Aponi's women had spread over the stalls' clean straw, and every so often
one of them cried out in a dream and was hushed by a hand that found them
in the dark without waking the rest. The old ones sat or lay along the cabin's
lee wall where the day's heat still lived in the logs. The warriors stood the
fence line in their places, rifles down, watching the dark beyond the wire
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with the patience of men who had been told exactly what the night required
of them and meant to give exactly that and nothing more.
Tadan's order had gone down the line before full dark, carried mouth to ear
in a language Emmett mostly did not have, though Aponi had given him the
shape of it: no man fires unless he is fired on, no man lifts a rifle to his
shoulder for any reason short of that, no man answers a shout with a shout. It
was not the order of a chief who trusted the morning. It was the order of a
chief who intended to be able to say, afterward, in whatever room men said
such things, that his people had done nothing the law could hang a name on.
Emmett walked the yard twice in the first hours, more to be seen than to
inspect anything. He carried no rifle. He had left it racked inside the cabin
door, a decision he had made in front of Aponi so she would know it was
made. A man carrying a rifle among three hundred guests is a statement; a
man carrying a bucket is a host. He carried the bucket. He drew water for the
old ones twice, and for a woman whose baby would not settle, and each time
the windlass creaked in the stillness it sounded loud enough to carry to Dry
Fork, and nobody stirred beyond a turning of heads.
Judge stood in the corral with his ears working, offended at the population of
his world. The mule had opinions about strangers, about loads, about weather
coming, about most things, and he kept them mostly to himself, but tonight
he stood facing the barn where the children slept and now and again stamped
once, softly, as if to say he was awake and counted himself on watch too.
At the well Emmett found Aponi already there, sitting on the stone curb with
her rifle across her knees and her eyes on the eastern dark where the riders
would come from when they came. She had been riding and talking and
translating for three days on almost no sleep, and it showed in her not as
weakness but as a kind of economy, nothing wasted, her movements pared
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down to the ones that mattered.
"You should sleep," Emmett said. "An hour. I'll keep the well."
"And who keeps you?" she said.
"I've kept myself forty-five years."
"That is what you tell the well," she said. "The well is too polite to argue."
He sat down on the other side of the curb because there was nothing in her
tone that invited argument either, and for a while they watched the dark
together and listened to the yard breathe. Three hundred people, and the
sounds were small ones: a cough, a horse shifting, the far-off complaint of a
dog that had followed the band in and could not understand the new rules.
Beyond the fence the desert made its own night noises, and the stars stood in
their thousands over the dry valley.
"You built this place to need no one," Aponi said at last. It was not a question
and it was not quite an accusation. She had a way of setting a fact down
between two people like a cup on a table, to see who would pick it up.
"I built it to be let alone," Emmett said.
"And now it is full to the fence rails with people you did not invite and
cannot feed past a week, and your well is the only sweet water in two days'
riding, and tomorrow a bought paper comes to move us off it like cattle off a
road." She turned her head and looked at him. "How does the letting alone
go, Emmett Cole?"
"About as well as most plans," he said.
Something moved in her face that was not quite a smile. "My uncle says a
man is known by what his ground does when it is frightened. Yours has not
run." She stood up, and her rifle came up with her as naturally as a hand. "I
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will sleep one hour. If the sheriff comes, wake me before you feed him. He
eats like a tax."
She went toward the barn, stepping over sleeping shapes without looking
down, and Emmett stayed at the well with the bucket rope in his hand and
thought about Martha, who had been dead nine years and whose grave stood
by the cottonwoods where the ground stayed coolest, and who had told him
more than once, in the years when the ranch was young and the work was
everything, that a place a man builds only for himself is just a slower kind of
grave. He had not believed her. He had believed the work. Tonight the yard
was full of other people's children asleep in his hay, and his well was the thin
line between three hundred souls and the desert, and he understood that
Martha had not been talking about generosity at all. She had been talking