Time enough, if Delgado reported on schedule. Time enough, if the boy at the ranch died of his wounds as sick men obligingly did. Sutter had backstopped both hopes with Delgado's rifle and Delgado's terror, and he smiled at the sunset and found it, on the whole, a satisfactory piece of work.
What he did not know — what his spies had failed to bring him, because the Kahlin had taken Rufe Delgado off the north ridge in the dark and asked Caleb Rourke what should be done with him — was that the letter riding east was no longer the only story moving on that road. In Caleb Rourke's barn, wrapped in a strip of blanket and sleeping the sleep of a man who has decided to talk, Sutter's own witness was waiting for morning.
Sutter finished his coffee. "Another cup," he told the waitress, smiling. "Looks like a long week. A man wants to be ready."
Chapter 10 — Cut Off
Sadie Rourke rode into San Miguel on the sorrel with the ranch's list in her shirt pocket and her father's last greenbacks folded inside it, and she knew within fifty yards of the general store that something had curdled. Men found business elsewhere on the boardwalk. Mrs. Pruitt stepped back into her doorway — Mrs. Pruitt, who had taught Sadie her letters — and closed the door not quite all the way, which was worse than a slam.
Mr. Ostrander at the general store kept his hands flat on his counter. "Miss Sadie," he said. It had always been Sadie-girl, never Miss Sadie.
"I have a list, Mr. Ostrander. Coffee, flour, salt, lamp oil, and twelve pounds of nails for the barn roof. And Pa says to put the nails on the book if the cash runs short, same as always."
"Same as always is done, I'm afraid." He didn't look at the list she laid down. He looked at a point over her shoulder, anywhere that wasn't her face. "Word's come to me that your father's harboring the hostiles that done Box Canyon. Committee of citizens met last night. Store's been advised: no goods to the Rourke place while the Army sorts it out. No credit neither. It ain't personal. It's the town protecting itself."
"The town is protecting itself from our coffee and flour," Sadie said. Her voice came out level. "Mr. Ostrander, the men at Box Canyon — Pa's got the scout who saw who really did it, and it wasn't the Kahlin. There's a prisoner, too, one of Sutter's own—"
"Sutter's a government scout, Miss Sadie." The name landed flat and final, a door of its own. "And there's talk your pa's hiding a strongbox. I won't be the man sold supplies to—" He stopped, and for a moment the old storekeeper showed through, miserable. "Don't make me say it in front of customers."
There were customers — three men and the drummer from Tucson, all studying merchandise with enormous dedication, none willing to look up.
She folded the list once, precisely, and put it back in her pocket. "Then I'll say it for you, Mr. Ostrander: the town of San Miguel is cutting off a ranch that has watered its travelers and buried its dead for twenty years, on the word of a man with silver on his hat."
She bought nothing at the freight office either, and nothing at the smithy, where the smith at least had the decency to say "I'm sorry, girl" to her face. She watered the sorrel at the public trough under the cottonwoods, and it was there, with her horse's muzzle in the water, that Harlan Beck found her. He came down the boardwalk with his thumbs in his vest and his face arranged into concern.
"Sadie. This is none of my doing, you understand. Town's frightened. Frightened towns do hard things." He lowered his voice. "This ends one way, girl: the column comes, and if those Indians are still at the tanks, and that scout still in your barn, your pa hangs for a harborer or dies in the yard of his own ranch. Unless—" He let the word open like a gate. "Unless the land changes hands before then. A sale, Sadie. To me." He named a figure that was a tenth of what the tanks were worth in a year like this one. "If the tanks are mine, the Kahlin are my problem to scatter; your pa's a seller caught in a bad patch. It's his life I'm buying him, girl. For his own good. You tell him Harlan Beck said so."
Sadie looked at him for a long moment. She thought of her father digging her mother's grave by the cottonwood because he said some work you don't hire out, and of him lifting a dying stranger's head to the cup that first night.
"Mr. Beck," she said, "when I was eleven I fell off the barn roof and you carried me to this very trough and washed the blood off my face so Pa wouldn't faint at the sight. So hear me the way family hears: if you ride out to our place with that offer again, ride slow, so Pa has time to decide whether he's answering you from the porch or the gate. And he won't sell you the water at any price, because it isn't a thing he owns the way you own things. It's a thing he keeps."
She swung up into the saddle. The sorrel laid his ears back and danced sideways, and she let him.
"Tell your committee," she called, not loud, just carrying, the way her father's voice carried, "that the Rourke place is cut off as of today, and we note it. When the Army's done sorting, we'll remember who sold us lamp oil." She touched the sorrel with her heels. "And who didn't."