the two of them not talking much, an old freight-hauler and an old chief
pacing off a piece of ground the way men pace off a grave or a foundation,
and at the end of the walk he said it.
"Your families come inside my fence tonight," he said. "Not the yard only.
The ground itself — the corrals, the barn, the cabin for the little ones and the
old ones, the stone walls where they're worth something. Your young men on
the fence line where they belong, and the women and children in behind
them, on my ground, under my roof where I've got roof to give. If that
bought deputy wants to clear a hostile encampment at dawn, he can explain
to the territory how it comes that the hostiles are sleeping in a white man's
barn with the white man's leave, and the white man standing in his own gate
saying so."
He stopped at the well, and put his hand on the stone curb of it, the stones he
had laid himself in the first year, with Martha handing him the water for the
mortar in a bucket, both of them young enough to think a well was a simple
thing. "The well is mine," he said. "I dug it, I hold the paper on it, and I'll
answer for it in any hearing they like. But the water isn't. It never was. It
comes up out of the ground for whoever's thirsty, and the day I start deciding
which thirst counts, I've dug nothing but a grave with good stonework." He
looked at Tadan. "Bring them in."
Tadan brought them in under the dark, the way his people did everything that
mattered, without noise and without waste: the old ones wrapped in blankets
and set gentle as children in Emmett's barn among the hay, the little ones
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carried sleeping in their mothers' arms into the cabin and laid in rows on the
floor and on Martha's bed, where no one had slept in four years, and Emmett
stood in his own doorway and watched strangers' children fill his dead wife's
room with breathing and did not find that he minded it, which surprised him
less than he expected.
In the barn, by lantern light, one of the grandmothers — a woman so old she
had been carried in on a litter between two grandsons — reached out as
Emmett passed with an armload of his own blankets and caught his sleeve
with fingers like roots, and spoke to him at length in her own tongue,
gravely, the way a person delivers something they have composed. Emmett
stood and bore it with his hat off, not understanding a word, until Aponi
came up beside him and listened and then said, in her flattest voice, which
did not entirely succeed in being flat: "She says the house of a man is known
by who is sleeping in it when the trouble comes. She says your house is a big
house tonight, Emmett Cole. She says Martha — " Aponi stopped, and
started again, more carefully. "She says the woman of this house would be
glad of the noise in it."
"Tell her there's been too little noise in it," Emmett said, "and she's welcome
to every corner of it." Aponi rendered it, and the old woman nodded as if a
debt she kept track of had been properly entered, and let go of his sleeve, and
settled back into the hay with the expression of a person who has finished the
day's business. The women disposed themselves in the corrals and the yard
with their bundles and their grandmothers' pots. The young men took the
fence line, and the band's horses were brought in off the valley floor and
packed into the back pasture, so that by the last hour before dawn the Cole
ranch held three hundred people inside one fence, quiet as held breath, and
the well rope creaked soft and steady in the dark as the water jars went the
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rounds.
Emmett was at the gate, with Brandt on one side of him and Aponi on the
other and Judge the mule standing hipshot and unimpressed in the yard
behind, when Aponi said, quietly, "Torches."
He looked east, down the long dark of the Dry Fork road where it came off
the ridge and crossed the valley floor. A string of lights had appeared on the
ridge line, small and yellow and moving, too many to count at that distance
and no need to count them. Torches, carried by riders, coming down off the
high ground in a long loose column, still a long way off — an hour, maybe
more, at the pace of men who believed they had the whole of the dawn to
work in and had started early to be sure of it.
The torches descended the ridge in their slow string, patient as a fuse, and the
light of them doubled in the still air, and nobody on the fence line moved,
and nobody in the yard made a sound, and the well rope creaked once more
in the dark behind Emmett and then was still.
The yard held its breath all night, and Emmett Cole held his with it.
Three hundred people can be loud in the ordinary way of people, but these
three hundred had come into his fence with a different understanding, and
they were quiet in the way of people who know that quiet is a kind of armor.
The children slept in the barn, laid out in rows on his hay and on blankets