have the order. I expect it executed. These hostiles are on a white man's
water and I want them off it before the sun's an hour higher."
"You'll have your order attended to, Mr. Slade," Brandt said, in a voice
pitched not to Slade but to the line. "Every word of it. That's my office and
that's my duty." He took the paper from his coat, unfolded it, and held it up
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so the seal caught the light. "I am required to read it in the hearing of the
parties. Stand easy, gentlemen. Paper takes the time it takes."
He read it. All of it. The recitals, the affidavit, the seal, the judge's name,
Cobb's name where the affidavit was sworn. His voice did not rise and did
not hurry, and forty men who had ridden out expecting shouting sat their
horses and listened to the law describe them as its instrument, and Emmett,
watching from the well, saw what Brandt had known in the cabin: that
reading is a kind of weather. It changes the air men breathe. Some of the
riders began to look at the fence line, where three hundred people stood in
disciplined silence doing nothing whatsoever that the paper said they were
doing, and the paper's words went thin in their hands.
"There's the order," Brandt said, and folded it. "Now there's the rest of the
record, which my office is also sworn to, and which was sworn first." He
took out the foolscap. "Statement of Burt Kellam, foreman to Vernon Slade,
taken by me at the Cole ranch fence, his mark witnessed, the man in my
custody and alive to repeat it at the hearing at Dry Fork."
"Brandt," Slade said, and his voice had an edge in it now. "Brandt, you are
out of your—"
"In the hearing of the parties, Mr. Slade," Brandt said, not loud. "You taught
me that just now. Stand easy."
He read Kellam's statement. All of it. The Eagle Rock spring and the dead
stock put in it on written instruction. The night ride to the Cole trough with
the sack. The poison bought in Slade's name at Dry Fork. The words went
out over the gate and over the fence and over forty horses standing in their
own dust, and they did not go anywhere else, because there was no wind.
Emmett watched the line of riders the way he would watch a herd deciding,
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not face by face but in the mass, the small shifts of weight. A man near the
end took his hand off his rifle and put it on his thigh. Another spat, carefully,
away from the gate. Nobody looked at Slade. That was the thing Emmett
noticed most. Forty men, and by the end of the reading not one of them was
looking at the man who had bought their morning.
Brandt folded the statement and reached into his coat a last time and brought
out two things, and held them up one in each hand, high, turning slowly so
the sun worked on them. In his left, the corner of a feed sack, the stencil
black and plain: BAR-S. In his right, a curve of iron, a wagon hub-band, with
a stamped mark near the break.
"Sack the poison came in," Brandt said. "Cut down off a Bar-S feed sack.
Hub-band shed by the wagon that carried it, up above the spring trail, and
brought to me by the band's lookout boy. Mr. Kellam is alive, fed, and under
guard not a mile from where he signed it, and willing to stand up at the
hearing at Dry Fork and say whose name he worked under. That's the whole
of both papers, gentlemen. One of them says clear this camp because it's a
danger to the water. The other says the danger to the water was manufactured
by the man who ordered the clearing, and his own foreman has signed to it."
He lowered his hands to his sides, the sack and the iron still in them. "I'm the
sheriff of this county. I'll enforce the law. I'm asking every man here to
decide which of these he's enforcing."
The silence after that had a texture Emmett would remember the rest of his
life. It was not empty. It was full of arithmetic. Forty men doing sums they
had not expected to do at sunup: wages against a hanging, a signature against
a mark, a judge's paper against a foreman's statement that would be read
again at a hearing with their own names beside the morning if they chose
wrong. A horse stamped. Somewhere behind Emmett a child in the barn said
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something in a dream and was hushed. Slade sat his horse in the middle of
his own line like a man at the center of a photograph that was developing
wrong, and Emmett watched him understand, in real time and in public, that
bluster is a currency that only spends while men are not thinking, and that
Brandt had just given forty men nothing in the world to do but think.
"Forgery," Slade said. It came out too loud, and he knew it, and made it
louder to cover the knowing. "A coerced mark off a drunk foreman, and this
sheriff—" he flung a hand at Brandt— "this sheriff bought and paid for,
gentlemen, bought with Apache gold, there's not a man in the territory
doesn't know the Cole water is promised to—"
"If there's Apache gold, Mr. Slade," Brandt said mildly, "I've been
shortchanged, because I'm still wearing last year's boots." A sound went