"Where?" Brandt said, and his voice had changed.
The boy pointed east, unhurried, precise. "At the crossing below the standing
stones, where the trail comes down to the spring's creek. In the rocks at the
trail's edge, where a wagon would stop to breathe its team. The band in the
brush where the wheel went over. The cloth in the stones." He looked at
Emmett, then at the sheriff, and delivered the rest of it as it had plainly been
given to him to deliver, in Tadan's own order. "My chief says: the white
men's wagon lost its shoe on our road, and left its name in our stones. He
says it is small. He says small things are how the truth travels, when it is
afraid to travel big."
Brandt took the iron band in one hand and weighed it, the way a man weighs
a stone he is deciding whether to build on. He took the sack corner and held
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it up to the light, and the painted brand showed through the weave, and he
folded it himself, carefully, into his own saddlebag, and put the band in after
it like a man shelving evidence in the only courthouse he had.
"This doesn't hang anybody yet, Emmett," he said. "A band can come off any
wagon and a sack corner can blow off any load between here and the
railroad, and Slade's lawyers will say exactly that, in better English, for
money." He swung up into his saddle and sat looking east, where the trail ran
down toward a spring that white hands had put to sleep in the dark, toward
stones like teeth and a scree slope and a woman breathing through reeds with
the water over her. "But it's the first thing in this whole business that isn't just
weather and talk. It's a nail. Now we see what hangs on it."
They left before the light, while the trough line was still forming at the ranch
gate and the band's people were leading the first horses down in the gray.
Emmett rode the sorrel gelding and led Judge with the packs, because Judge
was surer on broken ground than any horse he owned and meaner about
staying put when he was told to. Aponi rode her paint mare bare of
everything but a blanket and a rope, and with her went two of Tadan's men,
Manuel, who was fifty and spoke some English and less nonsense, and
Victor, who was maybe twenty and rode like the horse was an opinion he
disagreed with. They went east into the sunrise, toward Eagle Rock, a full
day's ride the way the crow flew and longer the way a man had to travel it,
through country that got drier the farther it got from Emmett's well, until the
grass gave up entirely and there was only creosote and stone and the white
glare of a land drinking its own dust.
Aponi set the pace and no one argued with it. She rode the way she did
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everything, like the ground owed her an explanation and she meant to collect
it. Twice she stopped where a trail crossed theirs and got down and looked at
nothing Emmett could see, and once she held up a hand and they all sat their
horses in silence while a dust devil walked itself out against the hills, white
and slow, going nowhere worth going.
"You watch the country like it might lie to you," Emmett said, somewhere in
the middle of the morning.
"It does lie," Aponi said. "Everything out here lies except thirst. Thirst tells
the truth. That is why men fight over water and not over views."
They came down into the Eagle Rock basin in the last of the afternoon, with
the light going the color of old brass. Emmett had not been to the spring in
three years, not since before Martha died, and what he remembered was a
green place, an unlikely green, willows and a pool no bigger than a wagon
bed, with dragonflies working it and the rock above it shaped by wind into
something like a bird with its head turned. The rock was still there. The green
was not. The willows stood gray and leafless with their feet in cracked mud,
and the pool had shrunk to a scummed eye of water no wider than a table,
filmed over with a yellow-white crust that gathered in the shallows like fat
on cold broth, and the air over it had a smell Emmett knew from the trough at
his own place the night of the attempt, a bitterness at the back of the throat,
mineral and wrong.
The dead were still there too. Nobody had buried anything. A cow lay on her
side at the mud's edge with her legs folded under her like she had lain down
careful and never got the rest of the instructions, her hide drawn tight and
dark, her eyes gone to the birds. Further out, where the mud gave way to
sand, a yearling steer. A deer, a doe, small as a dog with the drought on her.
And birds, more birds than Emmett wanted to count, scattered in the reeds
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like the pool had called them down out of the sky to die of the one thing they
had come for.
"They drank once," Aponi said, standing at the mud's edge with her arms
folded. "That is all it asked of them. Once."
Emmett got down and walked the ground the way he'd been taught by men