provocations had been itemized at that fire like counts in an indictment, because a raid was the one gift
Hale's lawyers were praying for nightly. Second: the old water — the unmapped springs, the canyon
seeps, the places a people keeps the way a house keeps a tin box in the flour — would be shown, spring
by spring, to a town that was learning, bucket by bucket, to be worth the showing. Goyan's son would
ride south within the week with the first of them.
At the fire's edge, before they left, Goyan spoke to Naya a long time, holding both her hands, and at
the end of it she turned to Silas with her face lit and wrecked and rebuilt all at once, and did the thing
she had deferred since the road in April, when she had told him what she was called at home was not for
the road.
"My father was Kashe, who kept agreements," she said. "My mother was Luan, who sang. At home I
am Naya, Kashe's daughter, of the people who keep Salt Wash. My uncle has asked me to carry it
myself, and I am carrying it." She held his look. "You may know it. Knowing is a kind of room, Silas. I
am deciding who has the keys." Then she mounted, and rode south beside him into the white heat,
toward a town drawing water by the bucket from her spring, and the road no longer felt like a place
where her name was not allowed.
Chapter 17 — Salt Wash
Slade made his last move three days later, and he made it the way a man makes a move when his bond is
posted by another man's money and his name is already in a record he cannot burn: quickly, and with
somebody else's hands, and at Salt Wash, because every road in Obadiah Slade's life ran through Salt
Wash in the end.
The lure was a message, delivered to the ranch at noon by a frightened boy on a blown horse: the
marshal's office required Naya's presence at the Salt Wash stage stop by sundown, with her certificate, to
answer a final question of identity respecting the February woman — a question, the message said, that
her uncle's people had raised. It had a seal. It had a signature. It had, Silas noted at Rosa's table, with the
paper going cold in his hands, everything except a day of the week that agreed with the marshal's known
movements, Cobb being, by Doyle's telegram that same morning, in Tucson.
"It is a trap," Rosa said, in both languages, for emphasis.
"It is a trap with my name spelled correctly," Naya said, "which makes it Slade's best work, and
means he is desperate, and desperate men at Salt Wash at sundown —" She looked at Silas. "He does not
want me. He wants the certificate, and the bill of sale I keep with it. The two papers together are the
whole archive of his forgery. Burn the archive, and Prescott is his word against a dead clerk's. He will
ask for them with a gun, burn them in front of me, and leave me alive to be unbelievable." She stood,
and put the papers — both of them, the void and the true — inside her shirt, in their place. "So we will
go, and give him the meeting he has purchased, and Doyle will be in the rocks above the stage stop with
Finch's field glass and four men the town can spare, because I am done being ambushed in the useful
direction, and this time the witnesses eat at my table."
It very nearly worked. That was the thing Silas would turn over afterward, in the nights when the
shoulder ached: how nearly the trap's second jaw — the jaw no one had counted — escaped the planning
entirely. Doyle's men were in the rocks. Doyle's rifle was on the stage stop's door. What no one had
counted was Jubal Cross, waiting inside the stop itself with the afternoon's dust on him, because Slade,
hiring his last argument, had hired the one man in the territory who had watched a knife cut rope in a
public square and had been repricing the world ever since. The message he sent out of the stop, by the
frightened boy, an hour before sundown — Miss Naya is to come in alone, the papers on the table,
everybody civil — was Slade's composition, and Cross delivered it with his ruined smile entirely absent,
and looked at Silas a moment longer than the message required, and said, too low for the boy, "When a
man starts burning paper, rancher, he ain't particular whose hands hold it still. Price that into your
arithmetic," and rode back to the stop like a man returning to an employment he had already resigned in
every ledger except the one that paid.
She went in alone, because the alternative was a siege Slade could starve and Doyle could not
lawfully storm, and because — she said it at the door, with her hand flat a moment on the frame — she
had been in rooms with this man before, and he had never yet been the most dangerous person in one.
Silas took the rocks with Doyle and counted his heartbeats like money, and the stage stop kept its
counsel for eleven minutes, and then the lamp inside it went over — whether by a hand or a struggle no
witness ever agreed — and the shot, when it came, came through the stop's front window and took Silas
Wren in the left shoulder as he was already running, having heard, in the crash of the lamp, the one
sound no plan survives: his name, in her voice, not calling for help, but warning him, which was worse.
He remembered the doorway in pieces. Slade with a fistful of papers that were not hers — copies,
decoys, the archive's shadow, which Rosa, at Naya's instruction, had fed to the saddlebags as ballast.
Slade with the true papers' absence dawning on him like weather. Cross, rising from the corner where
hired men wait, with his gun still holstered and his hands, pointedly, in view, saying, "No. Not this
room. Not this woman. I have sold some poor work in my life, trader, but I price my soul by the job, and
this job's gone under my floor." And Naya — bound, again, to a chair, because Slade's arithmetic had
never once updated itself — with her wrists working, small and ceaseless, at rope she would later inform
the room was tied by a man who had learned knots from paper too.
Silas's shot, the only one he fired, was fired from the floor, from a shoulder that had already filed its
resignation, and it did not kill Slade. It took the lamp's wreckage and the decoy papers in Slade's hand
and made an end of both, in a flare of burning copies that lit the stop like a brief, honest sunrise — and
if there was justice in the territory with a sense of theater, it was that Obadiah Slade, who had lived by
paper, should be arrested in the end by firelight of his own evidence burning, while the woman he had
bound twice sat watching him with her wrists already working free, saying, with great clarity, for the
witnesses crowding the doorway with rifles: "The true papers are on my person. They remain on my
person. Let the record, this time, be kept by someone who can count the days in February."
Doyle took Slade out of Salt Wash in irons, in the dark, with the doctor working on Silas in the
wagon bed beside them — Finch, who had come because Finch always came, pressing the rancher's own
shirt, folded, hard against the shoulder, saying, "The papers, Silas. You ran through a door with your
certificate in your shirt, over your heart, and the ball went through your list instead. Salt, wire, coffee.
You've a filing cabinet's luck." And Silas, gray with the pain and holding, in his good hand, the unhurt
edge of Naya's sleeve where she rode beside the wagon with her freed wrists bare to the night, said the
only accounting the day required: "Count it in front of them, Doctor. Slow. I want the town to be able to
say what changed hands."
Chapter 18 — The Creek Decides
Slade's arrest did not end it, because Slade had never been the head of the animal — only its most
expensive mouth. The head made its decision within the week, in a boardroom Silas never saw, and the
decision came down the home road at dawn on the last day of June in the form of Whitaker and nine
Hale riders with a wagon of powder kegs and drilling tools, riding not for the ranch house but past it, at
a trot, for the dam site above the seep spring: seize the ground, sink the charges, raise the dam's first
wall in a day of fait accompli, and let the territory's courts spend the drought deciding whether a built
thing could be unbuilt while forty men's wages provided the argument's percussion.
What Whitaker had not counted — what Hale, in his boardroom, had priced as sentiment and
sentiment's usual yield — was the town.