hour of it — no more, she said; she had a road to finish — and the bucket left
within reach, and his absence. So he withdrew to the barn and pretended at
tack work where he could not see her and she could not see him pretending,
and the hour went by in the white heat with the cicadas sawing and Judge
standing over his trough with his ears swiveling like a man at a window, and
Emmett thought about how long it had been since another person's presence
had altered the air of the place, and how the alteration was not, strictly,
unwelcome, and how that was its own kind of warning.
She came to him at the barn door at the hour's end, on her feet, the cloth at
her side darkening but her step placed as carefully as before, and he
understood that the audience was by her appointment and for her purpose,
and that the water had been only the beginning of her errand, or perhaps only
its excuse.
12
"You gave water without asking my name or my road," she said. "So I will
give you something for it, because a thing taken and not answered is a debt,
and I do not carry debts to men I may not see again."
"I didn't give it for payment."
"Then hear it as a gift, since you are proud." She stood straight, and her
shadow in the westering light reached halfway across the yard. "I am Aponi.
My uncle is Tadan, who speaks for the Mescalero at Eagle Rock. Three
hundred of us are camped there — old ones, children, mothers, not a war
party, whatever your storekeeper's news has told you. Three days ago the
spring at Eagle Rock went bad. The water turned. Stock that drank it died
standing. Children who drank it are sick, and some—" She stopped, and the
stopping said it. "A spring does not turn in a day, in a dry year, by itself. But
that is not your affair either, and it is not why I came down the mountain."
"Why did you come?"
"To find where water still lives, before the people must move. A scout goes
ahead." She touched, lightly, the cloth at her side. "I found the rocks instead.
And then I found your fence, and you."
Emmett looked east, toward the ridges he could not see over. "Three days
bad. And the children—"
"So the band is coming this way." She said it without ceremony, as a person
announces weather. "Not to your ranch. To water. Yours is the only water
living in this valley now, white man — yours, and what is left at Eagle Rock,
which is poison. Tomorrow, many will come. Old ones first, and the mothers
with the sick children, and the men behind them, because that is how a
people moves when it is not hunting war." Her eyes held his. "Do not shoot.
We come for the water, not for you. If one of your bullets starts it, no one —
13
not my uncle, not I — will be able to stop what follows, and your well will
run red and serve no one. If you let them drink, they will drink, and they will
go, and you will still have your ranch and your well and your—" she
glanced, once, toward the cottonwoods and the small stone there, and
something in her face acknowledged that she had seen it, that she had
understood it in her hour of shade, "—and your dead will not be disturbed.
That is the whole of it. I have said it straight because you poured straight."
He stood with his hands empty at his sides. "You could have drunk and gone
and said nothing."
"Yes."
"Why tell me?"
"Because you stepped back from the bucket." She said it as if it closed the
question. "A man who steps back can be told things."
She would not take the mule. He offered — saddle Judge, ride him east, a
mule's surer than a horse in that rock and he's eaten and watered — and she
refused as finally as she had refused the food, with a sentence he would turn
over all night: "I will not arrive among my people on a white man's animal,
owing a white man's gift, before I have told them a white man can be trusted.
They must see me come as I went. On my own feet." She drank once more,
one ladle, slowly, and set the ladle back on its nail with care, like a thing
returned to a shelf in someone else's house. Then she walked out of the yard
into the east, into the heat shimmer and the long shadows, upright, at a
scout's pace, and the last he saw of her was the straight line of her back
between the fence posts where the rails had come down, and he thought —
he could not help the thought — that she walked like Doyle had ridden, like a
person who had decided the road was hers.
14
He mended the two rails before dark, because hands that work do not shake,
and his were inclined to.
The night came down the way desert nights do, all at once and with stars, and
the heat went out of the stones and the yard cooled, and Emmett Cole sat on
his porch with the rifle across his knees and had it out with himself.
The rifle was loaded. He had loaded it at dusk without deciding to, the way a
man locks a door in a town he no longer lives in: habit reaching up through