ought to taste the goods," he said, "even at this late hour of the negotiation,"
and there was no clean way to refuse a thirsty man at a well without
becoming a smaller man than the occasion required, and Slade knew that too.
Emmett drew the bucket himself and held the dipper, and Slade drank
standing, unhurried, a man at a wine merchant's counter, and nodded at the
taste of it like a judge confirming a reputation. "Sweet," he said. "Cold all the
way down. Do you know, in this whole valley, yours is the only water that
doesn't taste of the ground it came through. It tastes of nothing. It tastes of
itself. That's a rare thing to own, Cole, and rare things make poor men into
targets and rich men into legends, and you get to choose which by Friday
next." He handed back the dipper, handle first, polite as a churchwarden.
"I'll save us both the afternoon," Slade said, dismounting without being
asked, which was itself a kind of statement. "My first offer was a speculator's
offer, and you were right to refuse it; it priced your water like a commodity.
This one prices it like what it is. Eight thousand dollars for the well parcel
and the water right, gold, not paper — and a life tenancy for you in the
house, and your stock water free till you die, in writing, witnessed at Dry
Fork. That's more money than this ranch will earn in your lifetime twice
over, and it's on the table until the hearing. At the hearing it comes off. After
the hearing, Mr. Cole, there is no offer, because after the hearing there is
nothing of yours left to buy."
"The hearing hasn't ruled yet," Emmett said.
64
"No," Slade agreed pleasantly. "It hasn't. But you and I have both been to the
territory's rooms, and we know what a room does with a man who has a
survey, a charter, and a railroad's letter of intent, set against a man who has a
well he dug with his own hands and a camp full of Apache he is pleased to
call his neighbors. I'm not threatening you with the ruling. I'm respecting you
enough to tell you the ruling in advance, which is more than the room will
do."
Then he lowered his voice, not theatrically but genuinely, in the manner of a
man setting down something heavy between them, and Emmett understood
that this was the true errand, and the money had only been its wrapping.
"And hear the rest of it, because no one else will say it to your face. When
the right is mine, the band goes. Not eventually — at once, by order, and if
they linger, by soldiers. You've let them gather here. You've let them build
their little trough and mend your fences and put their children to sleep in
your cottonwoods believing they've found the one white man in New Mexico
who keeps his word. When the troop rides in, they'll fight, because you've
taught them this place is worth standing on, and they'll die on your fence
line, Cole, women and all, for a well. And it will be said — I will not even
have to say it — that the blood is on the hands of the man who let them
gather.Sell to me now and they walk away alive, cursing your name, which is
the kindest ending this country offers anybody. That's not a threat. That's
arithmetic."
"The arithmetic's yours," Emmett said. "So are the soldiers, near as I can tell,
and so's the hearing, and so's the poison in Eagle Rock spring, which I'll say
into the record in six days with my hand raised. You came a long way to buy
a well, Vernon. What you're buying is the only water in two days' ride, and
we both know what that's worth to a man with a railroad's letter in his pocket,
65
and it ain't eight thousand. It's the whole valley, priced by the throat. I won't
sell you the throats."
Slade looked at him a moment, and something in his face settled, the way a
man's face settles when a door he had kept oiled closes at last and he stops
pretending he minds. "No," he said. "You won't. I told Kellam you wouldn't.
A man can be right about another man and still lose money on it." He
gathered his reins, and then, mounting, he paused with one boot in the stirrup
and looked past Emmett toward the cottonwoods at the yard's edge, where
Martha's grave stood in its little fence of stones he himself had set there in
the first winter, with the wooden marker Martha's brother had carved, gone
silver with weather. Slade's eyes rested on it the way a man rests his eyes on
a hand of cards he has already counted.
"A well and a graveyard," he said, almost gently. "Most men pick one to
tend, Cole. You've built a life out of watering the living by day and talking to
the dead by night, and you call the space between them a ranch. When the
water's gone, it'll just be the graveyard. Think on which half of your life
you're actually keeping."
He rode out through the gate at a walk, the white rag still flying, absurd and
deliberate, until the heat took him. Emmett stood where he was for a long
time. He did not go to the pump. He did not go to the grave. He stood in his