The water came back first, before anything else could be settled, and it came back the way a held breath is released. When the last of the brush and stone was pulled from the creek's throat, the dam gave a low, shuddering sigh and the creek pushed through, brown at first with stirred mud, then clearing as it found its old bed again. It ran past the stone spring-house with a sound Elias had come to know the way a man knows his own name — a cold, bright, unhurried talk over rock — and it went on down the canyon toward the camp, toward the tall grass and the fields that had waited through the night with their roots in dry ground. Men who had stood with rifles in their hands an hour before now stood with their hands empty, watching the water, and nobody was in a hurry to speak.
Deputy Sam Wilkes had ridden in with his posse while the parley was still unravelling, and he had done his work the way he did everything: slowly, honestly, and without any appetite for theatre. Cyrus Tanner sat now on a flat stone beside the spring-house with his wrists in irons, his blue cavalry coat torn at the shoulder where Elias had seized it, the yellow piping long gone from the collar, his hat lost somewhere in the struggle. He looked smaller than he had looked on the porch at Lark Spur Flat. The smooth talk had gone out of him. When Wilkes asked him plain questions, he answered them, not because he had found honesty at last but because there was nowhere left for the talk to run. He said the Lark Spur Land Company had paid him to find a way into the canyon, and that he had found it through Elias's name. He said the forged survey sheet had been Crowe's idea and his hand, and that the thirty-day notice had been meant to frighten the camp into signing before anyone thought to ask whose handwriting was on the paper. Wilkes wrote it down in a small book, stopping now and then to read a line back to him so there could be no argument later about what had been said.
Riker sat apart from him, his hands bound, his talking finally done. He had surrendered when Wilkes rode in, and the surrender had been a practical thing rather than a brave one: he had looked at the ring of riders, at the deputy, at the water beginning to move again, and he had set his rifle down on the ground as if it had grown too heavy to hold. He would go to jail in Lark Spur Flat, Wilkes said, and answer for the fence-cutting, the horses driven off, and the dam. He did not argue. There was nothing left in him to argue with.
Cole Marsh was not there at all. He had ridden away from Tanner's crew for good after letting the horses go in the box canyon, and no one in the posse had any order to chase a man who had already chosen to leave. Elias thought of him once, briefly, a quiet man on a quiet horse riding west, and wished him a better employer than the last one.
Wendell Crowe did not wait for the hearing to find him. Word reached the spring-house before noon, carried by one of Wilkes's riders who had gone back to town at a gallop: Crowe had been indicted on the forged filing, the paper with Elias's name on it now held against him by his own second ledger and by the testimony Tanner had just given, and Crowe had fled the territory rather than face the courtroom. He had left his office door locked and his desk emptied in the night, and the town was already talking about him in the past tense, the way towns do when a man has spent his credit. Elias felt no triumph at the news. Crowe had never ridden out himself, had never stood in the canyon or touched the water he had tried to buy. He had been a man who bought other men's maps and names, and in the end he had sold his own name cheapest of all.
Red Hawk came to the spring-house in the late afternoon, not as a prisoner but as a man reporting to his own people. He stood before Iron Elk and Nash and spoke plainly about the rifle and the coin, about the night trail he had shown Tanner's men, about the shame that had been on him even while he did it. He did not ask to be excused. He asked what work would set it right. Iron Elk listened the way he always listened, with his whole attention and no hurry, and then set the punishment the council had agreed: Red Hawk would be kept from the hunt for a season, and he would work for the families his betrayal had endangered — mending fences, hauling water, tending the horses he had helped loose — until the camp judged the debt paid. It was a hard sentence and a fair one, and it left a man a way back. Red Hawk bowed his head and accepted it, and the next morning he was at the corral before first light with a hammer in his hand.