Crowe did not wait for the hearing to resume. By the next afternoon, word reached the camp that he had stood up in the mercantile, in front of Wilkes and Otis and half the town, and had disowned Tanner in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear — had called him a rogue, a liar, a man who had acted without the company's knowledge, and had washed his hands of the whole affair as if a man's hands could be washed by saying so. Elias heard the news from a rider and felt no triumph, only a tired disgust, because he knew Tanner well enough by now to know what a cornered man does when the men who paid him step back and leave him standing alone. A cornered man does not go quietly. He finds another way to get what he was promised, or he makes sure no one else gets it either.
Tanner fled Lark Spur Flat that night, or seemed to. He rode out with Riker and four armed men, quietly, without farewells, and for a day the town breathed easier and told itself the trouble was over. It was not over. On the second night, under a moon thin as a knife blade, Tanner and his men came back by the lower trail, not to the town but to the canyon, and they went straight for the stone spring-house where the creek is measured in dry season, the small, solid building of fitted stone that guards the head of the water. They seized it in the dark, driving off the two men who watched it with threats and rifle fire into the air, and they set to work damming the creek below it, piling brush and stone across the narrow run until the water backed up behind their dam and the creek below began to run thin and then to fail. Tanner's message, carried to the camp at dawn by a frightened boy who had run all the way from the spring, was plain and ugly: he would keep the water until the claim was signed over, until the paper he wanted bore the names he wanted, and if the camp would not sign, the camp could watch its creek die.
Iron Elk heard the message in silence, and then he spoke quietly to his riders, and the camp moved with the swift, ordered calm of people who have faced a dry season before and know what must be done. Elias wanted to ride straight for the spring-house, and Nash, his wounded arm still bound, wanted the same, but Ayasha stopped them both with a hand on each man's arm and a plan spoken quickly and clearly. Someone had to warn the camp's outlying families, and someone had to ride for the law, and someone had to watch the spring-house without being seen, and those three things could not all be done by the same rider. Ayasha took the horses herself — she slipped away from the camp on Night, leading two spare mounts, riding the high trail that Tanner's men would not be watching, to warn the families downstream and to bring the camp's riders to the spring from the far side. Elias watched her go, her back straight, her black mare moving like shadow over the ridge, and he felt pride and fear in equal measure, and he trusted her, because she knew every spring and seep in the canyon better than any man in it, and she would not be caught on a trail she had walked since childhood.
The rider who brought the news of Crowe's disowning had been in the mercantile himself, and he told it plainly, without embroidery. Crowe had stood up, smoothed his coat, and spoken as if he were a judge rather than a man whose paper was in doubt. He had said Tanner was a rogue who had exceeded his instructions, a liar who had invented promises the company had never made, a man the company would no longer employ or defend. He had said it loudly, for the room, and then he had sat down and looked at his hands, and the room had understood exactly what it was: a man cutting a rope before the rope could pull him down. Elias listened, and he felt no satisfaction, because he had seen men cut ropes before, in the army and out of it, and he knew that the man left holding the cut end rarely walks away quietly. Tanner had ridden for Crowe, had lied for Crowe, had dammed a creek and stolen horses for Crowe's paper, and now Crowe had called him a rogue in public. A man like Tanner would hear that as a debt, and he would try to collect it in the only currency he understood.
The night Tanner fled, Lark Spur Flat told itself a comforting story. Men in the saloon said the trouble had ridden out with him, that the canyon would be quiet now, that the hearing had settled things. Mae Hollis, sharp-eyed as ever, said nothing of the kind, and Otis, closing his mercantile, shook his head and told Wilkes that a man who leaves without his pay does not leave at all, he only circles. Wilkes listened, and kept his rifle close.
The seizure of the spring-house itself was quick and mean. The two men who watched it were camp men, steady and unarmed except for old rifles they rarely fired, and they were driven off in the dark by shouting and by shots fired into the air, which in the narrow hollow sounded like a battle. They ran for the camp, one of them stumbling and rising again, and they brought the news with them, breathless and ashamed, though there was no shame in it — two men cannot hold a stone house against six armed