Chapter 1 — The Tanks at Dusk
The wind came down off the granite at sundown the way it always did, carrying the smell of hot stone cooling and creosote and dust, and Caleb Rourke was doing the last of the chores as he had done them for eleven years, in the same order, at the same hour.
He fed the two horses first. Then the mule, who had opinions. Then he walked the corral fence with his hand on the rails, feeling for the loose one he already knew about, second from the gate, and told himself again that tomorrow he would fix it. The windmill over the shallow well turned and complained, turned and complained, drawing up its thin supplement of water, but the real water of Coyote Tanks was not the well's. It lay in the rock itself — a stair of granite basins climbing the outcrop behind the house, tinajas the rains filled and the stone kept cool and dark under its own shadow, water that had not gone dry in any man's memory.
That was the whole worth of the place, and the whole burden of it. Between San Miguel, a day's ride east, and Fort Alvord, west, there was no other water a man could count on. Whoever held the tanks held the crossing. Caleb held them loosely, and for whoever needed them.
"Water is for whoever is thirsty," he said to the mule. "That's the rule."
He carried the lantern out to the stone trough by the cottonwood to check the level before night. Sadie had hauled buckets at noon, but the trough was the ranch's front door, and Caleb liked it full at dark. A man coming off the desert at night ought to find water before he had to ask for it.
He was halfway across the yard when he saw the horse.
It stood beyond the trough in the last of the light, head down, reins trailing, swaying a little on legs that had nothing left in them. A bay, lather burned to a gray crust along its neck, one foreleg trembling. Caleb stopped. A riderless horse at his trough at dusk meant a story.
Then he saw the man.
The fellow lay face down in the dust beside the trough, one arm flung out toward the water he had not reached, his fingers dug into furrows where he had tried to pull himself the last two feet. Apache, by the hair, by the moccasins, by the cut of him even crumpled and still. Young. Caleb set the lantern down slow and went to one knee and put two fingers to the side of the man's neck.
The pulse was there. Thin and fast and stubborn.
"Well," Caleb said quietly. "You're not done yet."
He rolled him over with care, and the man's head lolled and his eyes opened without seeing. His lips were cracked to bleeding. His shirt was stiff with old blood down the left side, and there was a long cut on his right forearm, crusted black — a man two days in the desert with wounds, run out of everything except reasons.
He slid an arm under the man's shoulders, lifted his head, and held his canteen to those broken lips, letting the water go in a thread, then stopping, then a thread again. The man's throat worked. Some ran out the corner of his mouth and made mud in the dust. Caleb waited. Kindness poured too fast can kill a man dying of thirst.
"Easy," he said. "It's not going anywhere. Neither are you, just yet."
The eyes found him this time. Dark eyes, and in them a sudden animal terror — the man tried to pull away, tried to get an elbow under himself, and scrabbled at his belt for a knife that was not there.
"I don't have your knife, friend, and I don't want it." Caleb kept his voice low and even, the way you'd talk to a horse in a burning barn. He held the canteen up where the man could see it, and then — because a gesture is a language every thirsty creature understands — he drank from it himself first, and offered it again. "Water. Just water. It's for whoever's thirsty. That's you, tonight."
The man's stare held a moment longer, weighing a whole life of reasons not to trust. Then the fight went out of him all at once, like a cut string, and he drank, in sips Caleb measured out patiently, as he had done before for soldiers, strangers, and once, years ago, an enemy.
When the canteen was half gone, Caleb eased him back down onto the blanket roll he'd fetched from the porch. He got the lantern close and lifted the ruined shirt away from the man's side with a penknife, cutting cloth, not skin.
The wound along the left ribs was a graze, a bullet's kiss, angry and seeping but clean of rot so far. The forearm cut was deeper and would want stitching. Both had been got in violence, and recently.
From the house, the screen door banged. "Papa?" Sadie's voice came across the yard, and then Sadie herself, nineteen and barefoot in the dust with the Winchester loose in one hand because she had her father's habits about riderless horses. She took in the scene in one glance — the horse, the man, the blood, the canteen — and her face did what it always did, which was settle.
"Who is he?" she asked.
"Don't know yet," Caleb said. "Somebody's son. Get Tomás. And bring the hot water and the needle kit to the barn. We're moving him in there — ground's no place for a man with open wounds."
"Trouble coming with him?" Sadie asked. It was not fear. It was inventory.
"Likely," Caleb said. "Trouble usually does. But it can wait till he's had water and stitching. Lift with me — easy on that left side."