Being by now used to being damned, Danny stood with his hat respectfully in his hands and waited to be bypassed if the preacher was polite, and he thought this one with the pretty blue church was far nicer than preachers down on the plains.
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 Brionne if she ever waked up—were entitled either to money or to their parents’ property, but not to the whole town and all the salvage in it.
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? Danny asked himself. What about their ownhouses, their ownjobs and their lives up here?
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, Danny thought. He wished he could find an occasion to go back to the table, or better yet all the way back to the rider camp. He was more than glad when Ridley, perhaps in the same frame of mind, walked forward from the back rows and said to the assembly and the marshal that they’d go back now and stand available for further questions if the village needed them.
“That’s fine. That’s real fine. Appreciate your help,” the marshal, Peterson, said, and shook Ridley’s hand. Their departure stopped the debate, and various townfolk and several of the disputants came and expressed their appreciation for the report. “Glad to have you the winter,” one said, which was a lot better than riders got out of Shamesey folk. Then Reverend Quarles came and said, “I know I can’t convince Ridley there, but we’d be happy to see you in Sunday services, son.”
“Thank you,” Danny said. He was astounded by the offer. “I might,” he said, and found occupation for his hands in keeping the brim of his hat uncrimped. “I might do that.”
“Any time you, you know, want to talk, I’m just the other side of the wall.”
“I won’t forget that, thank you, sir.”
But by then he was sure the preacher’s invitation simply hoped to separate him from Cloud and thereby save his soul, and his partnership with Cloud wasn’t even remotely negotiable. John Quarles and his heaven-blue church was certainly a kinder-spoken and more forgiving preacher than the fire-and-brimstone peddlers down in Shamesey town. In Shamesey as a whole a rider’s leathers and fringed jacket weren’t welcome, not in the town streets and least of all in respectable places. This village as a whole seemed a lotbetter.
But he didn’t linger to quibble. He had his escape, and took his leave with Ridley, out the front door through the foyer and down the porch steps.
It was done, then. He’d told what mattered.
“Wasn’t too bad,” he said to Ridley. “But what are they going to do? Wait till spring or what?”
“They’re going to be down that mountain like willy-wisps,” Ridley said, “some maybe if the weather holds good, hoping to get a jump on the others, and if they leave down the road, I’m damn sure not guiding them, and if they go overland I’m not rescuing them. They’ve lost their damn minds.”
Village riders were very different from town riders, he’d begun to figure that. Ridley cared about Evergreen. Shamesey riders, who hadn’t any sense of personal attachment, just drew pay for guarding herds and fields, or they got hire as he had with the convoys that took commerce back and forth between the towns. But if people Ridley knew were fools, Ridley might still go after them—that was how he understood the man, and Callie as well.
Jennie complicated things. Immensely.
And walking back from the meeting in which neither he nor Ridley had told all the truth—for what he suspected were very different reasons—he said to himself he had to talk to Carlo very soon and tellhim what the thinking was in the village, in case no one got around to explain to Carlo what his rights were, because Carlo, being an outsider like himself, didn’t have anybody but him to do that. But he couldn’t run from here to there or people would draw fast connections.