Cloud's Rider

But he began to sweat, then, hoping he hadn’t opened a question on that matter.

He didn’t mention this time either how there’d been a fight between riders down the mountain, didn’t mention riders dying or Spook or other horses being loose; but neither had Ridley brought that matter up yet, even to him back at the camp, after he’d heard his account at the marshal’s office. He didn’t know why they’d called him and not the Goss boys to question—though maybe they had talked to Carlo and Randy.

He reckoned himself the least involved of anyone, not even being from Rogers Peak, and probably the most impartial witness, and he figured if Ridley at this hour wanted any question raised about rider business whatever, Ridley was the boss in the rider camp, and that meant they should ask Ridley.

Which was exactly what he meant to say if they asked him anything of that sort: he’d resolved that matter early on.

But before he’d received any signal that they were finished with questions, one gray-haired man asked Judge Hodges about the legalities of inheritance, and Dawson stood up in the audience and said there were rights like for any salvage.

Then a woman who seemed to be anotherlawyer in the village said that, no, the Goss kids could have rights to the whole town.

Then the lawyer who seemed to be the judge’s relative, Dawson, said maybe to the smiths’ shop, but not to anything else.

Da

Then the notion dawned on him that Carlo and Randy could be rich.

That was a good thing, he supposed, if they survived the honor, counting some of these people, the miners and loggers, he supposed, looked real rough. But he didn’t think Carlo and Randy wanted ever to go back to Tarmin to live.

But not just Carlo and Randy had a right. The preacher stood up, called Brio

Being by now used to being damned, Da

The preacher added, “And God chose this brave young rider to guide them.”

That meant God had somehow ended up guiding a rider into the bargain—past two perfectly good shelters and on to Evergreen, half-killing them in the process.

No, that was sacrilegious. Maybe they wouldn’t have made it at all if they’d stayed in those shelters. Maybe something terrible would have happened to them or that horse would have caught up to Cloud and Cloud would have gotten killed. Then they’d have been stuck there helpless. He could easily construct sufficient disaster in his mind to explain why God would have had them bypass the shelters. There was a scared small spot in him that was still devout in his mother’s and his father’s religion, mortally scared of his own lately-come-by irreverence.

But after that Dawson and the other lawyer and the judge were out of their seats and a couple of other people began arguing.

He was glad, then, not to be named too directly. He wished he dared go back after another drink of hot tea back on that table. His throat was still sore when he talked for any length of time and the lawyers had started dicing things in terms of village law and inheritance law, over what, while he stood there on sore feet, really began to sound like some sort of compromise where Carlo and Randy— and Brio

That was still a lot of inheritance. And by all they said he didn’t think they had ever talked to Carlo and Randy.

One person stood up and said technically there couldn’t be salvage since there hadn’t been a wreck.

But, the judge argued, there couldn’t be next of kin to consider, either, since with the exception of the Goss kids all the next of kin of Tarmin folk had died right there. Nobody in Tarmin had married outside the village that anybody in Evergreen knew about, and it was first come first claimed, so the one faction maintained.

God, it was a gold rush. Except the prize was buildings. Stores. Houses. Personal goods. Equipment, all lying intact down there— because the vermin wouldn’t have destroyed that. The people in this church were talking about inheritances because they were priming themselves to go down the mountain as soon as they could and lay claim to vacant stores and houses in Tarmin—

But what would they do with their own? Da

And what about the other villages, that they dismissed with a reckoning that Tarmin villagers hadn’t any relatives up here or anywhere, and there was no legal need to notify anybody else?

So Evergreen was going to get it all?

Damn, he thought. Thatwas why the marshal had wanted him to come and tell what he knew to this gathering of the important, the powerful, the richpeople in the village.

They were going to organize an expedition come spring, faster than any other village knew anything was wrong in Tarmin except the normal downing of the phone lines in winter storms. They would go down there, not just to loot the place of what was portable, though a lot of that might happen, too, but abandoning their stores and houses, or leaving them, he guessed, to relatives, or maybe just flinging them to the first comer along with all the winter privations of the High Loop, to gain what he understood was the easier weather further down the mountain, where theycould be the shippers and run the mills and do the other things that siphoned off profit before it filtered up to the High Loop.

Did the vermin get everything? he’d been asked yesterday.

And he’d said, the truth: No, not but what was alive or stored food. And the hides in storage they’d probably get—because the winter hunger was that fierce, and vermin usually gnawed up the hides of whatever fell in the High Wild. What went down anywhere in the Wild was gone before the sunrise, down to the bare bones and few of those. But Tarmin—Tarmin had been so rich and so full of food even the swarm that had occupied it hadn’t scattered the bones. Hadn’t gnawed through all the doors by morning.

Had by now, he was sure. And what did Tarmin get now? A swarm of humans to follow the vermin?

Nobody yet seemed to have talked to Carlo about these rights everybody was arguing about.

Then someone who identified himself as the representative from the miners’ barracks stood up, a thin, bearded man who hooked his thumbs in his belt and said lawyers were all fine and good, but that any miner who staked a claim first was the title-holder.

“This isn’t a mine!” the mayor said, and the judge said.

“When value’s added by human hands, it’s not a find.”

“Beg to differ,” the other lawyer said.

“Words,” the miner rep drawled. “If we get down there first we stake the claims and then you lawyers can come down there and try to talk us out of ’em.”

Applause followed that, from a handful, boos from others.

That kind of wrangling was going to go on for days and months, Da