivey did.
“Understand,” Cassivey said, “you don’t talk about what’s in that truck. You don’t talk about the thing those trucks sometimes carry.”
“Aby never talked your business to me.”
Cassivey nodded slowly. Made several slow puffs, staring at him. “A damn good woman.”
He couldn’t talk for a moment. He knew now. Aby’d not done anything out of order, hadn’t changed, hadn’t been other than the woman who’d grown up with him. Aby had pleaded with him to join her—and himself, thick-headed, he’d seen only the evasions and getting mad about it. But it was Aby. It was the woman he knew. She came back to him—dead, she came back to him the way she had been, she hadn’tlied to him, and a weight went off his back.
“Yeah,” he said finally.
“I’ll make you out a contract,” Cassivey said, and laid aside the pipe. “I’ll send someone to the bank. One fine’s enough.”
He went out with what was newly his and with a contract in his pocket, riding in the open back of a Cassivey & Carnell truck, through the main town streets and down through the town gates.
One part townsman arrogance, he’d have thought it, without having met Cassivey, to send a truck outside Anveney gates with no horse to protect it, to deliver a rider back to the Wild.
He’d have taken it as an affront to his pride and his profession— under other circumstances; points for an old trucker, scored on a rider who ordinarily would watch over anybody going a stone’s throw out past the gates of any other town.
Not at Anveney, the point surely was. At Anveney, armed guards weren’t riders, and they didn’t need help—in their grassless desolation.
Right now, with his leg hurting like unforgiven sin, he was just damned grateful that Cassivey took the trouble to save him some walking, and he was glad enough of that courtesy that he was willing to make idle conversation with the guard in the back of the truck, a guard who chattered about the weather and the coming winter and how he’d like to drive the long routes, but he wasn’t sure his wife wouldn’t take up with somebody else if he did.