shot at, who held the water while he did it. The court can weigh her
testimony against the fever." Reilly's voice never rose. "Come down off the
porch."
It was Deke Ransome who moved. Wade had been watching him where he
stood by the wagon with the other hands, off to the side, a man already doing
the arithmetic of the yard โ the deputies' positions, the distances, the one
loose thread that a signed confession had hanging out of it โ and Wade saw
the decision arrive in him the way weather arrives, all at once and from a
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direction you'd been warned about. Deke was a man whose whole life had
been other men's orders, and a man like that, when the orders finally run out,
does not become free. He becomes unfinished. He went for Malone in the
wagon bed โ not with a plan that could have survived the minute, but with
the last instruction he had ever been given still running in him like a mill
wheel after the water's cut: a live witness was a risk. His revolver cleared
leather and came up toward the wagon and Reilly, who had been watching
Deke the way Wade had, shot him through the shoulder of the gun arm from
the porch steps, once, without haste. The revolver went into the dirt. Deke
went down beside it holding his arm, looking at the blood coming through
his fingers with an expression of pure administrative surprise, and the yard
was full of the sound of horses starting and men shouting and Dr. Hart โ
who had ridden out behind the wagon uninvited, with her bag โ saying "Oh,
for heaven's sake" in a voice of total disgust as she went past everyone to the
wounded man on the ground, as if gunfire were merely the rudest of
interruptions to her rounds.
"That one's yours too, Amos," Reilly said, into the ringing quiet. "In front of
twelve witnesses. I expect it'll add."
They bound Deke's shoulder and laid him in the wagon beside the boy he had
tried to kill, which Reilly said was a fitting arrangement and the closest thing
to justice the morning had on offer. And then, with the yard gone strange and
still, Amos Barlow came down off his porch at last โ not to the sheriff. To
Wade. He walked the length of the yard in his vest and his good boots, past
his own wounded foreman, past the warrant, past the whole apparatus of his
undoing, and he stopped in front of the horse-breaker he had once summoned
to this same yard with offers, and he looked at him with something that was
not rage at all. It was incomprehension, pure and almost gentle, the look of a
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man reading a page in a language he had paid good money never to learn.
"You had nothing, boy," Barlow said. "Nothing. A draw, a windmill, a shack
like a crate, debts at Foster's store with my name behind the paper. I offered
you everything you lacked. Work that paid. Land that would hold water. A
place in the order of things." His hand rose, briefly, toward Enola, and fell.
"What did she ever give you that was worth the town?"
Wade thought about the cellar, and the hearing, and a woman holding a water
bag to the mouth of a man who had fired on her people. He thought about
Barlow's table, and what every offer on it had required him to subtract from
himself.
"She never asked me to be smaller than I am, Mr. Barlow," he said. "That's
the whole of it."
Barlow looked at him a while longer, as if the sentence might rearrange itself
into sense if given time. Then he shook his head, once, with a kind of pity
that was the coldest thing Wade had ever been offered, and he turned and
walked to his own buckboard, and climbed up into it like a man going to
church, and sat with his hands folded while they tied his horse's reins to
Reilly's saddle and the whole procession โ sheriff, deputies, inspector,
wounded men in a wagon, and an empire's papers in a saddlebag โ moved
out of the yard of the B-Bar and down the long road toward San Tomas.
It would be pleasant to record that the territory, having been shown the truth
in broad daylight with twelve witnesses, arranged itself promptly around
Wade Sutter like a fence mended. It did not. The truth won, in the end, the
way water wins against a dam โ but the dam took its time about it, and
charged him for the waiting.
Foster sent for him first. The storekeeper had him into the back room with
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the ledgers open and the manner of a man performing an amputation he did
not order but would not refuse: the notes Wade had signed for two winters of
getting by had been bought up months ago by Barlow's bank as a courtesy to
its largest depositor, and the bank, with its depositor in a cell and its assets in
the hands of lawyers, was calling paper across the county like a man
gathering chips off a table. Thirty days. Wade stood with his hat in his hands
and looked at the columns of his own poverty itemized in another man's
hand. "It ain't my choosing, Wade," Foster said, and Wade said, "I know
whose choosing it is, Earl. That's the one comfort in it," and walked out into
the street with thirty days in his pocket.
The water filing came next, by letter, on a lawyer's paper so white it seemed
to give off light: Barlow's attorneys challenged the filing on his draw โ the
seep, the windmill, the whole fragile basis of his claim โ on grounds that the
appropriation had lapsed, that the use had not been continuous, that the man
who filed it had abandoned the land in spirit by taking up with persons
hostile to the county's interest. That last phrase Wade read three times.
Persons hostile. He put the letter in the stove and then took it out again and