too many kinds of men not to know the difference. Kellam's eyes kept going
past the yard, past the fence, east into the dark toward Dry Fork and the
Slade ranch beyond it, and every time a horse shifted in the corral or a boot
scraped on the packed earth, the man's whole body took the sound like a
blow he was trying not to show.
He was not afraid of the people in the yard. That was the plain truth of it, and
Emmett could read it as easy as print. Kellam sat between two peoples who
had cause to hang him before breakfast, and the thing that had him sweating
through his shirt in the cool of the night was a man who was not there.
Near midnight Emmett heard him say it, not to anyone, just out at the dark in
a voice scraped down to the wood. "He'll put it on me alone. He'll stand up in
front of God and the county and say Burt Kellam went rogue on him, say he
never heard the words Eagle Rock in his life." His bound hands turned over
in his lap, slow, like he was looking for something in them that was not there.
"And who'll say different. Who in this world'll say different."
Nobody answered him. The watch let the words go out into the dark and die
there, which was its own kind of answer, and Emmett understood that
Kellam knew it. A man who got caught was worth nothing to Vernon Slade
except as a hook to hang the whole business on, and Kellam, sitting against
the well curb with the poison at his feet, had arrived at the same
69
understanding and was turning it over and over like a stone in his shoe.
The watch kept itself the way the two peoples had arranged it weeks back,
when the watering hours were first set: two of Tadan's men at the front gate,
two at the back fence where Kellam had come over it, and Emmett walking
the yard between, because it was his yard and his prisoner in everything but
law, and he would not sleep while either fact stood. Aponi slept in snatches
with her back against the cabin wall and her knife across her knees, waking
at every change of the watch without being called, the way frontier people
sleep when the night has not yet declared itself. Twice Tadan himself came
up from the camp and stood a while at the fence, saying nothing, an old man
checking on a piece of work the way Emmett checked on a wagon before a
hard pull, and went down again into the dark.
Somewhere in the deep of the night Kellam spoke again, to Emmett this
time, because Emmett was the one walking. "They hang a man for water, in
this country?" he said.
"They've hanged men for less," Emmett said, "and called it more. Poisoning
a well in a drought — I expect a jury'd take a short walk with that one, Burt."
Kellam nodded slowly, like a man confirming an entry in a book he kept.
"That's what I figured," he said. "That's what I been sitting here figuring. He
knew it too. That's the thing I keep coming back to. He knew what the errand
was worth, to the man sent on it, and he sent me anyway, and saved himself
the walk." He was quiet a moment. "Cash money, every time, out of his own
hand. Man pays cash for a thing like that, he ain't buying work. He's buying
the rope to be somebody else's."
Emmett said nothing, because there was nothing in that that needed his help,
and he walked on to the back fence and stood a while looking out at the dark
70
valley where Eagle Rock spring sat fouled and stinking in its stones, three
miles and a whole world away.
Emmett rose before first light and sent the rider. It was one of Tadan's young
men who knew the Dry Fork trail the way Emmett knew his own yard,
mounted on a fresh horse out of the band's string, with Emmett's words plain
in his ears: Sheriff Brandt, and nobody else, and if Brandt was not in Dry
Fork then ride on to wherever he was, and tell him the Cole ranch had a man
for him to collect and a statement for him to take, and that it would not keep
past the day. The young man went out through the gate at a lope while the
stars were still showing, and the sound of the hooves dwindled down the
valley and was gone, and the yard settled back into its watching.
It was after the rider went, in the gray hour when the lantern burned pale
against the coming day, that Kellam's tongue began to fail him in the other
direction. His mouth had gone to leather. He worked his jaw and licked at
cracked lips and did not ask, because asking from Emmett Cole was a thing
he had used up whatever right he had to do, and both of them knew it, and
the knowing sat in the yard with everything else.
Emmett drew the water himself. He let the bucket down into the dark of the
well and hauled it up hand over hand the way he had hauled it ten thousand
mornings, and the rope creaked and the water slopped cold over the rim, and
he took the tin ladle down from its nail on the well post and filled it and