By the twelfth day Ambrose Teel had worn a path in the grass beside the bar. He walked it every morning, from the step to the post and back, with his hands in the pockets of his green coat and his bright eyes on the gatehouse board. He had learned the Tollgate’s brown print by heart. He could recite the clause backward when the Hard Hands were bored, and he had begun, on the eighth day, to recite it forward again in a sing-song voice that set Dunstan’s teeth on edge.
Pell did not mind him. She had never minded a man who sat outside a gate for a clause. She had only minded the gate.
So she brought him soup.
It was the Kitchen’s barley soup, thick with the last of the winter carrots and a knuckle of salt pork that had been kept back for the Hard Hands’ supper, and she carried it down the Gatehouse path in a tin pot with a cloth over the lid and a horn spoon stuck in the cloth. She did not hurry. She had carried soup down a great many paths in her life, and she had learned that a bowl of soup could make a man listen to a thing he would otherwise have argued with until the spring.
