“You always did talk too much when a simple answer would do, Caleb Morgan,” she whispered, her voice husky.
She turned to Judge Overstreet. “Judge, strike the old paper. And if the circuit preacher is outside with the crowd, tell him to come in. He has an honest wedding to perform today.”
The three years that followed were not easy years, for the desert does not surrender its harshness simply because men learn to live in peace. But they were good years, rich with the quiet satisfaction of labor that bore fruit.
The northern fence remained down. Where Nathaniel Morgan’s barbed wire had once scarred the limestone arroyo, wild plum thickets and willow stands flourished, their roots binding the soil and keeping the creek banks from washing away during the summer cloudbursts. The water flowed freely down the main channel, splitting into a network of hand-dug irrigation ditches that fed the cornfields of the Ramirez place, the alfalfa pastures of the German farmers, and the bottomland meadows of the Morgan Ranch.
Under Clara’s direction, the Community Trust established a formal water council. Once a month, the ranchers gathered under the cottonwoods at the Morgan place to inspect the flow gauges, allocate water shares during the dry spells, and organize working bees to clear the gravel drifts from the underground siphon. There were arguments—cattlemen are a stubborn, jealous breed by nature—but the memory of Gideon Vale and the shared drought held them together like iron bands around a cedar barrel.
Clara transformed the domestic life of the ranch. She did not keep to the kitchen or the parlor as the town women did. She rode the high pastures with Caleb, her sharp eyes spotting sick calves hidden in the cedar scrub long before the flies could find them. She taught the young men of the valley how the Chiricahua tracked water by observing the flight of dove flocks at twilight and how to dig shallow, rock-lined catch basins in the dry washes to harvest the mountain runoff.
And in the second year, the old house was blessed with the sound of new life.
A son was born on a cold, starry night in February while a gentle rain tapped against the cedar shingles of the new roof. They named him Nathaniel Whitaker Morgan, honoring the two old men whose friendship had survived eighteen years of darkness.
When Samuel Whitaker held his grandson for the first time, wrapped in a blanket of soft homespun wool and gray beaver fur, the old surveyor had sat by the hearth for hours without speaking. His gnarled, scarred fingers gently stroked the baby’s dark hair—hair as black and thick as Clara’s own.
“He has the Morgan brow, Clara,” Samuel had whispered, a single tear cutting a pale track through the weathered creases of his bronze cheek. “And the Whitaker chin. He will be stubborn enough to survive this rock, and wise enough to share the springs.”
Samuel lived another three years, his days spent sitting on the wide front porch beneath the cottonwoods, carving pine toys for his grandson and watching the cattle graze peacefully along the green creek meadows. When his time came in his seventy-fourth summer, he did not die in pain. He closed his eyes in his sleep, his hand resting on his old brass surveyor’s compass.
They buried him on the high limestone bench overlooking the canyon, right beside the entrance to the subterranean river cave. Beside his headstone of native red sandstone, Caleb and Clara planted two young cottonwood saplings, their roots watered by the very spring he had given his life to protect.
On the day of the burial, more than two hundred people climbed the rocky trail to pay their respects—white cattlemen in their Sunday coats, Mexican vaqueros with their hats held against their chests, and a delegation of ten Chiricahua families who had traveled from the reservation at Mescalero under special pass from the Indian agent.
An elderly Apache headman named Chato, whose hair was white as sheep’s wool, stepped forward and laid a bundle of sweetgrass and wild mountain sage upon the grave. He looked at Clara, his dark, ancient eyes filled with deep, silent understanding.
“The son of the surveyor kept the faith,” the old warrior said in his soft, guttural English. “The water runs through the stone. The people do not thirst. Go back to your valley, daughter of the Ndee. Your father sleeps with the mountain.”
Nature, however, had one more trial in store for the valley—a crucible that would test whether the unity forged in the fight against Gideon Vale was built on sand or founded upon the living rock.
It happened in the autumn of the tenth year.
A late-season tropical storm, sweeping inland from the Gulf of Mexico, collided with a high-pressure arctic front over the Guadalupe Mountains. For four days and four nights, the sky opened like a burst dam. Rain did not fall in drops; it descended in solid, gray sheets that battered the earth with the roar of a thousand waterfalls.
The high plateau could not hold the deluge. Thousands of square miles of hard-baked limestone shed the water into the dry arroyos, turning narrow canyons into raging, brown torrents choked with uprooted cedars, boulders, and dead cattle.
By the afternoon of the fourth day, the Red Hollow Creek had risen twelve feet above its banks. The lower bridge was washed away, and the muddy floodwaters were lapping at the porch steps of Mateo Ramirez’s adobe home, threatening to undermine the foundations and drown fifty head of his prime breeding heifers trapped in the low pens.
A rider came pounding through the torrential rain into the Morgan yard, his horse nearly collapsing with exhaustion. It was young Mateo Jr., his face pale with panic.
“Caleb! Clara!” the boy shouted through the roar of the downpour. “The north diversion canal has jammed with logs! The water is backing up into the old siphon! If the headgate doesn't open, the overflow will rip through our lower field and take the whole homestead into the river!”