across the creek with their empty skins laid ready by their doors — there was
exactly one man who knew the trough was tainted, and he was the man
holding the rope, standing in his own yard in the smell of bitter water, with
the cattle bawling and the light going and the whole of the morning already
on its way toward him downhill.
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He did not say anything at first, not even to the dog.
The light was going the color of old iron and the band was settling across the
creek, smoke rising straight up out of the lodges in the still air, and Emmett
stood at his trough with his hand on the rim and the smell coming up off the
water — faint, wrong, a bitterness at the back of it like green almonds and rot
— and understood that whatever else the day had been, it was finished being
ordinary. He had watered his own stock at noon. He had watered the band's
horses at the agreed hour, Aponi standing at the gate with her tally sticks, and
somewhere in the hours between, while his gate stood open and his yard was
full of another people's animals and another people's children, somebody had
come to his trough and put something in it.
He bent and dipped two fingers and touched them to his tongue, and spat,
and stood a while tasting the air. It was not strong. It was not meant to
announce itself. That was the part of it that put the cold in him: it was
measured stuff, whatever it was. A killing dose for horses watered at dawn,
maybe, belly-griping and down by noon; or a sickening dose, enough to
scatter a herd and start a story. Either way it was not weather and it was not
accident, and he had lived in this valley long enough to know that nothing in
it happened without a hand.
He worked by lantern light and said nothing to anyone.
First he led Judge out of the yard and picketed him beyond the fence with the
last of the morning's water in a bucket, the mule watching him with the
patience of an old business partner who has seen the firm through worse.
Then he bailed the trough out bucket by bucket and poured it all on the dry
ground far from the well, where it darkened the dust and was gone, and he
scrubbed the trough boards with sand and a stiff brush until his arms ached,
and rinsed, and scrubbed again. The trough was Martha's father's work, cedar
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staves bound in iron, older than the house. He had cursed its weight a
hundred times. He cursed it again that night, fondly, the way a man curses a
thing he is trying to save.
When it was clean he drew fresh water hand over hand from the well, the
windlass creaking in the dark, and filled the trough by bucket until the new
water stood black and still and smelled of nothing but cold stone and rope.
Then he did the thing that had to be done and that he did without ceremony,
the way a man signs his name. He dipped the tin cup that hung by the well,
drank it off himself, and stood in the lantern light waiting, his hand flat on
his own belly, counting his breath the way he had once counted miles
between freight stops. His mouth remembered the bitterness. His mouth
found nothing. The water was sweet and cold and clean, and it went down
like forgiveness.
Then he led Judge in and let the mule drink, and watched him drink deep and
blow and shake his ears and drink again, entirely unconcerned, and Emmett
put his forehead for one moment against the animal's warm neck and
breathed in the smell of him, dust and hide and honest sweat.
"All right," he said. "All right. Now we go and tell it."
It was full dark. Across the dry creek the campfires of three hundred people
burned low and red, and the whole wrongness of what he was about to do
rose up in him as he saddled nothing, took no rifle, and hung the lantern on
the gatepost where its light would say what it had to say for him. He was
going to walk into an Apache camp in the night, a white man alone, and tell
its chief that the water at the white man's well — the water the chief's people
were drinking to live — had been poisoned, or something near it, on the
white man's own ground, during the white man's own hospitality. He turned
it over and over as he crossed the creek bed, picking his way among the
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white stones by starlight. There was no version of the sentence that did not
hang him. If they believed him, they believed a man had tried to murder their
horses under his roof. If they did not believe him, then he was the man at
whose trough the poison had been found, explaining it with his hat in his
hands.
He went anyway. It did not occur to him until he was halfway across that it
was the first decision in years he had made without first asking himself what
it would cost.
The camp's dogs announced him and the camp's young men materialized out
of the dark around him with the ease of men rising out of the ground, and he
stopped where they wanted him stopped, with his hands open at his sides and