who are all dead now, slow, in widening turns, reading it the way other men
read a newspaper. The mud at the pool's edge had baked hard as crockery
since the spring went bad, and it had kept what was written on it. Wagon
tracks, plain as print. A wagon had come down the north cut, the only place a
wagon could come down, and backed in a long careful arc toward the water,
and the ruts where she had stood loaded were deep, deeper coming out than
going in, which was the wrong way round for an empty wagon and the right
way round for men who had hauled something heavy away from a spring
instead of to it. He knelt and laid his knotted measuring cord across the rut
gauge and nodded to himself, and cut a notch in a stick, and did it again at
the turn to be sure, and the measure was the measure Brandt already had
from the hub-band the lookout boy had found. A Bar-S wagon had stood at
this pool with its tail to the water.
Above the pool, where the rock shelved out flat in the shade of the overhang,
Emmett found where the sacks had been cut. The stone there was crusted
pale in a spill pattern, fan-shaped, as if a man had slit a sack's belly and let it
bleed out in an arc before carrying it down to the water, and some of the
mineral had missed the pool entirely and lain where it fell, and the ground
beneath the crust was dead in a way the drought could not account for — no
ants, no lichen, nothing, in a country where even the stones have something
living on them if you look close enough. Manuel, who had said perhaps
twenty words the whole ride, climbed down into the rocks on the far side and
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stood a long time looking at the doe, and when he came back he said, in his
careful English, "My grandfather watered at this spring. His father also. It is
on the road our people walk when we go east in the fall." He said it the way a
man reports the burning of a church, without heat, because the heat was
understood. Emmett cut a second stick to the length of the clearest wagon rut
and bound the two sticks together with a strip of rawhide, knowing it was
foolishness, knowing Brandt would want things a man could hold, knowing
that paper began, half the time, as one man refusing to trust his own memory.
"They poisoned it from the wagon bed," he said. "Didn't even have to get
their boots wet. Tipped the sacks off the back and let the current take it, what
current there was."
"And then they saw me," Aponi said.
She walked it then, the ground where she had been chased, and Emmett
understood that she had been carrying this walk in her body for days, the way
a man carries a song he is not ready to sing. She showed them where she had
come over the lip of the basin in the heat of the day with her water bag
empty, meaning to fill it and be gone before anyone knew the spring had a
visitor. Where she had stopped, seeing the wagon. Where she had run, up the
wash with the stones sliding under her, and where the first rider had cut
down out of the rocks to head her and she had turned, and where the second
had come behind, and how she had gone up the scree on her hands where a
horse could not follow and lain in a crack of the rock with her knife in her
teeth while they cursed the heat and each other below her, close enough that
she could hear the leather of their saddles. She told it without decoration,
standing in the places, pointing with her chin, and Emmett watched her face
and understood that she was not remembering it the way a person remembers
a story. She was measuring it. She was walking it off like a distance she
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intended to use.
"Two riders," she said. "I have told this. But there is a thing I did not tell,
because until now I did not know it was a thing." She led them down to
where the mud of the wash met the sand, where the horses of the men who
chased her had plunged and turned in the soft ground, and she pointed with
the toe of her moccasin at a print pressed clean and deep among the churned
tracks of the pursuit. "That one. I saw it while I lay in the rock, and I have
seen it in my sleep since. A shoe that is not a whole shoe."
Emmett knelt. The print was a horse's, forefoot, big — a heavy horse, a
working horse — and across the front of it, where the iron should have run in
one unbroken curve, there was a clean crescent break, a half-moon notch cut
out of the track as neat as if a man had taken a bite from it. He had seen
shoes clinched with a half-moon plate once or twice in his freighting years, a
special shoeing, costly, done for horses that threw shoes on rough ground,
and he sat back on his heels with his heart going harder than the ride had
made it go, because he had seen that print before. Not here. Not in this basin.
He had seen it in the dust of his own ranch yard, the day Vernon Slade rode