Reilly stood up and put his hat back on and looked at Wade for a long
moment over the sleeping boy.
"Well," the sheriff said. "Now I need a wagon, a brand inspector, and forty
horses' worth of daylight." He looked down the road toward Barlow range,
where the heat was already standing in sheets over the grass. "Sutter, you
ever see a brand read by a man who knows how? It wants a certain light, and
we've got maybe two hours of it left this morning that's worth a damn. Let's
go and look at Amos Barlow's stolen property, grazing on Amos Barlow's
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grass."
They left Malone sleeping in the wash under a deputy's guard, with orders to
fire a shot if the boy woke worse, and they rode with the brand inspector, a
leathery little man named Pruitt who complained about the hour and the light
for six miles and then went entirely silent the moment the box canyon
opened ahead of them, the way a hound goes silent at the den.
The canyon was not on any map Wade had ever seen. It was a fold in
Barlow's back range where the cliffs came down in two long arms and the
mouth had been closed, some years past, with a fence of cedar posts and
good wire that no stock on the open range had any business requiring. Inside,
the grass stood belly-high around a seep-fed trough cut from a single
cottonwood log, and the horses were there.
Forty of them, not counting the foals at heel no man had bothered to brand.
They raised their heads as one animal when the riders came through the gate
gap and they stood watching with the deep, insulted calm of horses that have
been handled by men they did not choose, and even at sixty yards Wade
could see the brands were wrong. A fresh brand has a look in its first season
— raised, dark, scabbed at the edges — and these were fresh the way a coat
of paint is fresh on an old door. Every horse on the near side carried the
B-Bar's running W worked over something older, and the something older
showed at the margins, the way a word shows through where the ink
underneath is darker than the ink on top.
"Now then," said Pruitt, and he dismounted with a rawhide quirt in one hand
and nothing else, and he walked into the herd the way a man walks into a
room of sleeping strangers, unhurried, and he took the first mare by the
forelock and turned her hip to the sun. "Light," he said, to no one, to
everyone. "It's all in the light and the angle. You graze the sun across it
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low—" he tilted the mare a degree, two degrees, and the hair over the altered
brand caught the morning at a raking angle, and the old mark stood up out of
the new one as plain as print: a bar over a crescent, the agency's mark for the
Mescalero remuda, with a smaller figure beside it that Pruitt read aloud.
"That's not a Barlow beast. That never was a Barlow beast. That's
government-issue Apache property, and the running iron that's been over it
isn't six weeks old."
He read eleven horses that way before Reilly told him it was enough for the
warrant and more than enough for God. The evidence from the ambush site
was already in Reilly's saddlebags — the B-Bar-stamped horseshoe pried out
of the rocks' mud, the cartridge cases gathered out of the grass, brass that
matched no Apache rifle ever made — and now the herd stood in its
cedar-fenced fold in the morning light with its true names written under its
false ones, forty head of stolen property eating stolen grass behind a fence
the thieves had built themselves.
Reilly sat his horse a long time looking at it. When he spoke, it was quietly.
"There's the stolen property, gentlemen," he said. "It's been grazing on the
victim's grass."
They rode to the ranch house with the warrant folded inside Reilly's coat, and
they brought Malone with them because Reilly would not have it otherwise
— the boy laid in the bed of the B-Bar's own supply wagon, with Dr. Hart's
bandage redone by Enola's hands and a deputy walking at each wheel. Amos
Barlow came out onto his porch as they came into the yard, and he stood
with his thumbs in his vest and watched them arrange themselves in his dirt
— the sheriff, the inspector, the deputies, the wagon with his wounded rider
in it, and at the end of the line, on a borrowed horse, the Apache girl whose
brother he had made into a paragraph — and Wade watched a great many
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expressions cross the old man's face and be refused entry until what was left
was the thing underneath all of them, which was not fear. It was offense. The
deep, sincere offense of a man who has been interrupted in his own yard by
the consequences of his own instructions.
"Reilly," Barlow said. "You've brought a circus onto my property."
"I've brought a warrant, Amos." Reilly took it from his coat and unfolded it
with the care of a man who knows paper outlives powder. "For your arrest.
Conspiracy to steal livestock, Amos, and conspiracy in the deaths of two men
— your own men, as it happens, though the statute book won't care whose
they were." He held the warrant out. "There's a statement signed this morning
by Jess Malone that says you planned it at this house's table. There's forty
horses in your box canyon wearing your brand over the agency's. There's a
horseshoe of your stamping in my saddlebag that was picked up in the rocks
where Harlan and Bell died. Shall I keep going, or will you come down off
the porch?"
Barlow did not move. "That boy's fevered. He's been in a woman doctor's
hands for a month, and fever talks."
"Fever signed its name at the bottom, Amos. In front of the woman your men
shot at, who held the water while he did it. The court can weigh her