There was something about Rose that made a man want to smile.
“You have a way with words, Mr. Hunt. I best be going before that temper is aimed my direction.” She started across the porch and opened the door just as her mother yelled for her.
“Rose, get the broom and pan. And I’ll have you fetch the papers from city hall before the day’s gone dead. The rail man’s expecting them tomorrow. Are you listening to me? Rose!”
“Coming, ma’am,” she called back.
Cedar watched her step through the doorway, caught for a moment as a lithe silhouette between the light and darkness, a graceful girl—no, he reckoned she really was a woman now—who paused just long enough to glance over her shoulder at him and give him a curious smile.
Then the Madder brothers came walking out, each calling a hello to Rose, and each fixing Cedar with a hard look.
Cedar got moving, down the steps and out into the busy street. He’d come to town on foot, wanting the walk. But he didn’t want to deal with the brothers. Not today.
A cool breeze pulled down off the mountains and pushed a few clouds across the sky. Signs that summer was back would soon be broken by frost.
No time left to plant, to harvest, to spend the days hopeful and hale. The season of the dead was coming round the way. Maybe the storekeeper’s wife was right. Maybe it was time for moving on to better hunting grounds before winter took hold. Maybe it was time to run again.
Cedar could feel the restlessness in the little Oregon town. Everyone twitching for a bit of sunlight that gave off enough warmth to last a day. Twitching for moving on, moving up to a better place in the modern world, to a better bit of luck. Before winter caught hold and locked the town tight between the feet of the Wallowa and Blue mountains.
The people of Hallelujah had been holding out against hard times for too long now. Killing winters, broken supply trains and routes, sickness. They hung their hopes like threadbare linens on the iron track that was being laid, tie by tie, coming their way with the promise of a new tomorrow and all the riches of the East and South.
No wonder they bowed to the rail man. He was all they had left to hope for.
Cedar strolled down the street, dodging a slow horse and a passel of kids chasing after a pig that must have gotten loose from its pen. The dirt under his bootheels was still hard from a season of sun, and he made good time crossing one street, then another.
Didn’t matter how busy town was today. The Madder brothers followed him like a pack of dogs scenting meat.
He stopped at the end of the street. The western edge of forest crowded up here, making homesteading more difficult. His cabin was about three miles into those trees, up the foothills a bit, by a creek that flowed through the seasons. If the Madders had some business with him, he’d rather deal with it here than at his home.
He didn’t want a fight, and he didn’t want to draw his gun. But he’d do both to keep the brothers off his heels tonight.
“There something on your mind, boys?”
The middle brother’s name was Bryn. Cedar could pick him out of the pack because he was always covered in dirt and grime from the mine—except for his hands, which he kept scrubbed from the wrist to fingertips, clean as a preacher’s sheets. He stepped forward.
“We think maybe you lost something.” He stuffed one of his clean, calloused hands into his overalls pocket and drew out a pocket watch. He gazed down at it longingly until the oldest, tallest, Alun, said, “Go on now, Bryn. Make it right.”
Bryn Madder looked away from the watch and held it out for Cedar. “It’s yours. As much as. I . . . found it. A while back. Broken. I cleaned it. Didn’t fix it, though. Wouldn’t take to fixing, and that’s a curious thing.”
The watch swung like a pendulum, stirred by the breeze: a silver disk, an accusing eye, cold and hard as hatred.
“A lot of men carry a watch.” Cedar’s throat felt like he’d just swallowed down ashes of the dead. That watch was not his. But he would know it anywhere. It was his brother’s. And he’d last seen it on him the day he died.
Bryn nodded. Tilted his chin so he could look at Cedar through his good left eye. “This one you lost. We found it. Maybe eight months ago when that rail man dandy came to town. Thought about keeping it . . .” His voice trailed off on a note of longing.
“But it’s not the sort of thing we’d need,” Alun said, more for his brother than for Cedar. “Now, if it had been something useful to us, like say that striker we’ve seen you carry a time or two . . .”
“Is that what you want for it?” Cedar could not look away from the watch, gently swaying like an admonishing finger.
The brothers paused.
Cedar glanced at the oldest, Alun, who wore a heavier beard than the rest. “How much?”
Alun did not look away. Instead, he did something very few could do beneath Cedar’s glare. He smiled.
“Our blood comes from the old country, Mr. Hunt,” he said. “Before Wales had that name. And our . . . people . . . have always been miners. A man sleeps and breathes and sups with the stone, he begins to understand things.”
A wagon pulled by mule, not steamer, rattled past, taking crates and sacks and barrels of food, nails, mended shovels, and hammers out to the rail work twenty miles south of town.
“All things in this world eventually soak into the soil and stone,” Alun said once the wagon had taken its noise up the street a ways.
“It gets to be where a man, one who knows what to listen for, can hear the stones breathing. It gets to be where a man knows what the stones have to say.”
“The watch.” Cedar didn’t care if Alun thought he could hear rocks conversing. Hell, for all Cedar knew, he was telling true and he could talk to stones. The brothers had strolled into town a year ago, just ahead of the rail man, and quickly struck the richest silver vein in the hills. Maybe they’d gone out and asked the mountain where the metals were hid.
And maybe the mountain had sat down and told them.
Talking to rocks wasn’t near the strangest thing Cedar had encountered on his walk across this country. He had seen the Strange—the true Strange—creatures that hitched along from the Old World, tucked unknown in an immigrant’s pocket, hidden away in a suitcase, or carried tightly in the darkest nightmare. He had seen what the Strange could do when set free in this new land. He had seen it more clearly than someone fixing to blame the bogeyman for a missing child. He had seen the Strange personally, been touched by them.
And he still hadn’t recovered.
It looked like the Madder brothers’ Strange had done them benefit. They were wealthy by any man’s standard, even though they never spent much, never left the hills much, and lived like they didn’t have a penny between them.
They had a way with metal; that was sure. It showed in their buckles and buttons, each carved with a symbol of a gear and wrench, flame and water. It showed in the glimpses of brass and copper contraptions that rode heavy in the pockets of their oversized coats.
And it showed in the customized Colt pneumatic revolvers glinting in handworked silver and brass, holstered at their hips.
He was of a mind they were also devisers, though they’d never come out and said such. Made him curious why they didn’t want to admit to their skill. A deviser could make things of practical applications that stretched the imagination. Yet folk in town always turned them a blind eye, while looking instead with hope to the rail man, LeFel.
“The watch isn’t yours, is it?” Alun Madder said. “Stones say this belonged to someone close to you. Someone gone. A brother?”
Cedar held out his hand for the watch. “Those stones of yours talk too much.”
That got a hoot out of all three of them.
“What is your asking price for the watch?” Cedar said.
“The striker. And a favor.”
“What favor?”
