Ethan stood with his rifle in his hands, and the water running at his feet, and he knew, finally, that he was not passing through anymore. He had stayed. And staying, it turned out, was the hardest and the best thing he had ever done.
The rifles went down one by one, and for a long moment no one in Stone Bowl Canyon seemed to know what to do with the silence that followed. The water kept talking. It ran over the stone lip of the basin in a thin, bright sheet, pooled, and ran again, and the sound of it filled the narrow place between the walls as if the canyon itself were breathing for the first time in weeks. Children were still drinking. That was the thing Ethan Cole kept coming back to, standing with his left shoulder on fire and his returned rifle heavy in his hands. The children were drinking, and no one was shooting at them anymore.
Chief Nan-tan-lupan stood at the water's edge with his braids over his shoulders and his scarred cheek catching the light. He did not raise his voice. He had never needed to. He looked at Coleman Murdock, who stood with his thin smile gone and his hands empty at his sides, and at Wade, who sat on a rock with his wrist held and his face white with anger and shame, and at Fitch, whose rifle lay on the ground where he had dropped it, and at the four other riders who had followed Murdock up the rim and down again and now looked as if they wished the canyon walls would close over them.
No one will be shot here, the chief said. "Not today. Not at this water."
Murdock opened his mouth, as if to salvage a claim or a price, then looked at the women filling gourds, at Yana kneeling with her little brother Koi beside her, both drinking with wet faces, and whatever he had meant to say died before it reached his tongue.
Ishtah came to Ethan first. Her small hands were stained with herb dyes and her iron-gray hair had come loose from its knot, but her eyes were clear and her touch was sure. She cut away the torn cloth of his shirt at the shoulder and looked at the graze where Wade's bullet had burned a furrow across the flesh. It bled freely and it hurt with every breath, but the bone was untouched and the muscle held.
You have been lucky twice, she said, not unkindly. "Do not ask for a third time."
She washed the wound with water from the basin and packed it with a poultice that smelled of crushed leaves and clean earth. Ethan sat on a flat rock and let her work, watching the canyon fill with the ordinary business of a people coming back to life: a fire built up, cattle led down in small groups to the lower pool so they would not foul the drinking basin.
The wounded pack horse stood with its leg held off the ground, trembling. Besh held its head and talked to it low and steady while Kani cleaned the wound in its foreleg. The bullet had gone through flesh, not bone, and the horse would live, though it would limp for a time. Ethan thought of Sable, his dun mare, standing nearby with her head low, her front-left foot still tender where the shoe had been lost so many days before. He would see to her soon. There was time now. That was the strangest feeling of all: time, unhurried, like water itself.
When Ishtah had bound his shoulder, the chief spoke again, and this time he spoke to everyone, his own people and Murdock's men alike, so that no one could later pretend the words had not been said.
This spring is not owned, he said. "It is not mine. It is not yours, Murdock. It is not Ethan Cole's, though he found it. It lives because it moves. If one man dams it, it dies for everyone. So hear the terms, and let them be plain. No dam. No wall. No claim written on paper or carved on stone. Any man, any woman, any child who comes here thirsty may drink, and may carry water away in his own vessel, and may rest one night in the shade. In return, no man takes more than he needs, and no man lifts a weapon at this water."
He paused, and his gaze settled on Murdock.
You came here to take it. You leave here as a guest. That is mercy, not weakness. Remember the difference.
Murdock's face worked. He was a man who had built his life on the idea that everything had a price and that the man with the most guns set it, and now he stood in a canyon where that arithmetic had failed him in front of his own men. He nodded once, a short, stiff movement, as if his neck hurt him.
We will take water, he said, his voice thin. "For the ride south. Fifteen miles is a long way in this heat."
Take it, the chief said. "Fill every canteen. Fill them full."
Fitch moved first. The young gunman, still pale, knelt at the basin, drank, and filled his canteen carefully, as if the water might vanish if he hurried. The other riders followed. Wade sat apart, cradling his wrist where Dzeni had wrenched the rifle from him. Dzeni watched him without triumph. Ethan walked over, his shoulder aching, and held out his battered tin cup, filled from the basin.