night, later than any honest errand runs, and he had seen the telegraph office
window lit and a man's shadow moving in it, bent over the key, writing. He
had told himself it was railroad business. He had told himself a number of
things that week, and every one of them had been wrong in the same
direction.
The notice was nailed to the post office door where the stage schedules used
to hang. Fresh paper. Good ink. He read it standing in the sun with his hat in
his hand like a man at a grave that had his own name on it.
Three hundred dollars reward, it said, for information leading to the
apprehension of a Mescalero Apache woman, name unknown, age about
twenty-two years, height five feet four inches, hair black and worn long,
speaks English. When last seen she bore a gunshot wound, fresh, in the left
shoulder. Wanted in connection with the murder of two riders of the B-Bar
Ranch and the theft of forty head of horses from the same.
Line for line, it was the girl in his root cellar. The shoulder. The hair. The
English, which Barlow's people could only have known if someone who had
spoken with her had described her, and Wade stood in the sun doing that
arithmetic too, and not liking any sum it produced. Somebody had talked to
Enola before the ambush and remembered her the way a man remembers a
thing he means to use. Under the notice someone had already penciled a
remark in a hand he did not know. He did not read it. He put his hat on and
rode out of San Tomas at a walk, because running would have been a kind of
answer, and he was not ready to give the town any answers yet.
Dr. Hart came out to the draw on the Thursday after dark, the way she had
come each time, with her buggy lamp shuttered and her bag on the seat
beside her and a rifle across her knees that she handled like a woman who
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had been taught young and had not forgotten. Wade met her at the gate and
took the horse, and she went down into the cellar with the lamp and was gone
a long while, and when she came up she sent him down with the water she
had heated, because Enola was sitting up.
She was sitting up. That was the first thing. Four days of fever and broth and
the doctor's powders, and the girl was propped against the cellar wall on his
folded blankets with her hair braided back and her face still thin as a blade,
but her eyes were clear and they stayed where she put them. The bandage on
her left shoulder was fresh. Her right hand lay quiet in her lap. She looked at
Wade a long moment, and then she looked at Dr. Hart, who had seated
herself on the upturned crate with her instruments laid out, and she seemed to
come to the end of some deliberation she had been conducting alone.
"You should know the whole of it," she said. "Both of you. Since men are
spending money to bury it."
Her English was careful and complete, the English of a girl raised within
trading distance of white towns, and she told it in order, the way a person
lays out stones to cross a river. Her father Kaya was headman at Ojo
Caliente, where the spring came up out of the rock hot enough to steam on a
cold morning and never failed, not in the driest year any living man could
name. Her brother Loche had led a party of six out of the camps in the
second week of the month, driving forty horses, mares and geldings their
own people had raised on the grass around the spring, down the San Tomas
road to trade. Flour. Tools. Cloth. Coffee, which her father pretended not to
like. It was a trading road. They had walked it in her grandfather's time. They
carried a pass from the agent and Loche carried it in his shirt.
"At the narrows, where the road goes between the rocks, the light was just
coming," she said. "They were above us. I did not see faces at first. I saw the
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gunsmoke before I heard the shots, the way you do. Loche fell in the first
fire. My cousin Tsali fell. They did not shoot like men hunting. They shot
like men who had been told where we would be and when, and had sat all
night in the cold to be ready for it."
"Who were they, Enola?" Dr. Hart asked, not unkindly.
"White men. I say it plain because it is the part that matters and I will not
dress it. They wore no paint. They wore hats and coats and one of them wore
a scarf over his face that slipped when he ran, and he had a beard the color of
rust. They knew the trail. They knew the herd. When it was done they did not
bury our dead. Men who steal horses bury nothing, but men who fear the law
bury their work. These men left our dead in the road for the first riders to
find, because the dead in the road were the story they wanted found."
She had run down the arroyo with the ball in her shoulder and the herd
thundering away toward the San Tomas road, toward Barlow grass, driven by
riders who knew exactly which direction home was. She had hidden in a
culvert through a day and a night. She had walked two days after that,
keeping to the low ground, making for the one water she knew of on that side
of the hills that a woman alone could reach without being seen from a road.
His windmill. She had heard its creak from the arroyo the way you hear a
church bell in a country that has none, and she had crawled the last of it.
"Barlow's horses were never touched," she said. "No B-Bar stock was taken.
No B-Bar rider was killed by my people. The two dead white men in his