"Sentiment," Hale said, still mildly, "is a tax the dry country collects from the tender-hearted. The
town will dig deeper wells. Towns do."
"Towns die," Naya said. She had been silent the whole while, with the stillness of the platform, and
Hale turned to her with the attention of a man who has been informed a piece of furniture has filed an
objection. "I have seen the places where the water was taken by paper. The people do not dig. The
people leave, and the paper stays, and owns a wind. You are not buying a creek, Mr. Hale. You are
buying the right to be the only man in the valley whose cattle drink, and to charge the rest of the valley
for the privilege of remembering rain. In my language there is a word for a man who walls a spring in a
dry year. It is not a long word. Children learn it early, so they will know it in time." Hale regarded her a
long moment, and something crossed his face that Silas had not seen there before: not anger, but
recognition, the look of a man who has been counting a household's assets and has found an entry
misfiled. "Slade," he said at last, "told me you were the handle on this ranch. The lever. He charged me
accordingly." He gathered his deed and his draft with unhurried care. "Slade has frequently charged me
for his own misunderstandings. It is among the reasons his bond does not trouble me as much as it
troubles his lawyer."
"You'll be asked about Slade," Silas said, "by a jury. The raid. The boy."
"I have been asked about many things by many juries," Hale said, rising, "and I will answer this one
the way I have answered them all: truthfully, in the particulars I can be proved wrong about, and at
length in the rest." He put on his hat. "My offer stands until the jury sits, Wren. After that, the drought
will make you a worse one, and you will miss this morning the way thirsty men miss weather. That is
not a threat. That is hydrology."
He drove out at a walk, the way Doyle had ridden out in April — a man rehearsing sentences — and
the yard was quiet, and Rosa said, into her unsweetened coffee, "Twelve thousand dollars. Ai. Even his
insults arrive by bank draft."
But it was what Naya said, watching the buggy shrink on the home road, that Silas carried into the
house that night and turned over like a stone in his pocket. She had gone very still at one moment in
Hale's speaking — not at the money, and not at the threats, but at a phrase in his amputation of Slade,
thrown away in the Tucson lawyer's hearing and repeated now on the porch: that Slade charged for his
own misunderstandings, and that Hale had paid one particular bill in February, before any auction, for
services described in Hale's own ledger as collection of a stray at Salt Wash.
"Silas," she said. "My brother ran at the river in April. But Slade spoke of Salt Wash from the first
day, and charged Hale for Salt Wash in February, and the Pritchard burnings were at Salt Wash, and the
patrol's whole story was built there like a house on a foundation poured before the walls were thought
of. February, Silas. Before the river. Before me." She turned from the road. "Someone was taken at Salt
Wash in February. Someone Slade sold, or lost, or buried in his accounts — and my sale in April was the
replacement, the second woman his correction kept inventing, except she was not invented. She was
first." Her voice did not rise. It set, like a post in good ground. "I need to go north, to my uncle's fire,
and ask my questions in the right order, in my own language, before the drought closes every road in
this valley. There are things at that fire I have been afraid to learn since April. I am done being afraid in
the useful direction. We ride when the moon is right — and we ride, this time, by my invitation, to my
people. You will be the stranger at the gate, quiet man. I will do the talking. It is your turn to be the
arithmetic somebody else is deciding."
Chapter 16 — Dry Country
The drought stopped being a warning and became a government in the second week of June. The town
well dropped a foot, then a hand's breadth a day. Red Hollow rationed by bucket and by pew: families
drew at dawn, the saloon was forbidden its wash water, Prudence Harrow — converted, with a convert's
ferocity, into the ration's chief magistrate — stood at the well at drawing hour with the store's ledger
under her arm and entered every bucket against every name, so that thirst, at least, would be honestly
kept. Wren Creek ran low and clear and stubborn, and the ranch, by the arithmetic Silas read aloud at
Rosa's table like a liturgy, could carry the town's drinking for eleven days if the creek held, and no more,
and the creek's holding was a rumor the mountains had not confirmed.
So the town came to the ranch, which in April would have been a sentence no one in Red Hollow
could have pronounced with a straight face. They came with barrels in wagons, in a line Rosa organized
like a siege in reverse, and Naya worked the trough and the seep beside Eddie-one-armed, and no one —
not the miners, not the churchwomen, not Whitaker, who came without his purse and with two empty
barrels and the decency to wait his turn behind the Pritchard widow — called it charity in either
direction. It was water. It was counted. Debts in the good way, accumulating like rain in a country that
had forgotten the sound.
It was in that week, with the roads white and the grass gone to straw, that Naya rode north, and Silas
rode with her as far as a stranger rides: to the last water, and then behind her, at the distance respect
surveys and marks.
Goyan's camp lay in a canyon north of Salt Wash where a spring the maps did not carry rose under
cottonwoods older than the territory, and Silas understood, arriving, that he was being shown a thing that
was not shown: a people's bank, kept in the only vault the drought could not foreclose. Goyan himself
was in his fifties, graying, with his sister's eyes and a face that did its deciding before it did its speaking,
and he received his niece at the fire with a formality that broke, all at once, into his arms around her and
a sound that Silas, standing with his hat in his hands among strangers, was honored to be too foreign to
translate.
And Little Hawk was there.
He came around the fire at his uncle's word — seventeen, eighteen now, tall as his sister and thin as
the year, with a scar through one eyebrow and a limp he had earned running at the river in April and
perfected in two months of mountains — and the siblings looked at each other across the firelight with
the whole of the spring between them: the running, the not knowing, the stories each had been told about
the other's death, Slade's stories, poured like a foundation in February. "You ran," Naya said at last, in
her own tongue first and then, for Silas's benefit and to her brother's visible astonishment, in English,
"and running was the correct sum. I have been deciding it every day since April, and it comes out the
same every day. You ran, and so one of us stood free in the world to be looked for. Do not apologize to
me with your face, Little Hawk. I have had apologies. They are a poor currency and I no longer accept
them from family."
The boy — the young man — laughed then, with tears standing, and the camp laughed with him, and
the questions began, in the right order, in her own language, with Silas fed and seated and left, with
great courtesy, entirely outside the circle of what was not his: the February taking, which Goyan's people
knew as the soldiers knew nothing — a small party, a woman of a related band taken at Salt Wash and
carried south in the cold month and never seen at any agency, whose people had been told the same
story in reverse, that she had been sold north. A trade in ghosts, Goyan called it, through an interpreter
who was also his son: papers walking around in place of persons, each sale making the next one
respectable. Slade's whole commerce, laid bare at last around a fire he would never see, was a mill that
ground people's absence into other people's title.
What Silas was permitted to carry home — and he understood it was a treaty, extended to the stranger
at the gate because the stranger had once opened a platform with a knife and then, more importantly, had
not followed it with a claim — was twofold. First: Goyan's band would not raid Hale, though Hale's