They had been on the road for an hour when Sam rode back along the column, his face set, and pulled his horse in beside Rosalind's. "Riders ahead, ma'am," he said. "On the ridge above the waterhole road. Duncan's men, and railroad men with them. They've got a wagon across the road."
Rosalind looked ahead. She could see them now, small dark figures against the ridge, and the wagon, and the dust their horses had kicked up, hanging in the air. Her first instinct, the old one, the iron one, was to ride faster, to meet force with force, to be the baroness of Bar Seven and settle it the way she had settled everything for eighteen years — by being harder than the problem. She felt that instinct rise in her like a familiar horse under her, and then she felt herself set it aside, deliberately, the way a person sets aside a tool that has served its purpose and is now too heavy for the work.
"We keep driving," she said. "We do not stop for a wagon. The road is a public road, and the herd has as much right to it as any wagon. Sam, you ride point. If they speak to you, you tell them we are moving our cattle to water, which is the truth, and that we will camp at Cottonwood, which is also the truth. Nothing more."
Sam touched his hat and rode forward, and Rosalind kept her place in the column, and the herd kept moving, slow and unstoppable as weather. The riders on the ridge watched them come, and as the column drew nearer, Rosalind could make out Duncan Pryce himself, sitting his horse in the middle of the road, with two railroad men in dark suits beside him and four of his own hands behind. He had dressed for the occasion — a clean shirt, a new hat — as if he were going to a business meeting and not a confrontation, and in a way he was. He believed, still, that business was what this was.
When the lead cattle were fifty yards from the wagon, Duncan raised a hand. Sam stopped, and the column stopped behind him, and the dust settled slowly around them. Duncan rode forward a few paces, alone, and looked past Sam to Rosalind, and his face did something complicated — surprise, and then a quick, practiced recovery, and then the smooth confidence of a man who has talked his way out of tighter places than this.
"Mrs. Carmichael," he said, and his voice carried well in the still air. "This is a misunderstanding. The railroad has a lawful arrangement for the waterhole. I have the papers. You signed —"
"I signed nothing," Rosalind said, and her voice was not loud, but it carried, too, because the whole column had gone quiet to hear it. "You signed, Duncan. In my name. That is a separate matter, and the county will hear it. Today we are moving cattle to water."
Duncan's smile did not quite hold. "You can't camp at Cottonwood. The railroad takes possession at noon."
"The railroad takes possession of nothing," Rosalind said, "until a court says it can. And no court has said it. What you have is a paper you wrote yourself, and a wagon in the middle of a public road. Move the wagon, Duncan."
For a moment she thought he would refuse, and she thought about what would happen then — the herd pressing forward, the wagon, the shouting, the possibility that someone, somewhere in that long column of men and animals, would do something stupid and irreversible. She had seen it happen before. She had seen what a single shot can do to a valley: it does not end a dispute, it plants one, and it grows for a generation. She kept her hands still on the reins. She kept her eyes on Duncan's face. And behind her, she heard Miren Zubizarreta say something in Basque, low and steady, to the shepherds, and the shepherds' dogs moved out a little wider on the flanks, and the cattle, sensing the hesitation, began to drift forward again, a few steps, then a few more, the way a river finds its way around a rock.