By midday they reached the pass, a narrow cut between two red shoulders where the wind came through like a knife and the stone on either side rose sheer and close. Sage picked her way through loose scree with care, and Elias leaned forward in the saddle, talking to her low, letting her find her feet. On the far side of the pass the world opened, and Elias felt his breath catch in his chest in a way it had not since he was a boy watching his father ride away and believing, for one bright moment, that the man would come back with a cabin already built.
The canyon lay before them like a held breath. Tall grass stood in the bottom, green and gold, moving in waves under the wind, tall enough to brush a horse's belly. A cold creek ran through it, clear over stones, singing softly to itself in the way only mountain water sings. On either side the red walls rose, and along the creek the earth was black, black dirt three feet deep, rich and crumbling and sweet-smelling when Elias dismounted and took a handful and let it run through his fingers. It was the dirt of his dream, the dirt his father had described on a Missouri porch twenty years ago: bottomland with timber on the ridges and cold water in the creek. A spring bubbled up near a stand of cottonwoods, strong and steady, and above it, on a flat shelf, stood a low stone building, a spring-house, where the creek was measured and kept in the dry season. Horses grazed in the distance, small and bright against the grass. Smoke rose thin from lodges Elias could not yet see, tucked into the canyon's upper flat.
Tanner watched him, and his smile was thinner now, more watchful. "Well?" he said. "Is it what you hoped?"
Elias did not answer at once. He knelt by the creek, cupped the cold water in his hands, and drank. It was the sweetest water he had tasted since he left Missouri, cold enough to ache his teeth, clean enough to see his own face in. He stood, wiped his hands on his trousers, and looked up the canyon toward the lodges and the spring-house and the grass moving in the wind, and for a moment the dream was so close he could have reached out and touched it, a cabin on the shelf, a garden in the black dirt, Sage in a corral of his own building, no parchment, no man with a paper telling him to move along.
And then, forgetting his own rule, forgetting the promise he had made in the dark above the saloon, he reached into his saddlebag and took out his father's brass compass. He told himself it was only to take a bearing, only to know where he stood, only the habit of a surveyor's son who wanted to fix a place in his mind the way his father had fixed places with a line and a notebook. He opened the lid, sighted along the needle toward the spring-house, and began to note the bearing in his head, the way Thomas had taught him. The brass was warm from the sun. The needle trembled and settled. He did not see the riders until they were already there.
They came out of the trees along the creek in a silence that was itself a kind of skill, five riders on strong horses, moving in a loose arc that closed around him without hurry and without a wasted motion. At their head rode a young man of twenty-nine, broad-shouldered, dark-eyed, with his hair tied back and a rope coiled at his saddle, and his face was set in a look Elias recognised at once: the look of a man who has caught someone doing exactly what he expected him to do. Elias closed the compass slowly and put it back in his saddlebag, his hands steady, his heart hammering against his ribs in a way the old wound answered with its muffled thump.
Put your hands where I can see them, the young man said, in plain, unaccented English, without shouting. "And step away from your horse."
Elias did. He had fought in a war, and he knew the arithmetic of five riders against one man on foot with a compass in his hand. He raised his hands, slowly, and stepped back from Sage. Two riders dismounted and took his revolver from his belt and his knife from his boot with a care that was not rough but left no doubt. Another took Sage's reins in hand, speaking to her softly, and Sage, to Elias's shame and relief both, went quietly, as if she understood that a calm horse was a living horse. Tanner sat his chestnut a dozen yards off, his face gone pale under its tan, his hands raised a little, as if to show he was no part of this, and Elias saw, in that moment, exactly how much Tanner's guidance was worth when the canyon's people arrived.
The young man looked at Elias, then at the compass case just visible in the open saddlebag, then back at Elias's face. "You were measuring," he said. It was not a question.
I was taking a bearing, Elias said, and heard how thin it sounded. "I meant no harm by it."
Measuring is measuring, the young man said. "My name is Nash. You will come with us, and you will explain yourself to my father. If you run, we will catch you. If you fight, you will lose. Walk."
Elias walked. Behind him, Sage's hooves moved softly in the tall grass, and the creek sang on, cold and indifferent, and the black dirt he had dreamed of for three territories lay under his boots as he was led away from it, a prisoner in the place he had wanted most to belong.