them at once now, in company, with his hands full and his name signed to
the errand, and the strange thing, the thing he turned over once in his mind as
the dark came down and the mules' hooves found the old trail, was that the
rope had never felt less like a rope than it did tonight, riding toward the one
gulch in all that country where every answer he owed was waiting in a dead
man's hand and a live one's saddlebag.
They came down off the ridge in the last hour of the dark, and the gulch
below them was still holding its night in the bottom of it like water in a cup.
Micah rode at the surveyor's left, where Featherston had put him without
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discussion, the way a man sets a tool within reach of his working hand.
Behind them came the two chainmen with the chain coiled in its leather case
and the brass pins bright in their quiver, and Grey's clerk with the record
book wrapped in oilcloth against the dawn damp, and behind the clerk, far
enough back that the gulch would see a survey party before it saw soldiers,
Doyle's troopers rode in a loose file with their carbines still in the boots.
Kweo rode at Micah's right shoulder and had not spoken since the midnight
halt. His confession was three days old and had not yet finished costing him
things, and Micah understood that the silence beside him was not sullenness.
It was a man listening to his own life rearrange itself and giving it room to
work.
Featherston went first to the treaty monument on the point above the gulch
mouth, where the survey of '68 had set its iron post in a cairn of stones, and
he stood a while with his hat in his hand, not out of ceremony but the way
surveyors do, reading the ground the way other men read a letter they have
been expecting. Then he set his instrument over the post and sighted his
backsight along the ridge, and the morning began in earnest, in numbers.
The camp below them was waking as the line came down. A cook fire
smoked. A man at the sluice straightened with a shovel in his hands and did
not go back to his work. The camp boss came out of the big tent with a rifle
carried easy in the crook of his arm, the way a man carries a tool and not a
threat, and stood watching the chainmen come down the slope with their pins
and their calling voices, and Micah saw the exact moment the boss
understood what kind of party this was, because the rifle came down out of
the crook of his arm and was set, with great care, against the tent pole,
muzzle up, like a thing that had been put away.
"Steady," Featherston said, to no one in particular, and the chain ran.
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The calls came down the slope in their order, plain as hammer blows. The
line crossed the gulch mouth and kept going. It crossed the tailings and the
first sluice box. It crossed the tent row, where men had come out half dressed
and stood in their blankets watching a brass pin go into the ground beside
their fire rings. It crossed the flag — the company's flag, on its peeled pole
— and kept going, out the far side of the camp and up the opposite wall, and
when Featherston finally lifted his hand and the chainmen stood still in the
morning light, the whole of the camp — tents, sluice, flag, and the twelve
stolen horses standing hipshot in the remuda lines beyond — lay inside the
band's reserved valley under the treaty of 1868, as it had lain all along,
whatever paper in Denver had said to the contrary.
Grey's clerk read the determination aloud at the camp table, in the open, so
that it would be a record and not a rumor. The discovery claims filed upon
the gulch were void upon their face. The ground was the band's. The boss
took the paper copy Featherston handed him with both hands, the way a man
takes a letter in a language he can read but does not want to, and he looked
once at the sluice line, where his wages had been coming from, and Micah
watched the stillness go through him — the stillness of a man whose whole
arithmetic has just been proved wrong by a brass chain and an iron post and a
dead treaty year.
It was then, at the back of the camp, that the horse was saddled too fast.
Micah knew the sound. Every man who has lived in camps knows it: a cinch
hauled in a hurry, a bit chinked against teeth, a hoof struck once against
stone. He turned in his saddle toward the cook tent and saw the bay gelding
— Hasek's bay, with the near hind shoe that rang a half note flat on rock —
and Petr Hasek himself swinging up with a saddlebag half buckled. And he
turned the other way, to speak, and found Kweo's place beside him empty.
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Kweo had gone without a word or a signal, melted off toward the back trail
in the half-light while the chain was still running, and Micah understood it all
at once, the whole of it, with the clarity that had been growing in him for
three days. Kweo knew that gelding. Kweo knew the back trail, because
Kweo had ridden this country in worse company than he rode in now. And
Kweo knew what a frightened man does when the law walks into a camp in
broad morning: he does not run at the soldiers. He runs for the one trail that
isn't watched — the trail he came in by — and prays the country is still his
friend.
Hasek came down the back trail at a trot that wanted badly to be a gallop,
and found it barred. Kweo sat his horse across the narrow place where the
trail pinched between the rock and the creek drop, doing nothing at all, his
rifle laid across the saddlebow like a gate bar in front of a toll road. He did