people like us."
The second night, another bucket of it. "I got closer than I should. That is the
whole confession — a scout's confession is always the same words. I got
closer than I should, because I wanted the count of them and the look of their
faces. There were sacks in the wagon bed, many sacks, heavy, tied at the
neck — not feed sacks. Smaller. And the men—" She turned her head,
considering. "Four that I saw. They worked like men at a chore they had
been paid for and did not respect. One stood watch on the trail the whole
time, facing out, where the spring's visitors would come from. They were not
careless men, Emmett Cole. They were careful men doing a careless thing's
opposite. Whatever went into that water, it went in counted."
"Faces?" he said.
"Distance, and the sun wrong, and then no time." She was quiet. "Running
time. They saw me on the rocks — or the lookout did, the one facing the
trail, he was not a fool either. They came up after me faster than I thought
white men could climb. I went down the far side where the scree runs — you
know the place — and the scree went with me. That is the fall they write on
me as a wound." She touched her side again, with a kind of dry ceremony.
"The rock did the cutting. Their boots did the rest of the teaching. But I knew
the water runs under that scree and comes out below, and I went into the dark
of it and stayed, with the water over me, breathing through the reeds like a
frog in a story, until their voices were done above me. Then I walked two
46
days home with the spring dead behind me, and I told my uncle: the water
did not tire. It was put to sleep, the way a man puts a dog to sleep, by hands."
"Why didn't you tell Brandt all this?" Emmett said. "The sheriff. When it
happened."
Aponi looked at him then, full in the face, across the little fire they kept at
the trough, and her expression was not angry. It was worse than angry; it was
patient.
"Tell him what, and be what, after? An Apache woman who says white men
poisoned a spring is a story white men tell each other about Apache women,
when they need the land the spring is on." She fed the fire a stick, precisely.
"I told my uncle. My uncle told the agent. The agent wrote that the spring
had failed from the drought." She shrugged, one shoulder, careful of the
wound. "Perhaps in his office there was a drought. Out here there was a
wagon with a busted hub."
Emmett sat with that through the rest of the watch, and the fire burned down,
and the trough stood black and guarded between them, and he understood
that the shape of the thing had changed while he wasn't looking — it had
stopped being weather at some point in the last days, and become a made
thing with a wagon at the bottom of it, and made things have makers, and
makers, God help them all, have names.
The paper war arrived on a Tuesday, on a tired horse, in the saddlebag of a
rider who would not take water until Emmett had signed for the envelope —
as if the water itself might be entered in evidence.
Emmett read it standing in his own yard, with the queue shuffling past him
and Seya watching his face the way she watched everything, as intelligence.
It was a notice of claim, filed at the territorial office by counsel for Vernon
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Slade, contesting Emmett's water right on grounds that would have been
funny in any summer but this one: that the Cole well filing described a ranch
in active agricultural use; that the ranch had ceased such use; that its
proprietor had, in the words the lawyer had clearly enjoyed, abandoned the
premises to the occupation of hostile Indians, converting a private water right
into a public nuisance and a danger to the territory. A hearing was set at Dry
Fork in ten days. The remedy requested was forfeiture of the water right and
its reassignment — the document did not say to whom, but it did not have to.
Vernon Slade's dislike of suspense was known in three counties.
He read it twice. Then he folded it into his shirt pocket, against his heart,
where a man carries a thing he intends to keep an eye on, and went back to
the windlass.
He had known Slade fifteen years, in the way of the territory — which is to
say he had watched him the way you watch a river change course. Slade had
come out with cattle money and a speculator's religion: that land was a sin
until it was fenced, water was a sin until it was owned, and other men's
arrangements with either were merely sins awaiting correction. He had
offered for the Cole ranch twice — once before Martha died, politely, over
coffee she had poured with both hands around the conversation, and once
after, less politely, in the yard, with Burt Kellam standing at the wagon with
his hat off and his eyes on the well the whole time, measuring it. The second
offer had been a good one. That was the thing Emmett had never said aloud
to anyone: it had been a good offer, more than the place was worth as a