"I am sorry to hear it, Chief. Sorry indeed. The Army will decide."
He rode out the way he had come, Hobbs behind him on the mule, and the performance was over, and nobody in the valley applauded. Wade watched them go up the narrows trail and felt the thing settle in his belly that he had felt at poker tables and horse auctions in the moment before a cheat played his card: the cheerful certainty that the loud story was a fence, and behind it something was being stolen in the quiet.
"He told that story to the lodges," Palo said beside him, in his careful English. "Not to the chief. To the lodges. So that when the soldiers come, the lodges will already be afraid, and afraid people's words sound guilty." Palo spat, precisely, into the dust. "My grandfather fought the soldiers. I would rather fight a man who digs."
"So would I," Wade said. He watched the dust hang over the narrows long after the riders were gone. "A digger's slower. And he leaves better evidence."
Chapter 14 — Vane's Offer
Vane found him alone at dusk, which Wade understood afterward had been arranged: the spring branch, the hour when the watch changed and the camp was at its cooking fires, Wade down at the lower meadow checking the borrowed mare's feet because the council's waiting was wearing a groove in him. The promoter came afoot, coat off now, sleeves almost human, leading no horse — a man taking an evening stroll in a valley he intended to own.
"Mr. Mercer." He said it like a colleague, like they'd been introduced at a club. "I've been making inquiries. You're the trader whose remuda the flood scattered. Bar M stock. I extend my sympathy — a cruel blow, a cruel blow. Forty head, I hear."
"Twenty-eight recovered," Wade said, and did not say by whom, and did not stop working the mare's hoof, because a man picking a stone out of a horse's foot is a man in a posture no salesman can easily interrupt.
"Forty went in," Vane said gently. "Twenty-eight your — hosts — have gathered. And twelve?" He let the word stand in the dusk like a signpost. "Twelve unaccounted. Swallowed by the river, the camp assumes. The camp is wrong, Mr. Mercer. My men, in the course of our salvage work — legitimate salvage, flood law, anything the water abandons — my men gathered a dozen head of Bar M horses out of the upper canyon, where they'd been swept and stranded. Twelve horses. Yours, by brand and by rights, if rights can be established to the proper satisfaction. They're penned safe behind my camp, fed, watered, and waiting for their owner's gratitude."
Wade set the mare's foot down slow. He straightened up with the hoof pick still in his hand and looked at the promoter in the failing light, and his face, he hoped, showed nothing at all, because inside him something had gone very quiet and very cold. The dozen. Driven up-canyon on the flood's second day, Palo had said. Driven. Not swept. Not stranded. A man does not salvage twelve horses in a box canyon with a pen and a gate by accident, and a man does not keep the owner's name off them for two days while he walks into the owner's camp and performs grief at the top of his voice.
"Kind of your men," Wade said. "Most'd call that a thing to mention at the council fire. With witnesses."
"Ah." Vane smiled into the dusk. "Witnesses. Mr. Mercer, let me speak to you as one businessman to another, because I believe you are a businessman and not a — forgive me — a romantic. The chief down there has you in a trap, and we both know it. Marry the girl or walk out with two-thirds of your capital and a story no one at the fort will believe about where the rest went. The Army will come into this valley, my report will see to that, and when it does, everything in it changes hands. The band will be removed — it's regrettable, it's policy, it's inevitable — and the claim will be worked, and the spring will run where it's told to run. The only question the next month holds is which side of the paper you're standing on when it settles."
He took from his coat an envelope, folded, and held it out, not quite offering, letting Wade see it.
"My dozen — your dozen — returned to you, every head, with a bill of salvage marked paid. Five hundred dollars for your trouble and your silence about salvage technicalities. And a partnership — a quarter interest in the Arroyo Creek claim, in writing, when the grant confirms. In exchange for one small service to the truth as the Army needs to hear it: your signature, as a white man and a respected trader, on a statement that on the flood's second night you heard shots from the direction of my camp and saw this band's riders in the upper canyon. Which" — the smile warmed — "may even be your honest recollection, once you've had time to recollect it properly. Men under fever misremember. Men recovered, prosper."
Wade did not take the envelope. "And the statement's already written."
"Naturally. My clerk's hand, fair copy, needing only a name." Vane set the envelope on the flat rock beside the mare's picket, with the care of a man laying down a card he is not worried about leaving on the table. "Keep the draft. Read it at your leisure. Sign at your leisure — or don't sign it at all, and ride out of here at the traders' moon with twenty-eight horses and the warm knowledge of your own purity, while the valley goes to men with fewer scruples and the girl goes to the reservation school of hard knocks along with the rest of them. I understand the chief gave you three days. I read men the way you read horses, Mr. Mercer, and I did not want the pressure of my little proposal to crowd your larger decision. Take the paper. Decide both things together. They're the same decision, really."