mound, and began to move the top stones aside with her hands.
"Saya," Silas said softly.
She did not look up. "I need to see," she said.
What she found there, half-buried in the dry earth, she lifted with both hands
as gently as if it were still warm: a child's shoe, small, scuffed, the laces
knotted the way a mother knots them so they won't come undone. She held it
for a long time. Nobody spoke. The wind moved through the pines above the
draw, and a jay screamed once, far off.
"The Hallorans," Quinn said quietly. "A man and his wife and two little ones.
Bound for the settlements. Their wagon was found empty by the old mining
89
road last autumn."
"They fought," Pell whispered. "The father β he fought. Aikens's men β"
He could not finish.
Saya wrapped the shoe in a square of cloth from her pouch and tied it with a
strip of rawhide, her fingers steady. When she stood, her eyes were dry and
terrible and clear.
"We will take them home," she said. Not a question. A statement, in the tone
of a healer giving an order no one would dare refuse.
They buried the Hallorans properly that afternoon, on a bench above the
canyon where the sun would find them, Silas and Dokan and Felipe digging
while Esteban β still too weak for the shovel β sat nearby and told them, in
a halting voice, what little he knew: that the family had been brought to the
camp already gone, that one of Hale's men had wept while digging, that the
children's shoes had been lined up by the wagon wheel like someone couldn't
bear to throw them away.
Saya kept one small shoe. She did not say why. Silas did not ask. He was
learning, finally, that some things a person carries are not yours to question.
They rode back into Juniper Flats two days later with the freed men, and the
town came out to meet them.
Word had run ahead β word always runs ahead in dry country β and by the
time the posse came down the main street, people were standing on the
boardwalks, and in the doorways, and in the middle of the road, not caring
about dust or decorum. The freed men rode in the supply wagon, blinking at
the sunlight like men surfacing from deep water, and Esteban sat in the back
with his brother's coat around his shoulders, because Felipe had given it to
him at the canyon and refused to take it back.
90
At the forge, Felipe helped his brother down from the wagon as gently as if
he were made of glass. Esteban stood in the doorway of the smithy β his
smithy, the one he had apprenticed in as a boy, the one Felipe had kept
exactly as he'd left it, tools oiled, forge cold all these months for lack of heart
to light it β and he put his hand on the doorframe, and he wept.
Then Felipe lit the forge.
He did it deliberately, ceremonially, the way you do things that mean more
than the doing. He banked the coals and worked the bellows until the fire
caught and roared, and the whole street could hear it, and one by one the
townspeople drifted toward the sound, until there was a crowd standing in
the street in front of the forge, watching the brothers.
Esteban picked up a hammer. His hands shook. He set it down. He picked it
up again. Felipe put a bar of iron in the fire without a word, and when it
glowed, he laid it on the anvil, and Esteban β thin, scarred, eleven months a
captive β lifted the hammer and brought it down, and the ring of it went up
the street like a bell.
Someone in the crowd started crying. Then someone else. Old Mrs.
Abernathy, who had sold Esteban penny candy when he was six, stood with
her apron to her face. Quill took off his spectacles and polished them
furiously and put them back on. The town wept β openly, unashamedly β
for the men who had come back and for the ones who hadn't, for the
Hallorans under their stones on the bench above the canyon, for everything
the red notebook had cost and everything it had finally bought.
Esteban hammered until his arms gave out, and then he sat down on the anvil
stump, laughing and crying at once, and Felipe sat beside him, and neither of
them said anything at all, because there was nothing that needed saying that
91
the fire hadn't already said.
That night, Quinn posted a deputy at the jail and another at Pell's cell, and
Silas sat on the hotel porch with Saya, watching the forge glow through the
smithy door long after dark, the brothers still in there, talking low, making up
for eleven months one hour at a time.
"He'll be all right," Saya said. "The ones who come back to work with their
hands come back fastest. The hands remember what the heart forgets."
Silas thought about that β about hands remembering. His own hands, on
Slate's reins. On the charcoal, copying Pell's columns by lamplight. On
Saya's shoulder, that first night in the shelter, when he had promised.
"Your hands remembered too," he said.
She looked at him. "What did they remember?"
"How to keep a promise," he said, and she smiled, and the forge glowed, and
Juniper Flats breathed, for the first time in longer than anyone could
remember, all the way in and all the way out.
The county hearing room in Juniper Flats had never held so many people.
They stood along the walls and crowded the doorway and spilled out onto the
boardwalk, and Quill the clerk β who had spent three years quietly pinning
copies of suspicious filings to the back wall of his office until the pattern