Ethan looked at the letter for a long time, then folded it and put it back in his coat. He did not tear it up. He did not write an answer. He simply sat with the choice unmade, listening to the water run over stone, and he understood that the choice itself was new. For the first time in his life, staying was not a failure to move on. It was a decision, and it was his to make, in his own time.
Above the canyon, the stars came out hard and bright, and the night air turned cold, the way desert nights do, sharp after the day's heat. Ethan pulled his coat around himself and thought of his brother Tommy, dead of fever on a trail when Ethan was twenty-four, and of the well that had gone dry after a family trusted him, and of all the roads he had ridden since. He had spent his life learning how water moves underground. Perhaps, he thought, he had also been learning how a man stays.
He slept that night with the bead against his chest and the sound of the spring in his ears, and his dreams, for once, were not of dry ground.
They came on the fifth day after the settlement began, and Besh saw them first from the rim: three small figures on the southern trail, moving slowly, stopping often, wavering in the heat. A woman, and two children. On foot. With nothing to carry water in but a single cracked jug.
Ethan was down at the basin when Besh came down the path at a run, and the look on the old scout's face told him everything before a word was spoken. They went up together, Ethan with his rifle left behind at the camp, because he had learned by now that a man approaching thirsty strangers does not come with a gun in his hands.
The woman was perhaps thirty, thin in the way of people who have given their own food to their children, her dress torn at the hem, her hair plastered to her face with dust and sweat. The children were a girl of about nine and a boy of about five, both barefoot, both with cracked lips and eyes too large for their faces. When they saw the men on the rim, the woman stopped and pulled the children behind her, and her hands shook.
Please, she said. Her voice was raw. "Water. For the children. I beg you. We have walked two days. My husband is —" She stopped, and her face crumpled. "My husband sent us ahead. He stayed with the wagon. The well at Murdock's — we could not pay. We could not pay what he asked."
Ethan knelt in the dust, slowly, so as not to frighten them, and held out his canteen. The woman stared at it as if she did not trust her eyes. The little boy reached first, and then the girl, and the woman drank last, in small, careful sips, as if she were afraid the water would be taken away if she took too much.
Who are you? Besh asked, gently.
Mary, the woman said. "Mary Ellison. This is Ruth, and this is Samuel. We farm east, on Webb's land. My husband works for Mr. Webb." She looked down at her hands. "We were told not to come this way. We were told the canyon was claimed. But the children —" She could not finish.
Ethan understood then, fully, what the second test was. It was not a test of whether the band would share with their friends, or with strangers who owed them nothing. It was a test of whether they would share with the people of the very man who had tried to claim their water, with Webb's own people, who had come begging because Webb's creek and Murdock's well had both failed them in the end.
He led them down into the canyon himself, walking slowly so the children could keep up, and the band gathered as they came, quiet at first, watching. Tahnee was the first to move. She came forward with a gourd of water and a bowl of stew, and she knelt before the children and held the gourd to Ruth's lips herself, the way she had held it to Yana's. Yana, watching, went to her shelter and came back with a strip of cloth for Samuel's blistered feet, and Nakai, solemn as a small elder, brought his wooden cup, filled to the brim, and gave it to the boy to drink from.
Drink slow, Nakai said, with great authority. "Ishtah says slow is best when you are very thirsty."
The chief came down last, and he looked at Mary Ellison for a long moment, and then he spoke, not to her, but to the band gathered around the basin.
Some of you will say these are Webb's people, he said. "You will be right. Webb closed his range to us. Webb sent a paper to claim this canyon. And now Webb's people come to us on foot, thirsty, because the water they were promised was sold to others first."
He paused, and the canyon was silent except for the water.
So I ask you: is this spring ours to refuse? If we refuse them, we become Murdock. If we refuse them, we become Webb. We did not dig this water out of the stone so we could learn to be cruel with it. The spring is shared, or it is nothing. That was the term we spoke aloud, and a term spoken aloud must hold when it is hard, or it is only a fine sound.
No one argued. Ishtah took Mary Ellison's hands and examined them, and then she took the children to her shelter and washed their feet and gave them salve for their blisters. Sani brought a blanket. The women found the Ellisons a place in the shade, and food, and water, and rest, and by evening Mary Ellison was sitting by the fire with her children asleep against her sides, weeping quietly, not from grief but from relief so deep it had nowhere else to go.