the rest. If I'm going to be the hook this hangs on, I'd as soon it hung
straight."
Brandt wrote it down. "He offered to buy this ranch twice," he said. "Cole's
turned him down twice. You know anything about that."
"I was in the kitchen for the second offer," Kellam said. "He come back from
riding out here with his hat in his hand and his jaw set like he'd bit a green
persimmon, and he said — " Kellam stopped, and for the first time
something moved in his face that was not fear. "He said Cole had a grave by
his cottonwoods and roots in the ground and a man like that couldn't be
bought at a fair price, so he'd have to be bought at an unfair one. I didn't
know what he meant by it then. I was standing in the yard at Eagle Rock
three weeks later with a sack on my shoulder before I worked it out."
The trough had been the second errand, and Kellam's alone, because Slade
had learned caution after the hub. One man, one horse, one sack, in the dark,
over the back fence. If the band's horses and Emmett's stock went off the
74
trough water — if a child got sick, Kellam said, and looked at the table, and
did not finish that part — then the well itself would be named poisoned in
every mouth in the valley by the end of the week, and a poisoned well was a
thing no hearing in Dry Fork could save.
"And the point of it, Burt," Brandt said quietly. "Tell me the point of it, in his
words if you can."
Kellam's hands, unbound now for the writing, lay flat on the table and
pressed down like he was holding the words still. "The band has to drink or
move," he said. "Foul the spring and they come to Cole's well, all three
hundred of them, camped on his fence, drinking his water by his leave — and
that ain't a camp, the way the army counts. That's a rising. That's hostiles
massing on a white man's water, and Slade stands up and says so, to the
county, to the fort, to anybody with a telegraph. Soldiers come. The ranch
gets emptied for everybody's safety — his word, emptied — the claim
contest at Dry Fork gets decided with Cole gone and no water right left to
contest, and when the valley's pacified" — the word came out of him like it
tasted of the mineral — "when it's pacified, the only water in two days' ride
belongs to Vernon Slade. For his herd. And for the mine shares, up in the
hills, that ain't worth the paper till there's water to work them with. That's the
point of it. That's the whole point of it, and it always was."
He stopped. The pencil waited. Brandt let the silence stand a moment and
then said, "Who paid you."
"Slade. Cash, every time, out of his own hand. No paper on any of it. He
don't keep paper, Dale. That's his whole religion. A man can't be hanged off
a handshake." Kellam laughed then, a short ugly sound with nothing in it.
"Except the man who did the work. He can be hanged off his own hands just
fine."
75
Brandt wrote it all down in his slow deputy's hand, page after page, and read
it back aloud in the quiet cabin, and when he was done he turned the last
page around and put the pencil in Kellam's fingers. Kellam held it a long
moment. His hand shook so hard the first try at his name was a scrawl, and
he stopped and set his jaw and steadied the hand with the other one, the way
a man holds a rifle he is determined to fire straight, and signed it a second
time over the wreck of the first. Burt Kellam, in full, under every word of it.
Aponi, from the doorway, said nothing at all. But Emmett saw her look at the
signed paper the way she had looked at the half-moon shoe in the mud at
Eagle Rock, and he understood that in her accounting the two things were the
same thing: a mark a man had left in the world without meaning to, that the
world had kept.
Brandt rode for Dry Fork that afternoon with the statement folded in oilcloth
inside his shirt, to swear the warrant before the justice, and Kellam rode with
him under guard — not Emmett's guard, but a deputy Brandt had sworn off a
ranch outside Dry Fork and sent for, because Brandt said a prisoner of the
county would travel as a prisoner of the county and nobody's private errand.
Emmett watched them go with a feeling he did not trust, the feeling of a
thing finally moving after weeks of standing still, and he was right not to
trust it, because a warrant travels at the speed of a horse, and word travels at
the speed of men's mouths, and in a dry valley in a hard summer a mouth is
the faster animal by a full day.
It was the stage driver who brought it back, on the second day, stopping at
the well on the Dry Fork road because even a stage team in that country
drank by Emmett's leave that summer. Slade knew. A clerk in the justice's
office owed Slade money, or a liveryman talked, or the thing simply rose off
the paper the way heat rises off stone — it did not matter how. Slade knew