The judge did not deliberate long. By the time the evidence had all been said
aloud in a room with the windows open, the conclusion had mostly
assembled itself; the verdict was just the name given to what everyone
present already knew. Slade's claim was dismissed in full, no prior right and
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no injury found: the Cole well was Cole's, its water right affirmed in whole
and without condition, as it had stood since the digging. On the second
question the court found the evidence sufficient and more: Vernon Slade was
bound over to the territorial court to answer for the poisoning of the Eagle
Rock spring and for the shot fired at the ranch gate, and remanded without
bail — the judge remarking, in the dry voice of a man reading a freight bill,
that a defendant who had used paper as a weapon and poison as an argument
had forfeited his claim to be trusted with either liberty or ink. Slade said
nothing. He was led out between two deputies with his good coat over the
chain, his shoulders still arranged like a man entering a room he owned. It
was the last time Emmett ever saw him. What came after came at a distance:
a trial at the capital in the winter, a verdict, a sentence of years in the
territorial prison — reported in a letter from Brandt in the spring, read twice,
and put away in the drawer with the other papers, where it belonged.
Three days after the hearing, in the clerk's office at the back of the
courthouse, Emmett did the thing he had been turning over since the morning
Brandt read the papers aloud at his gate. He did it with the clerk's pen in his
own hand, writing slowly, in the round freight-office hand he had learned
keeping manifests, Aponi at his shoulder to take it across the language line
when Tadan came in to hear it.
It was a short instrument, as Emmett insisted it be — short enough to be read
aloud in one breath's worth of pauses, because he had learned what long
paper could hide. It said that Emmett Cole, holding the water of the well on
his ranch by right affirmed in the county court, reserved that water in
perpetuity — the clerk made him spell it, and he spelled it like a man setting
a post — for the use of all travelers passing the ranch, of whatever people,
and for the band of Tadan of the Mescalero, in drought years and in wet
ones, at all hours and without fee. And it said what the band gave in return,
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which had been Tadan's own terms, offered through Aponi with a chief's
precision: the band's labor, each time they camped in the valley and at need
between, to keep the well curb mended and the troughs sound and the road
past the ranch passable, so that the water and the road would outlast the men
who had signed for them.
"You're giving away what the court just finished giving back to you," the
clerk said, not unkindly, sanding the page. "There's men would call that a
poor bargain, Mr. Cole."
"The court give me the right to keep it," Emmett said. "This here's me
deciding what the right's for."
Tadan came in with the dust of the ride still on him and listened to the whole
instrument twice through Aponi's mouth, once in the clerk's English and once
in his own tongue, sitting very straight on the clerk's stool with his hands on
his knees. He asked two questions. Whether the paper would still speak when
Emmett was dead. Whether it would speak to the men who came after both
of them, on both sides. Aponi translated the clerk's answers — yes, it was
recorded; yes, it ran with the land — and the old chief considered the page
the way he would have considered a treaty, a horse, or a weather sign: as a
thing whose real nature would only be known by living with it. Then he took
the pen the way a man takes an unfamiliar tool, respectfully and by the
wrong end first, and made his mark at the foot of the page, a firm, deliberate
sign, and Brandt, who had stood by the door with his hat off since the start,
signed below it as witness, in his careful sheriff's hand.
Emmett walked out of the courthouse with a copy folded in his coat and the
strange lightness of a man who has set down a load he did not know he was
carrying. He had spent the whole fight learning what paper was. A claim was
paper used as a rope, to drag a thing toward the man holding it. A confession
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was paper used as a lamp. This new thing was paper used as a fence — not
the kind that keeps a man's cattle in and the world out, but the kind a wise
man builds around a spring on open range: low, plain, and posted, so that the
water inside it stays clean and the gate in it is never locked. It had taken him
forty-five years and a war in miniature to learn that a fence could be built to
protect a thing for everybody, instead of from everybody.
The band left the valley on a morning in the early autumn, and they left it
properly, the way they had done everything in Emmett's sight — without
hurry and without remainder.
The night before, there was the last watering, which took until full dark
because it was not only watering. The horses came down to the troughs in