giving away water all night and keeping none."
The rider came before noon, at a pace that said the news was too good to
walk.
He was one of Brandt's couriers out of Dry Fork, a boy of seventeen on a
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lathered pony, and he pulled up at the gate with a dispatch wallet and the
expression of a lad who had been told he was carrying history and intended
to look the part. Brandt had reached Dry Fork with his prisoners and sent the
boy straight back with word that could not wait: the territorial marshal, in
Dry Fork on circuit business, had read Kellam's statement at the sheriff's own
table and taken the matter up federally. The water hearing at Dry Fork was
no longer a hearing into whether an encampment of hostiles threatened the
valley's supply. It was converted. It would be Vernon Slade who answered
charges — poisoning and attempted poisoning of water in a drought year,
conspiracy to seize a water right by fraud, suborning a deputy's false affidavit
— and Emmett Cole's water right would be heard the same day, in the same
room, on the same record, with Sheriff Dale Brandt testifying and Burt
Kellam testifying after him, alive, under the marshal's own protection.
Emmett heard it standing at the well with the dispatch in his hand, though the
boy had already read the sum of it aloud at the gate, because Brandt knew
paper travels better once it has been heard aloud. Aponi translated for the
fence line and the barn door and the old ones along the cabin wall, and the
yard did what it had not done at the gate: it made a sound, low and rolling,
not triumph exactly, but the noise of three hundred people setting down a
weight they had carried a long way in the dark.
Tadan stood in the sun with his people drinking around him, children with
wet chins, women filling the vessels for the midday meal, his young men at
ease for the first time in days with their rifles stacked and their hands empty
in the light. He looked over all of it a long while, the way a man looks at a
field he has decided not to abandon. Then he spoke, and Aponi, when she
brought the words across, did not trim them, because there was nothing in
them that needed trimming.
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"Then we will stay for the hearing, well-keeper. My people have never yet
been asked to watch white law work. We will watch it work for them."
Dry Fork had one street, a jail of squared stone no bigger than a smokehouse,
and a courthouse that had been a warehouse before the county made it one,
and the warehouse showed through in every board. Emmett tied Judge to the
rail outside it in the early light and stood a moment with his hand on the
mule's neck, looking at the building the way a man looks at a river he has to
cross in the dark. He had hauled freight past this town for years and never
had business inside its one official room. Now his whole life was going to be
said out loud in there, by other men, in the language of paper.
Brandt was waiting on the steps with his hat in his hands. The sheriff had
shaved for the occasion and it made him look younger and less certain, and
Emmett understood, watching him turn the hat by its brim, that Dale Brandt
was as much on trial in that room as any man — not in law, but in the record.
He had stood at a ranch gate with a rifle's worth of trouble pointed at the
territory's peace and he had read two pieces of paper aloud instead of
shooting, and whether that had been wisdom or luck was a question the
hearing would answer for the whole valley.
"They brung Slade in already," Brandt said. "He's in the back room with his
lawyer. Kellam's in the jail office. He ain't eat since yesterday."
"He'll eat after," Emmett said.
"You done this before?" Brandt asked. "Testified, I mean."
"I signed my name to freight bills," Emmett said. "That's the whole of my
court experience."
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The room filled the way a church fills, in twos and threes and with much
settling. Ranchers from the valley who had ridden in because the water
question was every man's question. Two of Slade's freight hands, uncertain
of their welcome anywhere. The judge's clerk, a young man with ink already
on his cuffs, arranging his books on the table with the care of a priest at an
altar. On that same table, set out before the judge's chair like the whole
argument made visible, lay the evidence, and Emmett's eyes went to it the
way they'd gone to a weak wheel on a wagon — automatically, and with
respect for what it could do.
A corner cut from a grain sack, no bigger than a man's hand, the canvas stiff
and stained a color no grain had ever made, with the stencil still legible on it:
a bar over an S, the Bar-S, Vernon Slade's registered mark. And beside it a
hub-band, a ring of iron off the hub of a heavy freight wagon, its outer face
scored where it had ground against stone, found by the band's lookout boy
along the spring trail and carried in to Sheriff Brandt. Two small ugly
objects. Emmett had carried freight for twenty years; he knew what they