along the riders' line that was not quite a laugh and was more dangerous to
Slade than a laugh would have been. "As for the mark — Kellam made it
sober, fed, and unchained, and he'll make his mouth say it at Dry Fork. Any
man here wants to hear him say it with his own mouth, he's close enough to
fetch by noon. The coffee's mine."
"You're refusing a lawful order," Slade said.
"I'm executing the law in the order it was sworn," Brandt said. "The
statement's older than the order, Mr. Slade. By six days. It's a hard thing for a
man to manufacture a crisis and date it wrong, but there it is in the clerk's
hand. Yours bought his paper in a hurry, and hurry shows."
It was not dramatic, the way it broke, and that was why it held.
A rider at the far north end of the line, a man Emmett half knew — Parnell,
who had freighted wool out of the valley two springs running and owed
money in the ordinary, unpurchased way — gathered his reins, looked once
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at the fence, where three hundred people were still doing absolutely nothing
to anybody, and said, to no one in particular and loud enough to carry, "I
signed for wages. I didn't sign for a poisoner's rope." He turned his horse's
head and rode out of the line at a walk, not hurrying, which made it worse for
the line than any gallop would have. Three men followed him before he had
gone twenty yards. Then two more, together, like men who had been waiting
to not be first. Then the line began to come apart the way ice comes off a
pond in March, not in a crash but in pieces, each piece making the next one
easier, riders peeling away north and south, none of them looking back at
Vernon Slade, most of them looking at nothing at all with great industry.
Cobb went last but one, and he went in a way Emmett had not foreseen and
would think about kindly for years. The deputy rode forward two paces out
of the dissolving line, alone, and stopped in front of Brandt, and took the
folded copy of the emergency order out of his own coat — the deputy's copy,
the one he was sworn to carry — and held it down to the sheriff like a man
handing back a tool he had borrowed and broken.
"I can't enforce it, Sheriff," Cobb said. His voice shook and he let it shake. "It
was sworn by me. That's the part I keep hearing. Six days after." He
swallowed. "I'll answer for my end of it at Dry Fork. I'd rather answer for
cowardice than—" He stopped, and gestured at the fence, at the barn, at the
whole held breath of the yard. "Than that. Whatever that was going to be."
"Ride in ahead of me and wait at my office," Brandt said, and took the paper.
"Don't run, Lyman. Running's the only thing left that can make it worse."
Cobb nodded like a boy and rode.
And then there was Slade, and perhaps six men who stayed because they
were too deep in his money or his friendship or his fear to do arithmetic
quickly, and the morning's whole weight came down into the few yards of
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trampled dust between one man on a horse and one man afoot with a sack
corner and a hub-band in his hands.
"You're finished in this territory, Brandt," Slade said. "Finished. I own the
paper on half this valley and I'll own the paper on you—"
"Mr. Slade," Brandt said, "you are under—"
The shot, when it came, was the morning's only one, and it was not aimed at
a man. Slade drew and fired in one motion, wild and spiteful as a boy
throwing a stone, and the bullet struck the wellhead above Emmett's shoulder
with a crack of splintering wood and hit the bucket chain fair, so the chain
sang and the empty bucket dropped clanging down the shaft and the sound of
it rang in the well mouth like a bell in a deep room. Splinters stung Emmett's
cheek. Aponi did not move. Not a rifle inside the fence so much as twitched
toward a shoulder, and Emmett, with his cheek bleeding lightly and his ears
ringing, felt a pride go through him so fierce it was close to grief, because the
discipline had cost those young men more than firing would have, and they
had paid it in full, in front of witnesses, exactly as their chief had sworn they
would.
"That," Brandt said into the ringing quiet, with great deliberation, "was
attempted destruction of the water supply of this valley, in front of forty
witnesses, by the complainant in this matter." He walked forward. "Vernon
Slade, you're under arrest. Hand me that pistol by the barrel, butt first, the
way your mother taught you."
Slade looked once, wildly, toward the fence, as if the Apache might still
oblige him by becoming the story he had paid for. The fence line stood like a
row of carved posts, rifles down, faces still, witnesses and nothing else.
Tadan's young men watched a white sheriff arrest a white poisoner on a
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white man's land under white law, and did not touch him, and did not smile,
and it was the most complete defeat Emmett Cole ever saw a man handed.
Slade gave up the pistol butt first, with a hand that shook, and Brandt had the
irons on him before the bucket finished settling at the bottom of the well.