What's he look like this colonel? Tall. Grayer than you'd expect for a man who still sits a horse that easy. Wears a ring on his left hand. silver. Some kind of crest on it I never got close enough to make out proper.
Talks quiet. The kind of quiet that makes a man nervous, not calm. Do shifted his weight, not meeting Wade's eyes. Got a way of looking at a man like he's already decided what you're worth to him. And you're not going to like the number.
How long? He asked. How long's this colonel been asking around? five years on and off. longer than most men stay interested in one patch of desert, if you want my honest opinion on it. five years. The same five years Wade had spent alone in a cabin, hating the wrong people for the wrong reasons. While the right one kept right on writing through this same trading post, buying rifles, asking about water, and nobody, nobody in five whole years had ever once thought to ask why.
You ever sell to him? Wolfrunner asked, voice flat. Dangerous in its own quiet way. Dobs didn't answer right away, which was itself an answer. "Man pays double market rate," Dobs said finally, not quite meeting anybody's eyes.
"Times are hard, Wade. A man's got to eat." You've been telling him things," Wade said slowly. "The whole shape of it coming clear now. Ugly and simple all at once.
Where the water is, where the tribes settle. You've been handing him a map, Dobs. One conversation at a time and taking his money for it. I didn't know what he wanted it for. Didn't ask, you mean?
Do said nothing to that. There wasn't anything left worth saying. Wade picked the fragment back up off the counter, closed his fist around it, and looked at the man he'd traded with three years running like he was seeing him clearly for the first time in his life. You tell this colonel anything about a spring south of here," Wade said. "Anything at all, I'll make sure the whole territory knows exactly what you've been selling besides flower and gunpowder."
He turned and walked out without waiting for a response. Wolfrunner close behind, and neither one of them said a single word the whole three hours back. There wasn't a word big enough yet for what they just found. The ring, though, that silver ring, some crest worked into it. Dobs couldn't quite describe.
That detail rattled around in Wade's skull the whole ride home. Familiar in a way that itched at the back of his mind like a splinter he couldn't quite locate to pull out. Because he'd served briefly in the peacetime army before he'd married Sarah, before he'd walked away from soldiering the same way he later walked away from everything else. two years under a colonel whose name he'd worked hard to forget. A man who talked quiet in that particular way that made subordinates more nervous than shouting ever could. A man who wore a ring exactly like the one Dobs had just described and who'd been reassigned sudden and unexplained.