Drink, Ethan said. "The ride is long, and the sun does not care who you are."
Wade looked up, and for a second Ethan saw bewilderment in his face, as if kindness from the man he had tried to kill fit no story he knew. He drank and handed the cup back without a word.
Webb's surveyor had kept to the edge of the canyon all through the confrontation, clutching his paper claim as if it were a shield. Now he came forward, unfolding the paper with hands that shook slightly, and began to speak of boundaries and filings and rights granted by a distant office. The chief listened to him with the same patience he gave to everyone, and when the man had finished, the chief shook his head slowly.
Your paper does not know this water, he said. "It does not know that it runs under stone to the south, and that damming it here kills it there. Take your paper back to Webb. Tell him the canyon is open to any thirsty man, and closed to any claim. That is the only answer you will get."
The surveyor folded the paper again, smaller this time, and tucked it away. He filled his canteen at the basin, because even he was thirsty, and he did not meet anyone's eye as he did it.
By late afternoon the light in the canyon had turned gold, and Murdock's party was ready to ride. Their horses had drunk. Their canteens were full. Wade walked, leading his horse, his wrist bound in cloth, because Dzeni had told him plainly that he would not ride armed out of the canyon, and Murdock had not argued. It was a long walk south to the well, fifteen miles of dust and heat, and Ethan found he did not enjoy the thought of it, even for Wade.
Murdock paused at the mouth of the canyon and looked back once, at the basin, the cooking fires, the cattle drinking below. Shame sat on him like a coat that did not fit, and Ethan thought that shame, properly worn, might do more good than any bullet ever had.
You have made your point, Cole, Murdock said quietly. "I hope your spring holds."
It will hold, Ethan said, "so long as no one tries to own it."
Murdock nodded and rode south with his men behind him. The surveyor followed later, eastward and alone, his paper claim folded in his pocket and his canteen sloshing full.
That night, for the first time in fifty-five days and more, the band did not ration water by the cup. Children drank until their bellies were round. Women washed dust from their faces. Old people sat near the fire sipping slowly, as if they wanted to remember the taste. Ethan sat a little apart, his shoulder throbbing under Ishtah's bandage, and watched Nakai carry a cup to his grandfather with both hands, spilling not a drop. The boy caught Ethan's eye and grinned, and something loosened in Ethan's chest that had been tight since the morning he had ridden into a dry basin and found a child with an empty cup.
The chief came and sat beside him. For a while neither man spoke. The fire crackled. Somewhere in the dark, a woman began to sing, low and soft, and other voices joined her until the canyon held the sound like a cup holds water.
You stayed between the guns, the chief said at last. "Twice."
I did what the water needed, Ethan said.
The chief nodded, as if that were a complete answer, and perhaps it was.
In the days after Murdock rode south, Stone Bowl Canyon learned a new shape. The band did not simply camp; they settled. Shelters went up along the canyon's eastern wall where the afternoon shade fell first, frames of cut branches lashed together and roofed with hides and woven brush. The work was unhurried now, and that unhurried quality changed everything. Men who had marched with their shoulders braced against thirst now stopped to straighten a pole properly. Women sorted stores that had been bundled for flight and laid them out in the open. Children, who had walked for days in silence, began to run again, their feet slapping the stone, their shouts bouncing off the walls.
Ethan woke each morning to the sound of the basin. It had become the center of the camp the way a fire is the center of a room, and people passed it the way people pass a hearth, touching it, pausing, speaking low. The cattle were watered twice a day in the lower pool, driven down in patient lines by boys who had learned, at last, that there would be enough. The twenty-six horses stood in the shade of the north wall, and the wounded pack horse, its leg bandaged fresh each morning by Kani, cropped grass that had begun to push up, green and startling, where the seep dampened the ground.
Ishtah claimed a patch of ground for her garden. It was not much, a strip of soil along the canyon wall where water from the basin's overflow ran in a shallow channel, but she walked it each morning with her medicine bundle and her small digging stick, and she planted what she had carried through the drought in a pouch at her waist: squash seeds, bean seeds, a few precious corn kernels saved from a harvest two years gone, and herbs whose names Ethan did not know but whose smells he was beginning to recognize, bitter and green and clean. Nakai helped her, pressing seeds into the dark soil with his fingers, and Yana helped too, serious as a grown woman, while Koi sat in the dust and patted the earth flat with both hands.