Ojo Caliente country, if you can credit it. And there was a girl with them, so
the sign says. A girl, riding with raiders. Girl got herself shot in the fuss,
maybe. Sign of a one that crawled off, maybe headed this way, water being
where it is." He nodded at the trough, at the windmill, at the whole of Wade's
little kingdom of water in a dry land. "Mr. Barlow's put a reward out. Fifty
dollars for word of her, brought in or pointed out. Fifty dollars is a lot of
word, for a man in your β situation."
"Situation," Wade repeated, mildly.
"Store debts and such." Deke smiled. It was not an unkind smile, which was
the worst thing about it. "No shame in it. Shame is a luxury, like ice in
summer."
Wade let a silence sit where an answer might go, and filled it with coffee,
pouring for Colly and Brandt, who drank with their hats in their hands like
boys at a funeral lunch and said nothing at all. "I haven't seen any Apaches,"
he said, and it was, word for word, the first lie he had told in some years, and
he heard how steady it came out and wondered at himself. "I've been right
here four days working that sorrel mare. Your sorrel mare, Deke. She's
coming along fine, if Mr. Barlow asks. She'll be ready end of the week."
"Is that a fact." Deke's gaze had drifted, unhurried, over the corral β where
the mare stood β and the claim, and the door of the shack. The door was
shut. It was a warm day, and Wade's door, like every door in that country in
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warm weather, lived open from sunup to dark, and it was shut, with the kettle
on inside and the windows shuttered against a heat that shutters did not help.
Wade felt the seeing of it happen. He felt it the way he'd felt the mare read
his own tension through a lead rope: instantly, and in his stomach. "You keep
your door shut against the flies, Sutter?"
"Against the dust," Wade said. "Wind's been up all day." The wind, at that
moment, was not up at all, and all four men knew it, and the windmill hung
still above them in the windless heat.
Deke nodded slowly, the nod of a man filing a thing rather than believing it.
He finished his coffee. He looked once more around the draw β at the
trough, at the churned mud at its base that Wade had worked over twice with
a rake and that still, to a tracker's eye, would not read as clean as it should; at
the tracks near the corral gate; at the shack, shut and shuttered, breathing out
through its seams the faintest smell that did not belong to an empty bachelor
shack at all: fever-sweat, and carbolic, and boiled cloth. Deke's nostrils
moved once. He said nothing about any of it. He set his cup down on the
trough's rim, precisely, like a man setting down a marker he intends to come
back to.
"Obliged for the coffee," he said. "You see anything β anything at all β
you ride in and tell us. Mr. Barlow would take it kindly. And Sutter β " he
swung up into the saddle with the ease of a man half horse himself, and
looked down, and the mildness went out of his face for just a moment,
leaving the thing underneath, which was not mild and never had been " β
you keep that mare coming along. Mr. Barlow's got plans for his horse herd,
and he'd hate for anything out here to get β complicated."
They rode out the way they had come, at a walk, unhurried, and Wade stood
at his trough with three empty coffee cups and watched them until the dust of
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them was a smudge and then nothing, and he understood with a clarity that
sat in him like swallowed ice that the visit had not been a visit. It had been a
measuring. They had not expected to find her in daylight like a lost calf; they
had come to see his face when they told him the price of her, and to let him
know the country was watched now β watched by men who watered at his
trough and set their cups down like markers.
Under his floor, in the dark, on a pallet among the potato sacks, a girl lay
holding her breath in a cellar that smelled of earth, listening to horses leave.
He waited until full dark to open the trap, and when he did, her eyes in the
lantern light were not frightened. They were furious, and they were ashamed
of the fury, because it had nowhere to go.
"You lied to them," she said. "For me. With your straight face, you lied like a
β " She searched for the word and did not find a kind one.
"I did," Wade said. "Get used to it. I expect I'll have to practice."
She ate that night sitting up β propped against the wall on his one pillow,
the bowl in her good hand, eating slowly and completely, the way a person
eats who has been starved. The color had come back into her face in patches.
The wound, when he changed the dressing, was angry but clean. She
watched his hands work, and when he was done she said, "You do that like a
woman."
"My mother did it on half the county," Wade said. "I was her second pair of
hands by the time I was ten. It's her kit you're smelling."
"She taught you well." She set the bowl down with care, exactly in the
middle of the table's edge, and then she looked at him the way she had
looked at him the first time, straight on, and offered him the thing she had
been deciding whether he had earned. "My name is Enola," she said. "My
15
father is Kaya. He is headman of our band β we are not many. We winter in
the valley of Ojo Caliente, where the water comes up warm out of the ground
and never stops, not in any drought. The white men want that water for their