own yard with his hands hanging empty at his sides and felt the words sit in
him like swallowed stones, because the cruelty of them was not that they
were false but that they had been aimed by a man who had studied the target,
and some part of him — the part that had eaten alone at a table built for two
for four years, the part that talked to a mule and called it conversation —
some part of him whispered that the speculator from town had merely read
aloud what the nights already said. He turned at last and drew a bucket and
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carried it to the trough and poured it in with care, slopping none, because the
trough was low and the evening watering was coming, and work, at least,
was a language he still spoke better than grief.
That night the moon was thin and the wind was down, and the watch around
the trough was Victor and one of the older boys of the band, with Emmett set
to relieve them at the deep hour. He was awake before his time — he had
been awake, mostly, since Slade's horse went out the gate — when the sound
came up from the yard: not a shot, not a shout, but a scuffle's brief
percussion, a grunt, the clatter of the gate chain, a man's voice starting to rise
and being stopped by something quieter and more certain than a hand. He
came out of the house with his rifle and his boots unlaced and found the yard
filling with lantern light, the band's camp waking beyond the fence in a
murmur that rose and held, and at the trough, in the middle of a ring of his
own people and theirs, the joint watch had a man down on his knees in the
dust with his arms wrenched up behind him between Victor and the older
boy, taken so cleanly that his hat was still on the ground where it had fallen,
ten feet back by the fence, next to a sack he had dropped when they came out
of the dark at him.
It was Kellam. His face was gray in the lantern light, grayer than fear alone
accounted for, and over his shoulder, half off it in the struggle, hung the
remains of the sack's twin — but the dropped one told the story: split at the
seam where it had hit the ground, spilling a pale crust of mineral across the
dust in a fan, the same bitter stuff, the same smell rising off it in the night air
like a held breath let go. Kellam's eyes went around the ring once, taking the
count of it — the trough, the well, the faces, the rifles nobody had needed to
fire — and then they came to Emmett and stopped there, and the foreman of
the Bar-S, who had grinned through every conversation he had ever had on
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this ranch, looked up at the man he had been sent to poison out of his home
with the first real fear Emmett had ever seen on him. It was not the fear of
the men holding him. It was not even the fear of Brandt, or of a rope. It was
the fear of a man adding up what Vernon Slade did to people who got caught,
and finding the sum larger than anything this yard could do to him. His
mouth worked once. He looked at Emmett, and he said nothing at all.
They kept Burt Kellam in the yard all night, in the open, where both peoples
could see him. Emmett had said it plain when the watch brought him in with
the sack still on his shoulder: no cellar, no barn, no dark corner where a thing
could later be said to have happened that had not happened. The yard. The
lantern. Everybody's eyes.
Kellam sat with his back against the stone curb of the well and his bound
hands resting in his lap, and the sack sat on the ground beside him where it
had been cut from his shoulder, its mouth tied with twine, the white mineral
sifting out of the weave in a fine pale dust whenever the night wind worried
it. Nobody touched it. Nobody had to. Every man and woman in that yard
knew what was in it, because every one of them had tasted Eagle Rock
spring on the day it went bitter, and the smell coming off the sack in the heat
of the lantern was the same smell, faint and wrong, like a coin held too long
on the tongue.
His horse stood in the corral with its head down, blown and dried stiff with
its own sweat, and every so often the lantern light or the first gray of the
coming morning caught the near forehoof where the shoe was clinched in
that half-moon shape Aponi had described weeks ago, the shape she had seen
in the mud at the spring among the wagon tracks. Emmett looked at the shoe
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and looked at the man and thought that evidence was a strange thing. It did
not shout. It just sat there in the open, patient as a stone, waiting for
somebody to write it down.
Kellam had not spoken since the fence. Not to deny, not to beg. He had
answered his name when Tadan spoke it, the way a man answers a roll call in
a place he does not expect to leave, and after that, nothing. But his silence
was not a strong man's silence. Emmett had freighted too many years beside