milk and the smell rose out of it, sweet and chemical and wrong. And the
purpose, in Kellam's own spelling, which the clerk read without smoothing:
to make the spring bitter, so the Apache would move off the valley and the
settlers blame them or leave, and the land — and the Cole well with it —
would come cheap.
"Is that your signature?" the judge asked, when the reading was done.
"Yes, sir."
"And is it true?"
Kellam looked up then — not at the judge, and not at Emmett — at Slade:
the look of a dog at a man who has beaten it and fed it for six years, and
whom it has finally understood. "It's true," he said. "I wrote it out and I
signed it and I'd sign it again. I done the thing. There's nights I still smell that
water. I ain't asking the court to make it less than it was. I'm only here to say
whose orders it was, and it was his. I never poisoned nothing on my own
account. I just drive the wagon where I'm told."
Teague rose for the cross, and he was good at his work, and his work was to
make Kellam into a liar who had bought his freedom with another man's
neck. He took him through it for the better part of an hour — the promise of
106
leniency, the fear of the rope, the grudge over wages, laid out like a card.
Kellam's answers got slower and his hands worked harder on the hat, but he
did not move off his chosen ground one step. Near the end, Teague asked
him why a jury should believe a man who had confessed to poisoning a
spring that women and children drank from.
"Because I ain't asking them to like me," Kellam said. "I'm asking them to
look at the wagon." He pointed at the table — at the hub-band, the scored
ring of iron. "That come off the big wagon up at that spring, and it's in the
mud yet where it dropped, and the Sheriff's man found it. And Mr. Slade's
wagon at Dry Fork is sitting on a new band this day that I put on myself, in
the dark, the week after, and told the wheelwright it was a road accident. Go
look at the wagon, Mr. Teague. The wagon ain't been promised nothing. The
wagon ain't scared. The wagon just says where it's been."
The room was very quiet. Slade was looking at the table again, at the two
small ugly objects, and his face had the expression of a man watching a fire
reach the room where he keeps his money.
Emmett was called last among the witnesses, and he stood and put his hand
on the Bible and swore, and sat in the chair that was still warm from Burt
Kellam, and answered the judge's questions in the order they were asked —
his name, his place, his years in the valley, the digging of the well. He told
about the well the way he would have told about a mule: when it was made
and what it had cost and what it gave. Dug in the autumn of '71, by his own
hands and one hired man's, through eleven feet of caliche that had to be
picked out a bucket at a time. Martha had hauled the rope the first month,
before her hands gave out. It had never gone dry. In the worst August of the
drought it had fallen four feet and risen again by morning, every morning,
the way it was rising now in the dark under his ranch.
107
"Mr. Cole," the judge said. "You have heard the claim argued — that your
well draws on the same water as the Eagle Rock spring, and that the
claimant's right is prior. What do you say to the claim?"
Emmett considered. He was aware of the whole room at his back and of how
little his answer would sound like the hour of law that had preceded it. He
had rehearsed nothing. A load rides best when it is plain and centered, and he
loaded his answer the same way.
"I say the well was there before his paper, Judge. I say I dug it with my wife
standing at the windlass, and I say the water in it ain't his and ain't mine
either, the way a horse is mine. It's water. It comes up out of the ground for
whoever's bucket gets there." He stopped, and then said the thing he had
come to Dry Fork to say, which he had not known was the thing until he
heard his own voice shaping it. "Everything that's happened since the
summer — the camp across my creek, the riders on my ridge, Mr. Kellam's
wagon, this room — all of it goes back to one morning when a woman came
to my fence hurt and thirsty and I gave her water out of my well. I gave water
to a stranger before I knew anything about her. I didn't know her name or her
people or her business, and I didn't ask. Everything since has been the
consequences of that. I ain't sorry for it and I ain't proud of it. It's just the fact
everything else stands on, and I figured the record ought to have it."
Teague asked him two questions on the cross, about dates, and sat down.
There was nothing to cross-examine in a man who had just confessed to his
own defense.