carried it across the yard. Every eye in the place followed him. Tadan's men
at the fence. The women who had come up from the camp in the night and
stood along the corral rails with their blankets around them. Aponi, where
she stood by the gate with her arms folded, watching the way she watched
everything, like a woman reading weather.
Emmett held the ladle out to the bound man.
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Kellam looked at it a long time. At the water trembling in it, clear as glass,
caught out of the same well he had come in the dark to poison. His throat
worked. "Why," he said. It was not much of a word. It came out of him like
something pried loose.
"Because you're thirsty," Emmett said. "Drink it slow."
Kellam raised his bound hands together and took the ladle in both of them,
the way a man takes a cup at a communion rail, and drank. He drank it down
to the bright tin and held it a moment longer against his mouth, and his
shoulders shook once, hard, and settled.
It was Aponi who spoke, from over by the gate, in English, in that flat dry
voice of hers that carried without being raised, dry as dust and twice as final.
"A man should think about who has ever handed him water," she said,
"before he chooses who to die silent for."
Kellam turned the empty ladle over in his bound hands. He looked east,
where the sky was going the color of old iron over the ridge, toward Dry
Fork, toward the ranch of the man who had paid him in cash and kept no
paper and would bury him under a story before the week was out. Then he
looked at the ladle again.
"When the sheriff gets here," he said, "I'll talk to the sheriff."
The yard let out a breath it had been holding since midnight. Emmett took
the ladle back and hung it on its nail, and nobody said anything more,
because there was nothing more that needed saying until Brandt came.
Brandt came in a little before noon, riding a lathered gelding and leading
nothing, having changed horses at the Dry Fork livery and ridden the last
stretch hard. He was a careful man, Dale Brandt, with a deputy's patience and
a face that gave nothing away to either side of an argument, and Emmett
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watched him take in the yard in one slow pass — the sack, the prisoner, the
watch at the fence, the band's people along the corral rails — before he
swung down and handed his reins to nobody in particular and came and
stood in front of Kellam and looked down at him the way a man looks at a
job of work.
"You want to tell me about that sack, Burt," he said. It was not a question.
Kellam told him. Not in a flood — Emmett had not expected a flood, and
Brandt, to his credit, did not try to pull one out of him. It came the way water
comes out of a cracked jug, a working man's confession, in pieces, with the
names of places and the weights of things in it. Brandt took him into the
cabin out of the sun and sat him at Emmett's table with a stub of pencil and a
sheaf of county paper, and Aponi stood in the doorway where she could hear,
and Emmett sat against the wall and listened to the whole architecture of the
last two months get laid out in a foreman's tired voice.
Slade had given the order in his own kitchen, with the door shut, in March.
The mineral was already bought and sacked — a bitter white salt out of the
dry lakes, the kind that turned stock water to poison and fouled a spring so
that nothing would drink from it for a season. Kellam and two hands had
hauled it up to Eagle Rock by wagon in the night, the three of them, and
worked till near dawn tipping it into the spring pool and the seep above it. On
the way down in the dark the wagon had shed a hub-band on the rough
stretch above the trail — Kellam's mouth twisted when he said it — and
Slade had cursed him for it for a week and then let it go, because who was
ever going to walk that trail and know a hub-band from a stone. The Bar-S
sack corner the watch had found near the spring had come off one of the
mineral sacks, torn on a snag. Slade's own brand, on Slade's own sack, and
Slade had laughed when Kellam fretted over it and said the Apache had no
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use for paper and the county had no use for the Apache, and that was the end
of it as far as he was concerned.
"The horse you rode over my fence last night," Brandt said, without looking
up from his writing. "Near fore shoe's clinched in a half-moon. There's a
woman in the doorway can put that shoe in the mud at Eagle Rock the night
the spring was fouled."
Kellam glanced toward the doorway, where Aponi stood, and looked away
again. "Slade's smith shoes half his string that way. Says it saves iron on the
rocky ground. I told him once it was a fool way to mark a horse. He said a
mark only matters to folks who come looking, and nobody was going to
come looking." He shifted in the chair. "Write it down, Dale. Put it in with