tonic next Sunday. I expect we'll all be here to need it."
They went in to supper then, all of them, while the lamps burned in the windows of the stone house
under the cottonwoods — a light visible, had anyone on the north ridge been watching, for a very long
way across the dark. In the barn, on its nail, the uncut loop of rope hung where it had hung for two
weeks, neither trophy nor threat: a question the house had not yet answered, in a story that was only half
told, with the riders gone east into the night and the water running, for now, clear and cold and free,
under the cottonwoods at Wren Creek.
Part Two
Chapters 11 to 20
Chapter 11 — The Night They Came for Horses
They came back on the third night after the Sunday, and this time they did not ride the skyline to be
seen.
Silas woke to the dogs — not barking, which was the strange thing, but growling low in their throats
from the porch, a sound like cloth tearing, slow. He was up and at the window with the rifle before he
knew he had decided anything. The moon was thin and the yard was all blue shadow and pale dust, and
by the corral gate something moved that was not a horse.
"Eddie," he called, low, through the house's open door plan, and heard the lean-to creak as the boy
woke.
The corral gate was already open six inches. A man stood in the gap with a rope halter in his hand,
coaxing Sol with the soft, lying patience of a professional horse thief, and two more shapes waited by
the barn with the spare mare and Eddie's bay already bridled in the dark. They had come for the horses
first, the way men do who mean to strand a place before they hurt it. A ranch without horses in a drought
year is a house with its legs cut: it can watch trouble come and do nothing at all about the speed of it.
Silas stepped onto the porch in his bare feet with the rifle and said, quite quietly, "That gate closes
from this side, friend. Put the halter down."
What answered him was not the man at the gate but a fourth man he had not counted, off to the left
by the woodpile, and the answer was a muzzle flash that lit the yard white and took a splinter out of the
porch post six inches from Silas's head.
After that the night stopped being quiet in every particular.
Silas fired at the flash, not at the man — an old scout's habit, shooting where a gun had announced
itself — and heard a curse and a scramble in the wood. The man at the gate dropped the halter and ran
for his own horse, tied beyond the barn. The two at the barn swung up bareback onto the bridled horses
and kicked them toward the north trail, and the whole theft would have succeeded in the next ten
seconds if Naya had not come out of the bunkhouse.
She came out shooting nothing, carrying nothing, in her night shift and Rosa's old shawl, and she ran
— not away from the horses, but across their line, straight at the mare's head, making a sound at the
back of her throat that was not a word in any language Silas knew and was plainly a word in hers. The
mare, who had been three strides from a gallop, checked, swung, and reared against the strange hands on
her bridle, and her rider went off sideways into the corral fence with a crack like a green branch
breaking. Eddie's bay, though, got past her, with its rider low and competent, and Eddie — nineteen,
barefoot, in the yard doorway with the ranch's second rifle that he had been expressly forbidden to touch
without a grown order — fired from the hip at the sound of hooves and missed the world. The rider
twisted in the saddle and fired back, once, without aiming in any sense a court would recognize, the way
a man swats at a wasp.
Eddie made a small sound, surprised more than anything, and sat down hard in the doorway, holding
his left forearm, from which blood was coming in a bright, rhythmic way that Silas had seen before and
had hoped, in the specific way men hope about boys they have raised, never to see at his own address.
"Inside," Naya said to him, arriving out of the dark at a dead run. She did not ask whether he could
walk. She got a shoulder under him and half-carried him across the threshold while Rosa — who had
appeared with the lamp and the shotgun she kept behind the kitchen door and had never once, in eleven
years, mentioned to Silas — put the shotgun's muzzle out the window and fired both barrels into the air
above the woodpile, a punctuation mark so complete that the remaining raiders decided the night's
business was concluded and left it, at speed, in three directions.
Silas counted the yard when the dust settled. Horses: all present, the mare shaking, Sol standing over
the fallen raider with an expression of mild professional interest. Raiders: one present, groaning, with a
broken collarbone and a conviction, which he announced repeatedly, that he had been hired only to hold
horses and knew nothing, nothing at all, about any of it. Eddie: on Rosa's kitchen table, pale as paper,
saying "It's not bad, it's not bad" in the rhythm of the blood, which was bad enough.
Finch rode out before dawn — someone had woken Doyle, Doyle had woken Finch, the town's alarm
traveling the way news does in a small place, door to door like a bucket brigade. The doctor probed the
forearm on Rosa's table by lamplight, fished out nothing, there being nothing lodged to fish, and
announced the verdict with his usual economy: the ball had gone through the flesh and nicked the bone
and missed, by a margin he declined to dramatize, everything that would have made it a funeral or a
cripple. "Six weeks in a sling," Finch said. "He'll milk sympathy for twelve. It's the best trade a boy his
age ever makes." He looked at Eddie. "You are forbidden to enjoy this."
"Yes, sir," Eddie said, from a great, morphia-tinged distance, and grinned like a prince.
Doyle took the groaning raider into custody at sunrise, along with the man's story, which, under the
sheriff's pea-shelling patience, had already grown a new detail by breakfast: they had not been sent for
the horses alone. Before the horses, at dusk, two of the party had spent an hour at the seep spring above
the creek with a surveyor's chain and a hammer, and the prisoner had heard the word dam spoken more
than once, and a name spoken more than the word. The name was not Slade's. The name was Hale's.
Chapter 12 — What the Ground Said
Naya read the seep spring the next morning the way Doyle read a document: one pod at a time, and
nothing dropped.
Silas went with her, and Rosa kept Eddie, and the two of them climbed to the spring in the early light
while the dew still stood on the shaded stones. She had found the seep herself, weeks before, and
doubled its flow with an afternoon's clearing; she knew its banks the way she knew her own pouch.
What strangers had done to it in the dark announced itself to her before they were within twenty paces,
and she stopped, and pointed with her chin, saying nothing, letting him see it arrive on its own.
Stakes. Fresh-cut pine stakes, driven in a line that had nothing to do with fences, marching down
from the ridge in surveyor's intervals and ending in a neat row across the spring's outflow, where the
ground had been scraped bare in a rectangle and a brass-capped iron pin had been set at each corner.
Around the pins the earth was trodden by many boots, and a length of surveyor's chain, dropped in the
hurry of the night's ending, lay coiled in the mud like a bright snake.
"They were not measuring my spring," Naya said at last. "They were measuring where their water
will stand. The stakes go up the draw. That is a waterline, Silas. A man paints the shore of a lake that is
not there yet."
She tracked the party backward from the spring with the unhurried completeness of a woman reading
a letter written in a hand she despised. Here, where three men had waited with the horses. Here, where a
canteen had been set down and leaked a dark fan in the dust. Here — and she stopped, and her face
changed — where a man had stood a long time looking down at the ranch house, unmoving, in no hurry
at all, his boot prints deep at the heel from standing.
"He stood and watched your lamps," she said. "That is not a thief's track. Thieves watch gates. This
one watched windows."
On the trail down she found the rest of it the way it had been lost: a torn half of a printed form,