its letters going soft in the weather, the smoke of the Mescalero camp rose up
through the trees of her resting place, and Emmett stood a while looking at
that, and could not have said what he felt, except that the valley was fuller of
life tonight than it had been in two years, and all of it was drinking from a
hole he had dug with his own hands in the worst summer of his life.
The riders from Dry Fork came the next day, in the slack hour between the
midday drawing and the evening one, when the well was resting and the yard
was empty and Emmett was up on the barn roof with a hammer, doing a
piece of work that could be done sitting down because his shoulders had filed
a formal complaint. He counted five horses coming out of the west in the
heat shimmer, and he knew the lead rider before he could see his face, by the
way he sat a horse like a man sitting in judgment on it. Burt Kellam. Behind
him, four citizens of Dry Fork in a bunch, the kind of delegation a town
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sends when it wants its errand to look like a neighborhood and not like the
man who paid for it.
Emmett climbed down and met them at the gate. He did not open it.
"Emmett." Kellam touched his hat brim with one finger, a courtesy measured
out like water in a dry year. "We've rode out peaceable. These are concerned
men. Mr. Haney, who keeps the store. You know the others."
"I know them from across a counter," Emmett said. "State your concern."
Haney did the talking, because a storekeeper's tongue is oiled for it. Word
was in Dry Fork, Haney said, and word had a way of traveling on to the
capital and the filing office and other places where a man's affairs could be
complicated by ink. The word was that Emmett Cole was watering hostiles.
Three hundred Apache off the reservation trail, camped on his creek,
drinking his well, and him drawing for them with his own hands like a hired
boy. There were men in town who called it aid and comfort. There were men
who used shorter words. Sheriff Brandt had been asked, in writing, whether
he meant to ride out and see the thing with his own eyes or whether the
territory would have to ask him why he hadn't. And the filing office —
Haney spread his hands at the unpleasantness of facts — the filing office
would certainly hear that the Cole water claim, which rested on continuous
beneficial use, was being put to a use some clerk with a grudge might call
abandonment, or worse, might call a public nuisance in a drought year, with
settlers' stock dying ten miles from a well that was pouring itself out for
Indians.
"Nobody's stock is ten miles from my well and dying," Emmett said. "The
nearest outfit is the Bar Six, and they've got the river."
"Facts have a way of shrinking on the road to a filing office, Emmett. You
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know they do."
"Then they'll shrink both ways. State the rest of it. There's a rest of it. There
always is when a town sends five men to do one man's talking."
It was Kellam who answered, and he answered quietly, which was worse.
"Mr. Slade sent us, since you're asking whose errand it is. He bears you no ill
will. He says to tell you the offer stands open and it won't stand long. He'll
buy the ranch — land, well, water claim, stock if you want to sell stock — at
a fair price, yesterday's price, the price before any of this. Eight thousand
dollars, and his word that your wife's grave stays fenced and kept as long as
the place stands. He says a man alone out here, with what's camped on his
creek and what's being said in town, is holding a thing that gets heavier every
day, and he'd rather pay you for it than watch trouble make it worthless and
you still standing in the middle of it. He says it kindly."
"He says it kindly," Emmett repeated.
"He does." Kellam's eyes went past Emmett, and Emmett, without turning,
knew exactly the route they took: the windlass, the rope, the curb he'd laid
stone by stone. The trough at the yard's edge, still damp from the midday
drawing. The stacked buckets by the well, the ladle hung on its nail. Kellam
looked at all of it a moment too long, with the attention of a man pricing
something he intended to own, or a man memorizing the layout of a place he
intended to visit again in different company. "He also says there's no shame
in a man deciding a thing's too big for him. Three hundred Apache is a lot of
big, Emmett. Bigger than your well. Bigger than you."
"Tell Mr. Slade this," Emmett said. "Tell him the well isn't for sale, and the
ranch isn't for sale, and the grave he offered to keep so kindly was keeping
itself before he learned the road out here. Tell him these people asked, which
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is more than his outfit has ever done on this place, and that they're drinking
under my hours and my law, with their rifles outside my fence, which is
more order than Dry Fork keeps on a Saturday. And tell Sheriff Brandt he's
welcome to ride out any day he likes and count the rifles himself — stacked,