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Kellam was taken, and Slade knew Kellam had talked, and by the driver's
account the Slade ranch was gathering men the way a thunderhead gathers,
slow and black and taking its time about it, riders coming in from the Bar-S
line camps and two wagon crews besides, more men than a cattle outfit had
any honest use for in August.
That night the young men of the band came up to the ranch in a body, forty
of them and better, painted not for war but for riding, which among their
people was a distinction with very little country between the two. Their
spokesman stood in Emmett's yard with the firelight on him and said what
they had come to say with the directness of the young: Slade was raising a
force to fall on the camp or the ranch before the hearing could be held; every
hour spent waiting was an hour given to the enemy; ride now, ride tonight,
burn the Bar-S corrals and scatter his herds and meet the man in the open
while Tadan's people still had the choosing of the ground. It was not foolish
counsel. Emmett, who had freighted through two territories in bad years,
stood in his own yard and heard the sense in it and felt the pull of it in his
own chest, where it lived alongside every instinct that had kept him alive to
forty-five.
Tadan heard them out from where he sat by the well curb, saying nothing,
letting the young men's words spend themselves against his silence the way a
river spends itself against a stone. Then he looked, not at the young men, but
at Emmett.
"Ask him," the old chief said to the yard at large, in his own tongue, and
Aponi rendered it in her flat voice for Emmett's benefit and Brandt's deputy's
and the record of the night. "The white man whose well it is. Ask him what
ground he means to fight on. Because it is his ground the soldiers will come
to, whichever way this goes."
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Emmett stepped into the firelight with his hat in his hands and did the hardest
thing a man in his position could do, which was ask three hundred people to
trust a piece of white paper over the evidence of their own eyes. He did not
dress it up. He said the hearing at Dry Fork was days off and no longer a
contest between him and Slade over a water filing — Brandt had seen to that
— but the law's one clean look at the whole business: the fouled spring, the
wagon, the hub-band, the signed word of the man who did the hauling. Kill
Slade's riders in the dark, even in defense of the camp, and by the time the
hearing sat, the only story left standing in the county would be the one Slade
had built the whole scheme to tell: hostiles, a rising, a white man's ranch
overrun. Burn one corral and the paper would not matter. The paper only
won if their hands were clean when it was read.
"One clean day of it," Emmett said. "One day of white paper read out loud in
a white man's hearing, with my name and his foreman's name already under
it, and the water stays law. Law is slow and it's ugly and it has failed better
people than us — " his eyes went, without his willing it, toward the
cottonwoods where Martha's stone stood in the dark — "but it's the only
ground where Slade can't outnumber us. Everywhere else he can."
The young men stood in their paint and their silence, and it was Tadan who
ended it, rising slow and stiff from the well curb like a man unfolding a map.
"We will hold," he said, in English, so there would be no interpreter between
his word and the yard. "Not because I love his paper. Because I have seen
what the other ground costs, and my people have paid it, and I will not pay it
again for Vernon Slade's convenience. We hold. The hearing decides." He
looked along the line of the young men, one by one, the way a man counts
fence posts. "Any man who rides out rides alone."
They held. But before they went, the spokesman stopped in front of Emmett,
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close enough that the firelight showed the paint still wet-looking on his face,
and asked him the question the whole yard had been holding, in English he
had plainly saved up for the purpose. "White paper has never once fed my
people," he said. "It has never once stopped a bullet or given back a mile of
ground. Why should it feed us now, this one time, when it is your well at the
end of it?"
"Because this time the paper has a dead spring and a signed name on it,"
Emmett said. "And because this time it ain't asking you to give anything up.
Every paper your people ever signed took something. This one only gives
Slade enough rope to hang himself with in front of witnesses — which, I will
grant you, is a use of paper I am new to myself." He held the young man's
eyes. "I am not asking you to trust it. I am asking you to let it work before
you ask your people to bleed instead. Bleeding keeps. It can wait one day.
Paper can't."
The young man looked at him a long moment, and then at Tadan, and
something passed between the old man and the young one that Emmett had