Duncan looked at the cattle, and at the men, and at the railroad lawyer, who was suddenly very interested in his own boots, and he understood, finally, what he was looking at. It was not a charge. It was not a riot. It was a ranch, moving its cattle to water, with its owner at its head and its neighbors riding beside her, and there was no law in the territory that could stop that without looking like exactly what it was: a theft, performed in daylight, by men in suits.
"Move the wagon," he said to his hands, and his voice was flat. The wagon creaked aside. The column moved through, and Rosalind rode past Duncan without looking at him, because she had learned that some men are most dangerous when they are being watched, and least dangerous when they are being ignored. She heard him call after her, something about noon, something about the law, but the herd was moving again, and the dust was rising, and his words fell behind them the way all his words would now fall behind them, into the past where they belonged.
The waterhole, when they reached it, was beautiful in a way Rosalind had forgotten it could be. Cottonwood Waterhole lay in a hollow between low hills, ringed with old cottonwoods whose leaves were turning, the water dark and still and deep, reflecting the sky so perfectly that it looked like a second sky laid down in the earth. The old sheep camp had stood on the rise above it, and you could still see where the fire had been, if you knew where to look: a darkening in the soil, a few stones set in a line that had once been a hearth. Miren walked to that place first, without being told, and stood there a long time with her hands at her sides, and Ana went to her and stood beside her, and the two of them looked out over the water together, and Rosalind, watching from the wagon, felt the weight of eighteen years shift in her chest and settle somewhere new.
Then the work began, and work, Rosalind had always believed, was the only honest prayer. The hands unloaded the fence posts and the wire, and Sam marked the line with Miren, who remembered every post hole as if she had dug them yesterday, and the shepherds dug, and the cattle hands dug, and Ana dug, and Rosalind dug, her hands blistering inside her gloves, her back aching in the way it had not ached since she was a young woman building a ranch with a husband she loved. The fence went up post by post, in the old line, from the cottonwood with the split trunk to the flat rock, and by late afternoon it stood again, crooked and honest and new, and the herd was watered at the waterhole, and the camp was made on the rise, and the cook fires were lit, and the valley, for the first time in eighteen years, had a camp at Cottonwood Waterhole that was not afraid of the night.
As the sun went down, Rosalind sat on a camp stool beside the fire with a tin cup in her hands, and she watched Ana teaching one of the shepherd children to read by firelight, the child's head bent over a primer, Ana's finger moving under the words, patient as water. Miren sat a little apart, mending a harness with the steady hands of a woman who has mended everything in her life at least once. Sam came and sat beside Rosalind without speaking, and after a while he said, "They'll come at noon tomorrow, ma'am. The railroad men. With a lawyer."
"Let them come," Rosalind said. "We will be here. We will be working. That is the whole of it."
But even as she said it, she knew that tomorrow would need more than work. It would need a paper, and a man with authority to read it, and a town willing to hear what the paper said. She had sent for Inspector Lind three days ago, with the copies of the registration and a letter in her own hand, and she did not know if he would come, or if he would come in time, or if, when he came, the law he carried would be strong enough to hold against men with money and a wagon full of stakes. She looked out at the waterhole, dark now, the cottonwoods black against the last light, and she thought of Elias, who had died trying to hand over a piece of paper in the dark, and she thought of the yellow coat, folded in its trunk in the ranch house, and she thought: this time, the paper will be handed over in daylight. This time, there will be witnesses. This time, no one will have to die for a signature.