“You suppose I ought to tellCarlo?” he’d asked Ridley then, deciding on the direct approach.
“Don’t know what he could do about it,” was Ridley’s answer.
That put him in mind of what his father had always said about the law, which seemed the only wisdom that applied—just don’t sign anything.
He’d slept with it, and waked with it, and worried over it.
His first trip this morning had to be out to the den, and he left the breakfast table, dressed for the cold—a light snow was falling— and took Cloud a biscuit from breakfast. The other horses, crowding him as he came into the den from the open-air approach, were obliged to wait: Ridley encouraged him to do that, saying that waiting their turn was good for them: they’d gotten out of their summer manners, meaning when they regularly had strange horses in the den, and they could learn they hadn’t a right to every biscuit that came into their sight.
So while Ridley was helping Callie clear the dishes, he fed Cloud his treat and rubbed him down from head to tail and oiled his feet, quiet in his mind for the first time since he’d come to Evergreen.
Cloud was satisfied, making that curious contentment sound, enjoying the importance of the first and only biscuit of the day. Cloud ducked his head around while he was working and licked the inside of his ear, which Cloud knewhe hated.
Both of them were moving a little more freely now, on feet less tender and joints less sore, and, able to go to Cloud and do such basic, ordinary things, Danny felt a great knot of tension that had been in him unravel. Conclusions hard to come to in the guarded ambient in the barracks were far clearer to him when he’d gotten out here to ordinary work.
The truly difficult things were over and done with, the emergencies were all settled, and there was almost nothing to do but brush Cloud’s tail and feed Cloud and bring him biscuits.
Cloud liked that idea. If there’d been females available, the winter would be absolutely perfect. But, next best thing to please his horse, Danny thought about <hunting,> and expected Cloud to approve that idea.
Cloud wasn’t as enthusiastic about it as he might have been. Cloud lifted his head and looked toward the walls and shivered.
Danny found that very odd. He stopped the brushing with his fist still full of Cloud’s tail, and he looked in that direction without even thinking he’d done it.
He’d never been wintered-in anywhere before. Shamesey didn’t have weather to require it, although a lot of riders arrived there to winter-over and the trade died down: Shamesey never felt isolated.
But Evergreen village suddenly seemed very small and very fragile against the mountain shoulder. It dawned on him then for the first time that there just wasn’t any human civilization in the world farther out on the edge than Evergreen and the little string of villages down its lonely road. Over on the other side of the mountain— there was just the Wild, where humans who’d dropped down from the sky had never visited, not on their farthest rides. No villages, no trails, no camps, no riders. Civilization just stopped—maybe just around the shoulder of the rock outcrops on the road they’d ridden. Civilization stopped in the mountains he’d not been able to see from his whited-out vantage on that high turn. Nobody had been out there. Ever.
Cloud’s skin twitched. Cloud snorted and the other horses acted bothered, but the ambient was otherwise quiet, and Cloud settled to being brushed again, rocking gently to the strong strokes Danny put into it.
A rider just shouldn’t think about spooky things, he told himself, not up here, not when the wind had started to blow out of the unsettled Wild.
The snow was coming down thick and hard when he walked out of the den with the notion increasingly sure that in this edge-of-the-world place friends were hard come by.
The end of winter might not see him better settled in the barracks than the beginning had: he had every legitimate rightto be in the rider camp for the winter, but he still found himself in an awkward position as an intrusion in the common room of the barracks— which turned out to be a family’s living room: not that it was supposedto be that, but there just wasn’t another child Jennie could play with—even as easy as the rider camp’s relationship with the village seemed, thatline was one people wouldn’t send their children across—and the barracks that in some places was a very rough and careless environment, was unquestionably a family living arrangement in Evergreen, an arrangement in which a teenaged visitor of outside origins was undeniably suspect in motives and personal habits. He didn’t think even Callie thought he’d do something so awful as have designs on Jennie; but clearly Callie didn’t leave him alone with Jennie, He wasn’t friendswith Callie. He never would be, he strongly suspected. He probably would never be friends with Ridley, on Callie’s account.
He didn’t know what his relationship was with Carlo, and why he hesitated so long and resisted so much going over there, whether he didn’t want to get the rebuff he’d had from some of his old townside friends, or whether he was beginning to believe Callie that he was a fool in the path of rational people, and he was scared to give Carlo advice on something he really didn’t understand any more than Carlo did.
He was spooked about the law, was one thing. Hisearly association with it hadn’t been that of an honest and upright citizen
And heheld too damn many secrets to sleep sound at night—Callie not even trusting him to keep to his bed. He’d tried turning down the vodka last evening.
Funny thing, Callie had said her feelings would be hurt if he didn’t drink it. So he had drunk it, all but certain now his very deep sleep and morning lethargy had something to do with it. People who’d do thatto you—maybe they didn’t want you wandering across the line between camp and village. That was the other matter that had him spooked—but at least this morning he knew for sure what he’d suspected about his nights there.
And theywere the source of all the advice he had.
Maybe they had their own set of problems. He had his.
So he found no need to tell them he was going.
He cast a look toward the barracks veiled in blowing snow, and no one was stirring—he’d given the excuse of going out to the den—he didn’t have to give them excuses, and there was no reason he couldn’t go over villageside on his own, absolutely no reason. Ridley was camp-boss, and could forbid him, but then he’d be out that gate and elsewhere.
They’d say later, Where did you go and what did you do? not as if they had a right to ask.
And he supposed, as he walked toward the camp gate and toward the village, that if he told Carlo what he knew, things were going to get out that could speed up the gold-rush mentality that was working among the rich. And that could rouse a little of the anger he knew was stored up and waiting for him when he finally didlet loose what he knew about the Goss kids.
It wasn’t a happy situation he’d landed in. In some measure he’d like to walk up to the barracks, fling open the door and lay out in two minutes everything he had to say.
But once you let a matter out of the proverbial bottle, it was out.
And panic wasn’t at all a thing to let loose in a place like this, with all the High Wild around them—at least that was the only wisdom on a situation like this he’d ever gotten from anyone. Panic in the ambient was like blood-smell on the wind.
There were two other people who knew everything he knew. And Carlo began to be not only somebody he owed the truth to—Carlo began to be the only human being in Evergreen that he’d rely on.
So never mind what the village marshal wanted, or what Ridley expected. With a quiet walk through thick snow-fell over to the gate of the camp and past the restraining post into the village side, he was gone, on his first foray into the village alone, into the quiet of the villageside ambient, this time without Ridley’s voice to fill the silence.