ranch, exactly what the place was worth as the only water in two days' ride,
and he had refused it for no reason he could have sworn to — only that
Martha's grave was by the cottonwoods, and the well had his sweat in its
stones, and a man's reasons do not have to be sworn to be load-bearing.
48
Now Slade had stopped offering. Now Slade was filing. Emmett hauled the
bucket up and poured it out for the herd and thought: paper is cheaper than
money, and hangs a man slower, and the whole valley can watch it done.
Sheriff Dale Brandt rode out the next morning, personally, which told
Emmett more than the notice had. Brandt was a careful man with a careful
man's embarrassment, a former soldier who had kept his seat and his
conscience through twenty years of other men's urgencies, and he came up
the yard slow, taking in the queue, the trough guard, the tally sticks, the
children with their cups, with the expression of a man reading a report that
does not match the deposition.
"Morning, Emmett," he said. "I see the hostile occupation's brought its own
crockery."
"They're particular about whose cup," Emmett said. "Coffee?"
They drank it on the porch, and Brandt turned his hat in his hands, and did
not pretend.
"I carried paper like that notice twice this year already, for Slade's outfit," he
said. "Both times it was bought paper — bought in the sense that the lawyer
got paid, which is the only sense that matters at the territorial office. It'll still
have to be answered, Emmett. That's the part nobody tells you when they sell
you the West. The bought paper works exactly like the honest kind. It just
costs somebody else more to kill it." He looked out at the yard, where Seya
was settling a dispute over a kettle with the gravity of a territorial judge, and
something moved behind his face that was not official. "I was at Dry Fork
when the word came up the wire — 'hostiles at the Cole place, three hundred,
armed.' I told the deputy to saddle my horse. Figured I'd ride out and count
the army that's taken you." He drank his coffee. "I've counted grandmothers,
49
Emmett. I've counted children carrying cups. If that's an army, the territory's
in more danger from its cooks than its cavalry, and I intend to say so in my
report, for whatever a report's worth against a filing."
"It's worth what it's worth," Emmett said. "I'll be at Dry Fork in ten days. I'll
answer it."
"You'll answer it better with more than your word about why they're here."
Brandt set his cup down. "Ride the boundary with me. I want the ranch lines
in my report while I've got the light — where your filing runs, where the
spring trail crosses it, all of it. If Slade's going to argue abandonment, I want
to be able to write that the place is kept, and kept hard, by the man who filed
on it. And—" He hesitated, and Emmett watched a sheriff decide to say a
thing unofficially, which is the most official way a frontier sheriff ever says
anything. "And I want to walk that spring trail crossing myself, Emmett.
Aponi's account of that wagon has been sitting in my desk for a month like a
fish on a bank. I've got no use for it as it stands. A story needs a nail to hang
on. Show me where she saw it."
They rode the boundary in the heat of the day, two men on good horses with
the dust standing behind them, and Emmett pointed out the filing corners —
the blazed cottonwood, the cairn on the ridge, the iron pin by the creek
crossing where his land met the trail that ran east to Eagle Rock. Brandt
wrote in a little book with a stub of pencil, sweating through his shirt, asking
the surveyor's questions, and Emmett answered them like a man laying fence
— post by post, nothing skipped. The spring trail crossed the boundary at the
cairn, where the ground fell away toward the dry creek and rose again toward
the eastern hills, and it was there, in the white glare, that they saw the boy
waiting for them in the trail's middle, on foot, holding something against his
chest with both hands, wrapped in a fold of hide.
50
Naseen. The camp's lookout, the laughing boy with the surveyor's eyes, not
laughing now. He had been posted on the ridge since before dawn, watching
the eastern trail as Tadan posted him every day — watching, though nobody
had said it in so many words, for a wagon. He stood aside for the horses and
held out what he carried with the care of a boy bringing eggs, and unwrapped
the hide in the road, in front of the sheriff of the county, with the gravity of
an altar server.
It was not much to look at. A curl of iron, rust-filmed, heavy — a hub-band,
sprung half off its wood and torn the rest of the way by the road, the kind of
band that walks off a split and failing hub a turn at a time until the wheel
gives it up entirely. And beside it, folded small, a corner of sacking, torn
across, the weave coarse, and stenciled on it in black paint, weathered but
legible, a brand: a bar over an S. The Bar-S. Vernon Slade's registered mark,
the mark on his wagons, his sacks, his cattle, his paper, his whole long
argument with the territory.