Jonah came out of the barn carrying two nose-bags of oats. He had seen the encounter from the shadow of the door; he had seen the cattle buyer reach and seen Tala turn the blow; but he said nothing about it. He slipped the nose-bags over the horses’ muzzles, buckled the straps behind their ears, and then walked to the rear of the wagon to check the lashing on the water cask.
“Crane is Hutchins’s brother-in-law,” Jonah said, his voice low and level as he tested the hemp rope. “He runs sheep on the lower San Pedro.”
“He is a small man,” Tala answered, leaning against the wagon tire. “A small man who hides behind a piece of paper that was written by another small man.”
Jonah nodded once. “The world is full of them, Tala. They build towns so they can feel large together, and when a person walks past them without asking their permission, they think the earth is coming apart at the seams.”
He looked across the alkali flat toward the west, where the great, saw-toothed wall of the Rincon mountains was beginning to turn purple in the late afternoon glare.
“Drink your fill, Tala,” he added, climbing up to the wagon box to fetch the grease-can. “We’ll pull out as soon as the team finishes their oats. We’ll make dry camp tonight at the mouth of the canyon, away from the flies and the talk.”
Tala watched the cattle buyer sitting sulking on his dynamite box across the yard. The fear that had once tightened her throat whenever white men gathered in small groups had gone; in its place was a hard, cold lucidity. She understood now that their power did not come from their weapons or their laws, but from the agreement of other people to look at the ground when they passed.
She had looked Silas Crane in the face, she had spoken her mother’s name and her own, and the earth had not opened to swallow her. The only thing that had happened was that an old woman with a shotgun had stood upon the porch, and a bully had gone back to nursing his bruises in the dirt.
They made their dry camp six miles beyond the stage station, in a sandy draw where a thicket of scrub mesquite and desert willow grew against the red wall of a basalt terrace. The sun had dropped behind the Rincon peaks an hour before, leaving the sky ablaze with cold orange and streaks of pale, jade green that faded into the deep indigo of the high desert night.
Jonah had unhitched the team, hobbled their forelegs with soft rawhide straps so they could graze the salt grass in the draw without drifting, and tied the light spring wagon to an iron picket pin driven into the hardpan.
There was no sound except the dry, tearing crunch of the horses cropping the grass, the occasional whistle of a night hawk sweeping low over the sage, and the crackle of a small, discreet fire built from dead mesquite roots that Jonah had gathered from the cutbank.
The fire was small—no larger than a man’s hat—built in a shallow trench Jonah had scraped out with his boot heel. It gave off almost no smoke, only a thin, sweet aroma of cured wood that rose straight into the still air and disappeared against the darkening cliff.
“A big fire is a fool’s comfort,” Jonah remarked, setting a battered tin coffee pot on three red coals at the edge of the pit. “It blinds your eyes to the dark, it tells every rider within five leagues where you bed down, and it burns up your fuel before the midnight frost comes on.”
Tala sat cross-legged on a piece of canvas opposite him, her back supported by the dry wheel of the wagon. Her indigo coat was buttoned to the chin against the rapid drop in temperature; she had her knees drawn up beneath the heavy wool, her moccasins tucked away from the draft.
Between them, propped against a smooth basalt river rock, sat the japanned tin box.
“How long did Mary live at the ranch?” Tala asked suddenly.
It was the first time she had spoken the dead woman’s name since the day Jonah had shown her the piece of buckskin with the quail track.
Jonah took a stick of dry wood and pushed a coal closer to the base of the pot. He did not look surprised by the question. His weathered face, illuminated from below by the dull red glow of the coals, looked older, the deep creases around his eyes holding small pockets of purple shadow.