again.
He remembered Hale's foreman, too β Aikens, standing behind the carriage
with his arms crossed, knuckles scarred white across both hands, eyes like
ball bearings. A man who'd done things for money and would do them again.
Silas had seen his kind in the mining camps. They were never hard to
recognize. They had a way of standing very still, as if conserving themselves
for the moment they'd be needed.
In the years since, Hale had only grown. That was the way of it in Cobre
County: the rich got richer the way rivers cut canyons, slow and inevitable
and impossible to argue with. Hale's Bar H brand was on cattle from Juniper
Flats to the territorial line. He'd bought the old Spanish land grant claims for
pennies when the heirs couldn't pay the taxes. He'd put his own man in as the
county surveyor's assistant. And lately β Silas had heard it in the general
store, in the saloon, in the spaces between what men said β lately Hale had
been buying up water. Not land. Water. Options on wells. Leases on creek
frontage. In country this dry, a man who owned the water owned everything
the water touched, and everybody knew it, and nobody said it too loud,
because Hale also owned the biggest payroll in the county.
Three Springs. The word came back to him now, Saya's whisper from the
night before. The only reliable water for twenty miles in any direction β
three sweet springs bubbling out of the rock at the head of the upper fork,
feeding the little creek that kept half the small spreads alive through the dry
years. Silas's own cattle watered two miles downstream of it. If a man
wanted to own Cobre County, Three Springs was where he'd start.
He stood at the spring with the water running over his boots and the two
18
cigarette stubs in his vest pocket, and he did the arithmetic the way he'd once
done freight manifests β weight, distance, cost β and the numbers came out
ugly. Traps on foot trails. Riders hunting a lone woman. Expensive tobacco.
A cattle broker buying water.
He hoped there was no connection. He hoped it the way a man hopes the
rattlesnake in the woodpile is just a stick β with full knowledge that it isn't,
and that hoping won't change the shape of it.
When he got back to the overhang, Saya was sitting up against the rock wall,
the rifle across her lap, watching the canyon mouth. She'd braided her hair
back neatly. She looked, impossibly, like herself again β or like someone
who had decided to be herself again as an act of will.
"Something troubles you," she said.
"Found tracks at the spring. Three horses. They passed close in the night."
She was very still. "The same men?"
"Could be."
She glanced toward the entrance. "Then we cannot stay here."
"Not today." He set the canteens down. "You can't put weight on that leg."
"I can ride."
"Not with a fever like that."
She opened her mouth. He raised one hand.
"I'm not telling you what to do," he said. "I'm telling you what I see."
She stared at him. The distinction seemed to matter to her, the way it had that
morning. After a moment she nodded, once. "Tomorrow, perhaps."
19
""Tomorrow we'll see."
They sat in silence a while after that, the fire settling, the canyon going blue
with evening. Saya turned the cigarette stub over in her fingers β he'd
shown it to her, and the one from the trail β and her mouth tightened.
"Rich men's tobacco," she said. "The men who came to our camp last winter,
the ones who offered my uncle money for the grazing near the springs β
they smoked this. I remember the smell."
Silas felt the arithmetic in his vest pocket get heavier. "Did your uncle take
the money?"
"He told them the springs were not his to sell." She handed the stubs back.
"They did not like the answer."
She lay back against the rock wall then, tired from the day's small efforts,
and he banked the fire and checked the poultice once more by feel, and told
her what he was doing though her eyes were already closing. It had become a
habit in a single day. He wondered what that meant, and decided not to
wonder.
"Silas," she murmured, half asleep. "When I can walk β you'll help me find
out? Who set it?"
He looked at her β the bandaged leg, the fever-flush still faint on her
cheeks, the braid coming loose again β and he thought of the graves under
the cottonwood, and of eight years of Thursdays, and of the particular shape
of a life that had narrowed down to one clean cup on a shelf.
"First you heal," he said. "Then we find out."
It wasn't quite a promise. It was the shadow of one, and they both knew it."
That evening the fever came back worse. It rose fast, the way it had the night
20
before, and this time there was no lucidity in it β only heat and restless
murmuring and once, again, her mother, called for in a child's voice that
didn't belong to the woman who'd laughed at his stitching that morning.
Silas did what he could. Cool cloths. Water. The fever root, brewed weak,
dripped between her lips. He changed the poultice by firelight, his hands
steady now with practice, and told her what he was doing though she couldn't
hear him, because it seemed like the kind of promise you keep even when no
one's listening.
Past midnight she quieted. Her breathing evened. He thought she'd finally
dropped into real sleep, and he let his own head fall back against the rock
wall, just for a minute.
Her hand found his wrist in the dark.
He went still.