thread, the logic of the barred door.
Judge dozed standing in the corral, one ear back, at peace. The stars wheeled
with the patience of things that have never once had to decide anything.
Emmett went back up the steps and sat in the dark with his rifle and his open
gate and his full troughs, a man who had arranged his whole life so that no
one could need him, waiting for three hundred people who did.
At first light Judge was standing rigid in the corral with his head up and his
ears pricked east, and he was not looking at Emmett, and he was not looking
at the trough.
Emmett stood. The rifle slid from his knees and he caught it and stood a
17
moment with it in his hands in the gray dawn, looking at it as if it were an
object whose use he had forgotten. Then he leaned it against the porch post,
slowly, the way he had set down the hammer, and left it there.
They were on every ridge.
They had come in the last of the dark, or in the first of the light, on horses
and on foot, and they were all around the bowl of hills that held his ranch —
east ridge, south ridge, the low shoulders north and west — a people, not a
war party, exactly as she had said: he could see the shapes of women with
bundles, of old men walking with staffs, of children carried and children
walking, of men on horseback at the edges keeping the order of the moving.
Hundreds of them. They made no sound that reached him. The silence of
three hundred people is a different substance from quiet; it has weight, like
the heat had weight, and it pressed on the yard from every side. Far off, thin
and small in the still air, a baby cried once and was hushed.
Below the east ridge a single rider detached himself from the rest and came
down the slope toward the ranch at a walk. An old man, straight in the saddle
despite his years, with gray in his hair and the unhurried bearing of a person
who has never once had to announce himself. His uncle. Tadan. Coming
down alone, because that was how it was done, because the scout had
reported a man who stepped back from a bucket, and the chief would test the
report with his own skin.
Emmett Cole went down his porch steps unarmed. He had nothing in his
hands. He crossed the yard in the dawn light, past the open gate and the full
trough, and at the well he stopped and took down the tin ladle from its nail
on the stone collar, and he held it in his hand, and he stood there beside the
water he had dug out of the earth with his own hands, and waited for the
chief of the Mescalero to ride down and meet him.
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The chief rode down alone, and Emmett Cole stood by his well with a tin
ladle in his hand and nothing else, and he had time, while the horse picked its
way down the long slope, to feel the full size of the fool he might be making
of himself. Behind him the cabin door stood open. His rifle was inside it,
leaning against the wall by the stove, where he had left it on purpose, which
was either the bravest thing he had done in twenty years or the last. On every
ridge around the valley the riders sat their horses and did not move, dark
against the morning, more of them than he had counted the first time and
more than he cared to count the second. Below them all, a white-haired old
man in his sixties was coming down to ask him for water, and the asking
would be done with perfect courtesy, and both men would understand that
courtesy was a garment and not the body underneath it.
Tadan stopped his horse at the fence, outside the gate, and waited there. He
did not ride in. He sat the little dun with his hands quiet on the reins and his
eyes on Emmett, and he waited to be invited onto another man's ground, with
three hundred people behind him in the hills and all the thirst in the world at
his back. Emmett walked down the yard and opened the gate himself.
"You came alone," Emmett said.
"I came to talk," Tadan said. "A man does not bring an army to a
conversation." His English was slow and exact, the words set down one at a
time like stones across a creek. "If the talk fails, the army is still there. You
knew this before I said it."
"I knew it."
"Then we do not have to say it again." The chief came down off the horse
with the care of a man whose knees had opinions, and he led the dun through
the gate and tied it to the fence rail with a rawhide loop, and he walked with
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Emmett up the yard to the well. He looked at the well the way a man looks at
another man's wife's portrait: respectfully, and taking in everything. The
stone curb Emmett had laid himself, course by course, the summer after the
digging. The windlass, the rope, the bucket resting on the curb stones. The
ladle in Emmett's hand.
"My niece lives," Tadan said.
"She was doing tolerable when she left my fence," Emmett said. "I bound her