"I heal," he said to Caleb, in his careful, growing English. "Then I ride."
"You heal," Caleb agreed. "Then you ride. In that order, scout, and the first one's not finished."
Asto looked at the barn door, where the light fell in. "My uncle's people sit at your water. My mother eats at your table. And I lie here like a child in a cradle."
"You lie there like a man who got shot doing his duty," Caleb said, "which is what you are. The rest of us will carry the water. It's not heavy. It only feels that way to the one who can't."
That evening a young Kahlin man Caleb did not know came up with Tomás to where the corral's top rail had sagged since winter, and without ceremony the two of them reset it — the stranger sighting along the rail with a craftsman's squint, Tomás holding, Caleb fetching the maul. No one had asked him. No one thanked him, either, beyond a nod. The rail went in true.
Bucket by bucket, Caleb thought, watching the campfires come on below the tanks like a second, smaller town. Rail by rail. It was not peace. But it was the shape of it, and a man could work with a shape.
Chapter 12 — The White Flag Offer
The rider came in the heat of the second day, out of the east, with a white cloth tied to a lance shaft and the dust of the San Miguel road still on his coat.
Sadie saw him first from the porch. "Rider," she said. "One… no. Three. Two hanging back by the gate. The one in front's carrying a flag."
Caleb set down his coffee. "Tomás. The barn door — shut it, easy, and stay with Asto. Sadie, the Winchester stays inside the door where it lives. Nobody touches it. A flag's a flag until it isn't, and we'll find out which standing still."
He walked down to the trough and waited with his hands empty and visible, the way a man waits at his own water, and Abel Sutter rode in under the white cloth with his hat in his hand and his smile already on.
"Caleb Rourke," Sutter said, pleasant as a drummer in a dry goods store. "You've got half the territory talking about you, and none of it fit to print."
"Then they'll be relieved to talk about somebody else by supper," Caleb said. "Light down, Abel. Water's there. Your horse looks like he'd take kindly to it."
It was a calculated offer and they both knew it — a man who watered another man's horse at his own trough had declared something. Sutter's smile thinned a fraction, recalculated, and he swung down and led the horse to drink, because refusing would have declared something too.
"I won't waste your afternoon," Sutter said. "I've come official, in a manner of speaking. The Army's got its column out of Fort Alvord, and San Miguel's got its hair on fire, and in the middle of it sits you, Caleb — you, with a wounded hostile in your barn and a band of them camped on the only water between here and the fort, and a white prisoner in their hands that half the county says they've already cut to pieces."
"Delgado's breathing," Caleb said. "I saw him at noon. The Kahlin feed him better than you fed him, by the look of his coat when he came."
Something moved behind the smile and was smoothed away. "Here's the mercy of it, and I'm the only man riding with it. Hand me the scout — what's his name, Asto — and hand me Delgado, tonight, quiet, at the gate. The Army gets its culprits, the band melts off home without a shot fired, and you — " he reached into his coat and brought out a leather pouch that chinked with the soft, serious music of gold coin, "— you get four hundred dollars for your trouble and risk, a letter from the post commander commending your cooperation, and your ranch. Your name clean. Your daughter's name clean. Water rights untouched, freight contract men buying your beef by Christmas. All of it, Caleb, for two men who are nothing to you."
From the porch, Sadie's voice came down flat and clear. "They drank our water, Mr. Sutter. That makes them something to us."
"Sadie," Caleb said, without turning.
"She's got her mother's spirit, they say," Sutter said, and smiled at her the way a man smiles at weather. "Spirit's a fine thing in a girl. It doesn't stop a cavalry carbine."
"No," Caleb said. "It doesn't. State the rest of it, Abel. There's a rest of it. There always is with you."
"The rest of it's arithmetic. Refuse, and when Lieutenant Gray's column tops that ridge, they find Abel Sutter's report already waiting: that Caleb Rourke harbored the Box Canyon killers, fed them, hid their scout, held a white prisoner for them. There's a word for that in the Army's book, Caleb, and the word is traitor, and they hang for it in wartime — and make no mistake, once that column's out, this is wartime." He let the pouch chink once more, gently. "Gold and a clean name, or a rope and a burned ranch. I'm not threatening you. I'm describing the weather, same as you'd describe it to me."
Caleb looked at the pouch. He looked past Sutter, down the path to the camp, where the smoke of cooking fires rose straight in the still air and a child's laugh came faintly up the hill. In the barn behind him a wounded man was sleeping off a fever he'd taken riding to warn people who'd never done him a kindness in his life — no. That wasn't right. The kindness had run the other way, and that was the whole of it.