Fighting their way through the livestock congesting Malice's thoroughfare, Ben and Buck began their trip back down the rancorous trail. If the elders, midwife, and Adam had traveled it first then they left behind no evidence of their journey. Though, Ben wondered, with the petrous state of the road, if tracking anyone who used it was possible. He certainly could not find attestation that he and Hoss had traversed it. Only Adam and Joe had forfeited any confirmation of their trip, the now rotting carcasses of the cattle who had not survived. Only Ben and Hoss had known to interpret the dead animals as gruesome validation that Adam and Joe had taken the path. He wondered what others—if there ever were others who would dare venture up the grueling trail leading to Malice—would presume about the fallen stock. Would they interpret it as a warning to avoid the trail or a sign to remain steady on their path?
Finally coming to the bottom of the trail head, feeling and looking a mite worse for wear, Ben cast his gaze upon the landscape, a collection of yet more formidable, stately, jagged mountains. The trail leading him further would be much wider now. Though steep and winding in places, it would be easily negotiated. After all, Joe and Adam had successfully shepherded eighty head of cattle up until this point. This past success seemed small in comparison to the defeat of the current day.
In a little over ten miles, Ben would come to a fork in the road, and he would blindly decide what direction to go. Like the trail before it, the one he was presented with now also held no evidence of recent travelers, though, lined with a dense collection of small rocks, pieces of shale, and crushed stone it surely could and should have. He looked at the road for a long time, falling captive to absolute uncertainty.
Should he go forward? Or should he go back? Which direction promised he would find his oldest son, and which one guaranteed he would lose him for good?
He snorted humorlessly. With all the vexatious things the midwife had said about how to begin a non-obvious question, she never said anything about should or which—not that it mattered anyhow. There were no further questions to ask. There was nothing left but a series of wrenching convictions, haunting thoughts about the things Ben should have done.
He should have taken Hoss's palpable and extemporaneous agitation seriously when the first telegraph from a town called Malice arrived. He should have ignored their strange request for cattle. He should never have allowed Adam and Joe to embark on their trip. When he and Hoss arrived in Malice, they should have liberated Adam from the dusty jail cell when they had the opportunity to. He should have spent more time believing what he already knew and less time questioning what he didn't.
Of course, Adam did not attack Joe; from the beginning, Ben had always known that. Even if Joe's recount did not absolve Adam of wrongdoing—even if, enchanted by exhaustion and frustration, Joe had hit Adam and Adam had hit him back—that did not make Adam guilty of what he had been accused of. It did not make him the one who had almost beat his brother to death. But someone was guilty of the crime. Either it was the elders or the midwife, Ben was certain that one or all of them together had harmed Joe. And now they had Adam, and he was painfully unsure of which direction to go.
If he went forward, then what would he find? If he turned around, fought his way back up the trail, what would be waiting for him in the decrepit town? Two of his sons and a small herd of cattle, were a given. It was everything else that seemed so uncertain.
Closing his eyes, he thought of Adam's demeanor, his calm, enduring certainty, which had guided them both through the most uncertain of times. Ben knew his son's wisdom had long surpassed his own. Like Joe had said, Adam, it seemed, always knew what to do. He was careful and calculated. He knew what to say and when to say it. As Hoss had phrased more simply, he never pontificated without meaning. If he spoke there was purpose to his message—even his silences were significant. Everything meant something with Adam, and Ben had been told that Malice was a town where nothing mattered at all—a juxtaposition that was suddenly too glaring to ignore.
Strangely, Ben thought about where he had been just before the midwife had told him nothing mattered in Malice. He was standing in front of the boulders which had obstructed the town, hindering its growth and limiting it to the three buildings that now seemed a little too familiar to him. Lingering thoughtfully in front of those astounding rock formations, he had been alone. When he had finally turned around, intent on returning to his sons, the midwife had aberrantly appeared, materializing from seemingly nowhere to stand between him and the boulders. When he asked her where she had come from, she had told him not to ask obvious questions. It was a galling response; one Ben had not been granted time to think about–at least not in connection to the specific question that had prompted it. He would think of her words later, but, foolishly, he would not reconsider his own.
He had asked her where she had come from, and she had told him not to question the obvious. Though he had heard her reply, he had failed to understand it, and when Adam spoke, only allowing himself a few arcane statements at a time, Ben had failed to understand them, too.
"I found Malice, Pa," Adam had said. "If you don't get out of here, you're going to find it, too."
"Where did you come from?" Ben had asked the midwife.
"That is an obvious question," the midwife had said.
"He told me to pack up Joe and get out of town," Hoss had said, recounting Adam's grim warning, "that the risk of Joe losing his life on the trail was minute in comparison to what would happen if he died in this town."
But Hoss and Ben had not heeded the warning; Joe had not died; and it was Adam who would go missing in the night. It was he, the elders, and the midwife who had left no tracks to follow on a trail decorated with small rocks, pieces of shale, and crushed stone. The trail should have been a tracker's dream, the environment impossible to ride or even walk through without leaving proof behind. Instead, it contained none.
Ben could have asked himself why, but to do so would have been posing another obvious question, the answer of which was now so disgustingly obvious when considered in conjunction with what he had asked the midwife and what she had said.
"Where did you come from?"
"That is an obvious question."
Now, it was not the question that was obvious, it was the answer. The wrongness of an extemporaneous explanation he had been a little too quick to fabricate was glaring. While Malice could be defined as the intent to do harm, it was also the name someone had given a town. It was a place where folks lived and sent telegraphs. Somewhere where a small herd of cattle could be hidden. A place that could shroud the person who attacked Little Joe. A secret settlement where a woman could emerge from when her presence would cause the most confusion.
There were no tracks on the road in front of Ben because the elders and midwife had not taken Adam this way. They had not traveled in this direction at all. There was something more lurking behind the boulders stymieing the derelict hamlet. He just needed to figure out how to access it.