They hadn’t spoken in forty miles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That was the arrangement, unspoken itself, the way most things between Cord Reyes and Ellis Brand were arranged \u2014 without discussion, without negotiation, through the accumulated understanding of two men who had ridden together long enough that silence had become its own language, fluent and sufficient. The wagon rolled through the dust of the Cimarron Flats and the horses pulled without complaint because they were good horses, chosen for exactly this \u2014 the long haul, the punishing distance, the kind of country that ate lesser animals and left their bones as warnings. The sun was a flat white hammer. The land was the color of everything used up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cord smoked his cigar down to the last inch. Ellis did the same. The dust of the horses rose behind them and the dust of the trail rose around them and by midday they were coated in it, two men the color of the earth they crossed, which was perhaps fitting, Cord thought, given where they were going and what they intended to do when they got there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He thought about it but he didn’t say it. Ellis already knew.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They had known each other twenty-three years. They had met in the territorial jail in Tucson in 1871, which was not a place either of them had planned to be and which both of them had left within forty-eight hours by means that were never subsequently discussed in polite company. They had ridden together, apart, and together again through the years that followed \u2014 years that had taken them from the border country to the high plains to the deep green mountains of Colorado and back again, years that had included enough trouble to fill a ledger and enough loyalty to balance it. They were not good men in any simple sense of the word. But they were particular men, precise about certain things, and one of the things they were most precise about was this: you did not leave a debt unpaid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The debt they were riding to collect was twenty years old.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A man named Harlan Teague had taken something from Cord Reyes in the fall of 1873. He had done it in the town of Mineral Fork, New Mexico Territory, on a Thursday afternoon while Cord was three days’ ride away and unable to stop it, and what he had taken was not money and not land and not anything that could be replaced or recovered or adequately compensated for. Cord had spent two years trying to find Harlan Teague after that and then had stopped looking, not because he had forgiven the debt but because a man can only sustain a certain temperature of rage before it starts to burn him from the inside out, and Cord had understood, in his practical way, that survival required banking the fire rather than feeding it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He had banked it for eighteen years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Three weeks ago, a letter had found him in Abilene. No return address. One sentence, in handwriting he did not recognize: Harlan Teague is in Defiance, Arizona, and he is calling himself a respectable man.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n He had read it once, put it in his breast pocket, and walked to find Ellis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ellis had asked no questions. He had looked at Cord’s face and said, “When do we leave?” Because that was what Ellis Brand did, and had always done, and why Cord had ridden forty miles of silence beside him without feeling alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “You ever been to Defiance?” Ellis said now. First words in a long time. He said them the way he said most things \u2014 flat, direct, the inflection of a man who had edited everything unnecessary out of his speech somewhere along the way and never gone back for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Once,” Cord said. “Eighty-one or eighty-two. Small place. One main street. Church on the north end, saloon on the south. Man who runs it either direction usually runs the whole thing.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Which end does Teague run?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cord drew on the last of his cigar and thought about a man he hadn’t let himself think about clearly in a very long time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “That’s what we’re going to find out,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ellis nodded. That was enough for him. It was one of the things Cord valued most about Ellis Brand \u2014 he had never once required Cord to explain the full weight of a thing before deciding to help carry it. He had simply, consistently, across twenty-three years and more bad country than most men see in a lifetime, shown up and stood alongside and asked only what was operationally necessary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cord had done the same for him, twice, in circumstances he thought about only when he had to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That was the agreement. Not spoken. Never spoken. Simply true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The horses pulled. The dust rose. The Cimarron Flats gave way, slowly, to the harder country beyond \u2014 the red rock and the sparse scrub and the sky that out here was not blue so much as absolute, a blue so deep and total it functioned less as color than as statement. This was the country that had no interest in you. This was the country that had been here before every human ambition and would be here after every human conclusion and that registered your passage across it with complete indifference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cord had always found that comforting. There was an honesty to indifferent country that polite country could not match.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They made camp at dusk beside a dry wash that had a little water still in the bottom of it if you knew where to look, which Cord did, which Ellis did also. They watered the horses and ate without much ceremony and Cord sat with the last of the day’s light dying on the rocks and thought about Mineral Fork, New Mexico Territory, 1873, and a Thursday afternoon he had been reconstructing in his mind for twenty years from the secondhand accounts of men who had been there and then wished they hadn’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He thought about what had been taken. He thought about what a twenty-year debt looks like when you finally ride to the door and knock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “You sure about this?” Ellis said. Not challenging. Just asking. The way a man asks when he is prepared to accept any answer but wants to give you the chance to say the true one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cord looked at the darkening sky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “No,” he said. Which was the true one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Good enough for me,” Ellis said, and settled back against his saddle, and was asleep in four minutes, because Ellis Brand had the gift of sleeping cleanly in hard country, and Cord had always envied him that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cord sat up a while longer. He smoked the last of the tobacco he had and watched the stars come out one by one over the Arizona Territory and thought about a man who was calling himself respectable and living, apparently, without the weight of what he’d done, which had always been the particular injustice of it \u2014 not just what Teague had taken, but that he had taken it and continued, unencumbered, into a future that should not have been available to him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That was what Cord was riding to correct.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He didn’t sleep until very late. When he did, he dreamed of nothing. That was its own kind of answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the morning they broke camp before the sun cleared the rock and pointed the horses southwest, toward Defiance, toward Harlan Teague, toward whatever version of reckoning was waiting at the end of the Devil’s Road.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whatever it was, they would meet it together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They always had.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"