no tongue for and did not need. The spokesman turned and walked down to
the camp with the rest.
Emmett watched them go down in the dark, unhurried, forty riders choosing
patience with their whole people watching them choose it, and he thought it
was the bravest piece of generalship he had ever seen performed by anybody,
and that Vernon Slade, who had counted on their rage the way he counted on
the drought, had just had the first of his certainties taken away from him.
Slade's answer came on the third day, and it came wearing the law's clothes,
which was fitting, because Slade had never in his life preferred a gun to a
document when a document would do the killing for him.
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The rider who brought word of it was one of Brandt's own — the deputy
came up the Dry Fork road at a dead run in the middle of the afternoon with
his horse foundered under him, and what he had to say he said standing in
Emmett's yard with his hat crushed in his hand, to Emmett and to Tadan and
to Aponi, who rendered the parts of it that mattered in a voice gone flatter
than Emmett had ever heard it. Slade had gone around the county justice
entirely. He had ridden forty miles to a territorial judge who owed his
appointment to men who owed Slade money, and he had come away with an
emergency order, signed and sealed, declaring the Mescalero gathering on
the Cole ranch a hostile encampment endangering the settlements, and
directing its removal — by force if resisted — before it could be marched on
Dry Fork. A sworn body of riders was being mustered at the Slade ranch to
execute it, thirty men and more, and at their head, to give the thing its coat of
law, rode a deputy of that judge's own county, bought and saddled, a man
whose name the deputy spoke the way a man spits. The removal was set for
dawn tomorrow. Not after the hearing. Before it could ever be held. Slade did
not need to win the hearing if there was no camp left to hear about.
And Brandt — the deputy took a breath that shook — Brandt had been
served with the order himself, in Dry Fork, in the street, by the bought
deputy's own hand, with half the town watching to see the sheriff of the
county stand down in front of a piece of paper with a bigger seal on it than
his own.
Emmett stood in his yard and looked at the messenger's foundered horse
blowing in the heat, and at Tadan, who had received the news of his people's
removal with the stillness of a man who had been receiving such news, in
one wording or another, for sixty years. "And where is Brandt," Emmett said.
"Riding," the deputy said. "He read the order through twice in the street, Dale
80
did, and then he folded it and put it in his pocket like it was a bill he meant to
pay later, and he got on his horse. He said to tell you — " the young man
swallowed — "he said to tell you he's coming back through the night to stand
with you. Not that it'll hold them. He said to tell you plain it won't hold them,
if they've a mind. But he's coming."
Brandt came in a little after two in the morning, on a horse he had ridden
near to death and did not apologize to, having come the whole way by
starlight and memory through country that ate men in the daylight. He was
gray with dust and wore through with tiredness, and he took the coffee Aponi
put in his hand and drank it standing, and what he said he said without
heroics, in the tone of a man reading out a bill of lading.
"The order's lawful on its face," he said. "Judge's seal, judge's signature. In
my county I'm outranked by it, and in point of fact I'm outnumbered by it,
thirty and better against what this ranch can put on a fence line." He set the
cup down. "Here's what I can do, and it's all I can do, and I've thought it
through the whole ride so don't waste what's left of the night arguing me out
of it. When they come at dawn, I will stand in your gate, Emmett, in my own
person, and I will read that order out loud, every word, so that no man there
can say later he didn't hear what he was doing. And then I will read Burt
Kellam's statement out loud, every word of that, with his name signed under
it — the spring, the wagon, the mineral, the whole design of it, and who gave
the orders. And then every man on that road can decide for himself which
paper he wants his name standing under when the territory sorts it out. Some
of them are Slade's. Not all of them. Some of them have just never had to
hear it read aloud."
He shrugged, once, with his whole tired body. "It may do nothing. But it's the
ground we've got, and I'm damned if I'll give it up sitting in Dry Fork."
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What was left of the night, Emmett spent on the decision he had in fact made
hours before Brandt arrived, somewhere down under his ribs, in the place
where his decisions had always actually been made while his mind was still
arguing about them. He walked his fence in the dark with Tadan beside him,