In the end they agreed, because Elias had come too far to turn back for the sake of a bad feeling he could not yet name, and because he had a rule for himself: look before you judge, and judge by what a man does, not by how smoothly he talks. Dawn, at the stable behind the store. No stakes. No survey talk. No chain. Just two men riding to look at a canyon, and Elias's promise to himself that he would look and not take. Tanner shook his hand with a grip that was firm and dry, tipped his hat, and walked away down the track toward Mae Hollis's saloon, whistling softly through his teeth, a tune Elias did not recognise.
Elias stabled Sage, paid Otis for grain and a night's board, and took the small room above the saloon. It was clean enough, as Otis had said, with a narrow bed, a washbasin, and a window that looked out over the track toward the darkening peaks. The piano below played for an hour, badly and cheerfully, and then fell silent. Elias lay awake long after the town had gone quiet, listening to Sage shift in the stable below and to the wind moving along the track outside. He took his father's watch from his coat pocket and held it in his palm in the dark. The cracked crystal caught a thin line of moonlight through the window, and the hands stood at twenty minutes past four, as they always did, as they always would. He thought of his father kissing the top of his head on a Missouri porch and riding west, of the three boys dead on a Tuesday morning, of the discharge tent and the hollow spring of 1865, and of the black dirt three feet deep that Otis had described. He thought of Tanner's smile and the ripped piping on his coat, and of Iron Elk, a man he had never met, who did not like soldiers or speculators and held the best bottomland in the territory.
He made his decision in the dark, slowly, the way he made all his decisions: he would go and look, but he would not stake. He would carry the compass because it was his father's and because a man crossing strange country needed to know his way back, but he would not use it to claim another man's water. He would watch Tanner. He would watch himself, harder. And if the canyon was what Otis said it was, he would find an honest way to ask for a place in it, or he would ride on and keep looking, because a dream that had to be stolen was not the dream he had carried across three territories. He closed his hand over the watch, set it on the windowsill where the moonlight could find it, and at last, near midnight, fell asleep with the wind in the eaves and the red peaks waiting beyond the dark.
Dawn came up cold and clean over Lark Spur Flat, with a wind that smelled of dust and sage and the faintest promise of rain far off in the peaks. Elias was at the stable before the sun cleared the roofs, saddling Sage in the half-light, checking her girth and her feet, settling his father's compass in the saddlebag where he could reach it and yet where it would not rattle and announce itself. Tanner arrived as the light strengthened, leading a rangy chestnut gelding and carrying a bedroll and a canteen and a smile that looked as if it had been put on with his coat. He did not mention the thirty dollars, and Elias, without a word, counted fifteen dollars into his palm from the money he kept in his boot. Tanner weighed the coins, nodded, and tucked them away.
You ride quiet, Tanner said as they left town, "and you'll see more. The desert tells a man plenty if he shuts up long enough to listen."
Elias had no argument with that. They rode north along the wash Otis had described, Sage moving with her steady, ground-eating walk, the chestnut keeping pace with a longer, looser stride. The land changed by degrees. The flat, baked plain of creosote and snake-weed gave way to broken ground, to arroyos cut deep by old floods, to stands of juniper and piñon that smelled sharp and resinous in the morning air. A hawk circled high above them, crying once, twice, and then falling silent. A covey of quail burst from a thicket and scattered like thrown stones. The red peaks grew larger with every mile, no longer a distant wall but a presence, their rust-coloured flanks banded with shadow, their crests catching the sun and throwing it back in a fierce, clean light.
At the dead cottonwood, Tanner turned east without hesitation, and Elias marked the fork in his mind: a bleached trunk, a pile of stones, a wash that bent away to the south. He did not take out the compass. He told himself he would not need it on the way in, with a guide, and that the promise he had made in the dark was easy to keep as long as he kept his hands off his saddlebag. But the compass was there, and the habit of his father's teaching was there too, sight and note and walk, and his eyes kept doing the work on their own, reading the land the way a man reads a letter: here the grass thickened, here the soil darkened, here a line of green marked water running just under the surface.