part that will get us both killed if you go on not understanding it."
Wade said nothing. The lamp burned between them and the cellar smelled of
24
earth and carbolic and the faint sweet rot of a wound going clean.
"They did not want the horses. Horses are the story. Forty horses is a number
a telegraph can carry. What they want is the water at Ojo Caliente. My
father's spring. It is the only water on that side of the mountains that does not
fail, and the grass around it is the grass Barlow's cattle must have or his herds
go thin in a dry year, and a dry year is coming, everyone with eyes knows it.
But the spring is ours, held by treaty and by use older than any paper in this
territory. So there must be a raid. Apache raiders, stealing, killing white men
on the road. Then the soldiers come, as soldiers have always come, and they
move my father's people off the water to a reservation where the government
can count us. And the spring stands open. And a man with cattle and paper
takes it the way a man takes a chair when another man is made to stand."
"And you?" Dr. Hart said.
"I am the only one alive who can say who held the guns." She said it without
any rise in her voice at all, which made it worse. "Loche is dead. Tsali is
dead. The others are dead or scattered into the hills and will not come down
to a white town to say it, and who would write down their saying if they did?
I saw the rust-bearded man. I saw the herd driven toward Barlow grass by
men who knew the way. If I live and speak, the raid is a lie and the lie has
names. If I am found by the soldiers, I am a prisoner and a prisoner can be
kept from speaking for years, in rooms, with paper. If I am found by
Barlow's riders, I am a raider who was shot resisting, and dead women file
no statements." She turned her head then and looked at Wade directly, and he
felt it go through him like a hand closing on his collar. "That is what is under
your floor, horse-breaker. Not a girl. A witness."
Dr. Hart had finished packing her bag while Enola talked, folding her cloths,
corking her bottles, tying her strings with the neat ferocity she brought to
25
everything, and now she set the bag down and looked at the girl, and then at
Wade, and she gave the verdict of a woman who had delivered half the
county and buried a fair portion of the rest and was not given to ornament.
"Then her life is a fact a great many men need not to exist," she said. "And
the two of you had better start conducting yourselves accordingly."
The B-Bar horses had come to Sutter's Draw every second Friday since
Wade was twenty-two, a string of unbroken colts and spoilt saddle stock that
no one else had the patience for, and on the Friday after the notice went up,
no horses came. He spent the day mending corral rails that did not need
mending, watching the road. Toward evening a B-Bar rider he knew by sight
came down the draw at a trot, not slowing, and called out across the fence
line as a man calls to a dog he is not sure of anymore. Ransome's orders, the
rider said. No more stock to Sutter's. Nothing personal in it. The rider did not
look at Wade when he said nothing personal, and he was already turning his
horse when he said it, and Wade stood in his own yard and watched his
living ride away from him up the draw with the dust hanging in the still air
behind it.
The Gazette did its work the following week. Wade found the paper folded
on Foster's counter on his next trip in, left there the way a thing is left where
a man will find it, and he read it standing up with his hat off because he had
been raised not to read in a hat indoors, which struck him afterward as the
last ordinary courtesy he would be shown that month. The editorial did not
name him. It did not have to. It spoke of the outrage on the San Tomas road
and of soldiers delayed and of certain elements in our midst, and that phrase
did the naming, certain elements who would harbor fugitives and succor the
enemies of progress for reasons of profit or perversity, and it said that a
community is judged by what it shelters. He folded the paper along its own
26
creases and put it back on the counter square with the edges even. Foster
watched him do it and said nothing at all, which was by then a kind of local
dialect Wade had learned to read fluently.
On the Sunday the sermon took it up. Wade did not go to hear it. He had not
darkened the church door since his mother's burying and the town knew that
too and used it as they used everything, but word travels out of a church the
way heat travels off a stove, and by Sunday night he knew the shape of it: the
text had been the Good Samaritan, which might have gone another way in
another man's mouth, but the Reverend had preached it as a warning about
the Samaritan's inn, and who was kept there, and at whose expense, and what
manner of men paid their debts to innkeepers with other people's safety.
Wade listened to this account from the liveryman's boy, who had been sent to
the draw on an errand that did not exist, and he thanked the boy and gave
him coffee and sent him home, and that night he found the sack at his gate.
It was a flour sack, washed and folded at the top, set square on the gatepost
stone where a passerby would take it for a thing dropped off a wagon. Flour.