Wade looked up the long throat of the canyon, where the walls pinched and the shadow lay blue even at morning. He thought of Tali, three days past, riding that way on the band's business with her eyes that missed nothing. He thought of the sluice and the stakes she had not yet described to anyone but — no. She had described them to no one yet, so far as he knew. What he knew was a dozen of his horses had gone up that canyon under somebody's hand while the valley was still drowning.
"The second day is half gone," Kaslin said, "and you have used it counting." There was no mockery in it now, or less. "What will you do with the rest of it, trader?"
Wade gathered the borrowed reins. "I'll hear what your chief's daughter saw up there," he said. "If she'll tell it."
Chapter 12 — What Tali Saw
She told it at midday, in the shade of the cottonwoods behind the council lodge, with the spring branch running bright between the roots and the whole valley going about its work within earshot and pretending not to listen. Chief Tazlo sat on a folded blanket against the great tree's trunk, and Weshka sat beside him mending a moccasin, and Wade stood because no one had told him to sit and the standing felt honest.
Tali spoke the way she did everything: no waste in it.
She had ridden the upper canyon two days past, she said, on the band's business — checking the high spring and the trail to the summer ground after the flood. Above the narrows, where the canyon bent, she had found the miners' camp: three white men, maybe four, with a canvas wall-tent and a string of mules, stranded by the same water that had taken Wade's camp. That much was misfortune, and misfortune was no crime in the valley.
But below their camp, a channel had been cut.
"A sluice," Tali said. "Dug new. The earth is still dark where the spades turned it. It runs from the creek above the lower spring, on a line to bleed the spring away into their diggings below." She looked at her father, not at Wade. "If it is finished, the lower spring fails by the dry month. The camp drinks from that spring. The horses drink from that spring."
The chief's face did not change, but Weshka's needle stopped, briefly, and went on.
"And the stakes," Tali said. "Along the creek, above and below their camp. Driven fresh — the wood is pale where the maul struck, and there is no weather on the cuts. But the papers wired to them are dated before the flood. Before the water came. As if the claim was staked in a dry canyon, weeks ago, by men who were not there."
"How do you know the date on the papers?" Wade asked, and then wished he could call the question back, because of the look she gave him, which measured exactly how much of a fool he intended to be.
"I read them," Tali said. "The papers are in your tongue. The date is written plain. Ninth of the month, they claim. On the ninth of the month the upper canyon was dry and empty — I rode it myself, hunting my grandmother's grey mare, and there was no camp, no stake, no white man. On the eleventh the flood came. The stakes went in after the water, with the date of before it." She let that sit. "A man who lies on paper about a date will lie about other things. That is what ground says when it is read carefully."
Wade thought about claim law: a dated stake, a filed paper, and possession, and a mining promoter with friends at the land office could starve a band off its own spring with nothing but ink and patience. He thought about twelve horses gone up-canyon on the flood's second day, toward a camp that needed horseflesh to work a claim and haul a sluice's worth of timber. He did not say any of it. It was not his council.
The chief was silent a long while. A jay scolded from the cottonwood. Somewhere a baby cried and was hushed. When Tazlo spoke, it was not to Wade and not to Tali but to the space in front of him, the way a man speaks a thing in order to hear whether it is true.
"Vane," the chief said. "That is the name the traders gave for the man in the upper canyon last spring, when he came with his papers and his smiles and asked to buy the spring itself. I told him the spring is not sold. He smiled more." His eyes came up, old and flat and entirely awake. "Now the water has done his asking for him, and he digs while we bury our dead and count our horses. He will come down to us with a story. Men like that always come with a story, and the story always asks the soldiers to finish it."
"Father—" Tali said.
"Wait." The chief raised one hand, and the word was not anger; it was heavier than anger, it was law. "We will wait. He has cut his channel and driven his lying stakes where the ground can remember them. The ground does not forget, and it does not hurry. Let him come down and tell his story in the open, where the soldiers can hear it beside ours. If we ride up now, there is blood, and blood is the only witness the white law loves." His gaze moved to Wade, and stayed. "Double the watch on the spring. Day and night. No man of the band lifts a hand first — that word goes to every lodge, and to you, trader, while you are under my roof's law. Is it understood?"
"It is understood," Wade said.