What followed was quiet, the way real endings usually are. Hobbs did not run; he looked once at Vane like a man setting down a load he had always known was too heavy, and held out his wrists for the irons as if glad of the excuse to stop carrying it. Vane went on talking — lawyers, Washington, the railroad — all the way to the horse they put him on, but it was no longer a man building a road; it was a man shouting down a well. The two miners were disarmed and paroled to their tent, and the paper — the little unsigned paper that had ridden in Wade's coat like a coal — lay on the table under the lieutenant's hand, already an exhibit.
Tazlo had not moved through the whole of it. Now he rose, and the camp rose with him, and he said to Callum in his careful English: "The water is yours also, Lieutenant. Drink before you ride. A man should not leave this spring thirsty, whatever he came for."
Callum took off his hat — to the chief, to the spring, and, Wade thought, a little to the ground itself. "The Army is obliged, sir," he said. "For the water, and for the way this was handled." He looked down the flat at the band standing in their order, at the horses grazing the valley herd where twelve Bar M brands moved among them like returned words in a sentence. "I'll report what was true here. All of it."
Chapter 24 — The Question Asked Twice
The patrol rode out in the late morning, Vane and Hobbs in irons mid-column where prisoners ride, and the valley exhaled for the first time in six days.
By evening the camp had the looseness of people after a fever breaks. Fires were lit big instead of small. Someone was roasting more meat than sense required. The dozen Bar M horses stood in the valley herd, heads down in good grass, unremarkable at last. Wade sat on a log by Weshka's lodge with a tin cup in his hands, and he thought: now it comes back. The ultimatum had not died in the crisis. It had only been stood in the shade, like a horse, waiting.
The chief kept his word with the same exactness he kept everything. After the meal, when the fire was built up and the camp had gathered in its wide ring as on the first night, Tazlo rose and spoke — first in his own tongue; Tali did not translate, and Wade did not need her to. Then the chief spoke in English, for the guest, as the law of guests required.
"The valley is safe," Tazlo said. "The soldiers have gone with the liars in their irons. The spring runs. The horses are counted." He let the fire have a moment of it. "Now I return to my word, as I said I would when this man's answer was stood aside for the fight. The law of my daughter's roof is not finished." His eyes found Wade in the firelight, and the growl was in his voice again — but under it, now, Wade could hear something he had not heard the first time: a father, finishing a hard duty exactly. "Wade Mercer. You were tended under my daughter's roof three days. You will marry her, or you will leave this valley. You asked three days to decide like a man, and the days were given and the fight ate them. Decide now."
The silence went around the ring the way it had the first night, and Wade felt it arrive at him and stop.
He stood up. His words were not the ones rehearsed on the gravel bar, and they were not yes and they were not no, and he said them standing straight with his hat in his hands.
"Chief Tazlo. Your law brought the question to me, and I will answer it before this fire. But there is a wrong in the asking I cannot carry past tonight. I was asked because I owed a life. She was never asked at all. My answer was to be counted like a debt, and hers like weather — a thing that happens to men. I will not marry a woman who was given no question. And I will not be the man who left because she was given none." Around the ring, the fire cracked and settled. "Put the question to Tali as it was put to me. Her answer first — free, and her own. Then mine will follow it wherever it goes. If she sends me down the road, I will ride it with her name thanked at every water. If she keeps me — " he stopped, and found he could not finish that sentence before her whole people, and did not try. "Ask her, Chief. I will not be answered for, and I will not answer for her."
For a long moment the old man looked at him, and what was in his face was not anger. It was the look of a craftsman shown his own work done better by a stranger's hands — honest enough to know it, and proud enough to admire it aloud.
"You ask my law to bend," Tazlo said.
"I ask it to ask," Wade said. "It asked me. I am only the owed one. She is the roof. Her name is the one spoken wrong in this camp these two years. Let the camp hear the question go to her. Let her shame end in the same fire where it was lit."
Tazlo turned — slowly, the way mountains are said to turn — to where his daughter stood, and every face turned with him, and Tali stepped into the firelight not as a thing being given, but as she had stepped to the officer's table that morning: without hurry, and without asking the path's permission.
"Tali," her father said, and his voice in her name was a thing Wade had never heard from him, the growl gone out of it. "Daughter. The question is yours before it is his. This man — who owes you his life and owes this camp nothing, for he has paid — will you take him for a husband, here, of your own mouth? Or will you send him from the valley, and the law satisfied, and your roof your own again? Speak it free. No answer will be put in your mouth. Not mine. Not his."