in with his foreman to make the first offer, in the churned ground by the
trough where the visitors' horses had stood, and he had looked at it then and
thought it a curious thing and no more than that, the way a man looks at a
stranger's face in a crowd and forgets it by supper.
"Kellam's horse," he said. "The bay with the white sock. I saw this track at
my own trough, the day they came to buy me. I didn't know what I was
looking at."
"You know now," Aponi said.
"I know a print," Emmett said. "Let's find out whose hand made the shoe."
56
They camped that night above the basin, where the air was clean of the
spring's smell. Over the fire, Aponi said the thing Emmett had been circling
since the dead doe and had not wanted to arrive at: that a poisoned spring on
the east road was not aimed at the band's thirst but at its geography. With
Eagle Rock dead, every fall journey, every hunt east, every visit to kin bent
west instead — toward one well, one ranch, one white man's gate — where
three hundred people gathered at a single trough could be painted as a threat
by any man who needed them painted one. "He does not poison water," she
said. "He poisons the map. He makes us all stand in one place, so that we can
be counted, and feared, and removed." Emmett fed the fire a stick at a time
and said nothing, because there was nothing in it to argue with, and at first
light they rode for Dry Fork by the north road, which brought them in by the
middle of the second afternoon with the horses gray with dust. Walt Finney's
forge stood at the town's east end, and Finney himself was at the anvil, a man
built like the things he made, with forearms like rope and a squint burned
permanent by forty years of looking at hot iron. He knew Emmett from the
freighting days and came out wiping his hands, and when Emmett cut to it
and described the shoe — clinched, with a half-moon plate, special work,
costly work — Finney's squint deepened before the words were finished.
"Half-moon clinch," Finney said. "I've set maybe six of those in twenty
years, and four of the six within the last two months, all on one man's string."
He jerked his chin at his daybook where it hung on its nail by the forge door,
the pages curled and black-fingered. "Slade's foreman. Kellam. Bay gelding
with a white sock behind, and a chestnut, and two grays. He come in with the
order writ down, off Slade's own paper — clinch shoes, half-moon, for rough
country, and double pay to have them before the week was out. I asked him
what kind of rough country needs a shoe that costs like that one did. He said
country a man don't want to be afoot in. I remember it because it was a fool
57
thing to pay for, unless a man expected to run horses hard over rock and not
stop to pick up what they throwed."
Brandt was in Dry Fork for the court week, and they found him at the jail
with his boots on the desk and his hat over his face, sleeping the way lawmen
sleep, all at once and ready to stop. He listened with his hat still down until
Finney finished, and then he sat up and took the hub-band and the torn sack
corner out of his desk drawer and laid them on the blotter next to Emmett's
notched stick and the cord with its knots, and the four things sat there
together like the beginnings of a hand of cards no one at the table wanted to
be holding.
"Now I'll tell you what you've got," Brandt said, "because you're going to
want it to be more than it is, and it ain't, yet. You've got Slade's wagon at a
poisoned spring. You've got Slade's foreman's horse at the same spring, and
at your trough the day the offer was made. You've got a brand on a sack
corner and a mineral that any teamster can buy by the barrel in three
counties. What you have not got" — he held up one finger — "is a man, or a
paper, that puts the poison in Slade's hands. Not Kellam's hands. Slade's.
Kellam's a dog that hunts where he's pointed. A jury in this territory will
hang a dog and let the man who pointed him buy the rope. I need a witness
who heard the order, or a page out of a book that shows the buy, or Kellam
himself deciding his neck is worth more than his wages. Until I've got one of
those, all of this" — he swept the four things with his palm, not touching
them — "is circumstance. It points. It don't hold."
"And the hearing's in eight days," Emmett said.
"Eight days," Brandt agreed. "And Slade knows it, and Slade's lawyer eats
circumstance for breakfast and asks for more. You keep that band peaceful
and that trough clean, Cole, and you let the paper do the slow work. If his
58
side makes a mistake before the hearing, I'll be there to pick it up. Men like
Slade always do make one. It's the waiting that costs."
Before they left, Brandt took Finney's account down in his pocket book in a
hand like fence staples, and had the blacksmith make his mark under it, and