He lit it and saw where to Dakaya had spent 24 years of Septembers. A small stone room, a sleeping mat, a water jar, a bundle of dried sage, and in a niche on the far wall, like a saint in a church, a steer box with a bronze clasp. He pressed the disc to the clasp. Click. Inside lay seven pages, ragged edges.
He pulled the notebook from his coat, the swollen soaked. He laid the stubs against the torn edges. They fit like a puzzle made of grief. He read September 2nd, 1860. If you are reading this, Wade, then I am dead and the well has been found.
Forgive the handwriting. I write by coal oil light with Da waiting in the dark below. I do not expect to see another dawn, and I hope to God he never needs to use the door. Garrett Voss came last night with Amos Rudd and two hired men. They had two copies of a deed and a pen.
They said, "Sign, Jonas, or the boy goes down the well. " I signed, "God forgive me. " I signed both. But a man who signs under a gun has not truly signed. I told them I had burned the sealed copy.
I hadn't. Before they came back for it, I did what Elias and I did when we played Lighthouse with you. In the silk of the ribbon, I pricricked the truth with a pin. The true date, the true names in the code only Elias and I would know. Voss carries the unsealed copy.
He suspects I lied about the other and he will tear this county apart looking. Elias will hold it for me. Do not destroy it. Let Voss fight for it. Let him record it.
Let him wave it before the highest man in the territory and then let the truth read itself. Wade lowered the page. The lamp trembled. So did he. He thought of Dakaya in the ashes.
But look at the seal again. The old man had seen the holes and had not known what they said. He had only known they were no moth. The pin and the glass had been for the door. The ribbon was a secret between two men and a child's game, and one of those men had sold the other's son.
"You sly old goat," Wade said. And then the tears came. All of them. They fell on the page and ran the ink, and he did not care. "You absolute magnificent goat.
" His father was not a forger. His father had walked into the worst night of his life with a sewing pin and built a trap. And he had trusted a 14-year-old boy to spring it. Beneath a layer of cloth lay one more sheet, brittle brown, marked with a dozen signatures and a dozen small drawn hands and stars. True agreement.
The one Voss had spent a quarter century trying to erase. Wade tucked the seven pages in the parchment inside his shirt, blew out the lamp, and went to find the sky. The passage opened onto a dry creek bank a mile below the dam. Pale gray light, cold wind, the juniper, and far down the wash, small shapes moving, wagons, mules, children, old women with bundles on their backs, 61 people, walking away from their home. Wade ran, heart in his teeth, lungs full of dust, and somewhere in the middle of that mile, a small figure at the head of the column stopped, turned, but stared at a dripping, filthy, hatless man, stumbling toward her through the dawn.
But Guan dropped her pack. She did not say his name. She crossed the gap in four strides and hit him so hard he nearly went down. You are dead, she said into his chest. Mostly you were in the well.
I was in the well. We heard the blast. So did I. From a closer seat, she pulled back, hit him on the shoulder, hugged him again, hit him again. You are the most irritating man I have ever met.
I've been told. Dakaya would have said the same. I'm sure he had opinions. Her face crumpled for one second. Then she folded it away like a letter going back into its envelope.
Said, "Get them out," she said. The wall was above us and Voss's men were all around it. So I took them down the wash. I hope that is acceptable. It's the best decision anyone has made all week.
I know. Nalin came running, limping, grinning. You are alive. I told her, "I said you were too stubborn. " Wade caught the boy by the shoulders, held him and said quietly into his hair.
Nalin Da asked me to tell you something. The boy went still. The voice was real. Nalin's mouth opened, closed, his bruised eyes filled. The one in the well.
The one he said sang to a boy once. That was him. He sang for me every night for 24 years. He just did it from farther away. Nobody spoke.
The mule snorted and Wade stood in the cold with two people he had known for 6 days and could not imagine living without an air to stood something simple. He was not alone. Not anymore. Maybe not ever. Wade Nalin was staring past him.
Look on the far ridge dust a long dark line moving against the a flag and in front a man on a tall bay horse riding straight. Pike said Guuen. How long minute? The order said five. We can't outrun them with mules.
No then we don't run. He looked at the 61 at the children at every face that had waited on this creek bank for a miracle. Where is Weller? The soldier boy gone since Sunday. Then I need him to have been very fast.
Wade, humor me. He walked up the middle of the wash alone straight at the column, shoulders back, wet the hatless, 61 people watching him go. Behind him, Guan muttering, he is doing the stupid thing he is, said Nalin. Good. Somebody should.