The yard exhaled all at once, and the sound three hundred people make when
they let a held breath go is not a cheer and not a sigh but something older
than either, and it went through Emmett like weather.
Brandt's remaining work was brief and public. He sent two of Slade's last
riders, disarmed and suddenly eager to be useful, to ride Slade and Cobb into
Dry Fork ahead of him, with instructions spoken loudly enough for the fence
to hear. The rest he dismissed to their lives. Then he came back through the
gate, picked up his coffee cup off the well curb, found it cold and full of dust,
and drank it anyway, as a man signs his name to a thing.
Aponi sent for a new bucket and spliced the chain with her own hands,
working the broken link out with a cold chisel from Emmett's smith box
while the first of the women came forward with vessels. The first watering
after a siege is a ceremony whether anyone names it or not. The old ones
drank first. Then the children, straight from the dipper, solemn as
communicants, one small girl spilling half of hers down her front and
looking up stricken until Emmett, on one knee in the dust, told her the well
did not mind and drew her another. The warriors watered their horses last
and themselves after, in their order, and the yard settled in the strengthening
sun into something Emmett had not expected ever to see on his land: an
ordinary morning. Cooking smoke. A baby crying and stopping. Judge, in the
corral, finally lowering his head to his feed with the air of a magistrate
adjourning a court.
They brought Kellam up from the root cellar before Brandt rode, because
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Brandt wanted it done in the yard and not in a cell. He had been held there
since his taking, at Brandt's instruction, because Slade's friends in town had
made noises about a rescue that was really about a silencing, and Brandt
trusted Emmett's cellar and Emmett's fence more than his own jail for
keeping a witness alive. Kellam emerged blinking into the sun, a big man
gone smaller in the shoulders, with his hands free because Brandt had
ordered it, in front of the Apache, in front of Emmett, in front of the well he
had come by night to poison.
"You're going to Dry Fork with me when I ride," Brandt told him. "You'll
stand up at the hearing and you'll say what you signed, all of it, in the room,
to the judge's face. Do that, Burt, and you live. The territory hangs poisoners
of water in a drought year when it can. Your statement's the only rope you
own that isn't tied to you. Hold onto it."
Kellam looked at the yard, at the children with the dipper, at the women
filling vessels at the well he had crept toward in the dark with a sack on his
shoulder. He took off his hat, which men do for the dead and for judges. "I
never aimed to kill nobody's children," he said, hoarsely, to Emmett more
than to Brandt. "Slade said the spring'd just go bitter. Said the band would
move off and no harm done but a bad taste. When I seen the trough here I
near turned back at the fence." He swallowed. "That's a poor thing to say to a
man whose well you came to poison. I know it's poor. It's the truest poor
thing I own."
"You'll say it at Dry Fork too," Emmett said. "All of it. It's worth more there
than here."
Kellam nodded, and put his hat back on, and his gratitude when Brandt told
him again that testifying meant living was an awkward, real, unbeautiful
thing, like a man learning to walk on a leg he had expected to lose.
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Then it was just the well, in the late-morning sun, and Tadan came to it the
way he had come to everything that week, without hurry and without escort,
and stood across the curb from Emmett with his hands resting on the stone
his enemy's bullet had scarred.
"Your paper held," the chief said through Aponi, standing at Emmett's
shoulder. "And your fence held. I have lived long enough to watch white
men's paper blow away and white men's fences become firewood. These did
neither."
"Neither would have mattered," Emmett said, "if your young men had lifted a
rifle at the gate. Forty guns rode home safe because three hundred people did
the hardest thing there is. You tell them that from me, Aponi. Tell it exact."
She translated, and something in the old chief's face acknowledged the
exchange as between equals, which in that valley in that year was a rarer
currency than water. "He says the well-keeper understands command," Aponi
reported. "He says that is rarer among your people than among his, and he
does not mean it as an insult, only as a count."
Aponi herself looked at the scarred wellhead, at the spliced chain bright
where her chisel had worked, at the dipper going hand to hand in the sun.
"Two papers fought at the gate this morning," she said, in her own voice and
her own English, dry as the valley in August. "It is the first time I have seen
paper get tired and guns go home instead." She lifted the bucket hand over
hand, easy as a girl. "Drink, Emmett Cole. You look like a man who has been