"You've ridden a long way in the heat," Caleb said at last. "I'll not answer a thing like this standing at a trough with your horse drinking. You'll have your answer at sundown, at the gate. That's not a stall, Abel. That's a man weighing his soul, and it takes the time it takes."
Sutter studied him, and for one moment the smile slipped entirely and Caleb saw the other face under it — flat, patient, and utterly without warmth, like a snake's regard — before the smile came back up like a shade being raised.
"Sundown, then," Sutter said. "I'll be at your gate. Bring the answer, not a rifle." He swung up, settled the white flag across his saddle, and looked down. "Weigh it well, Caleb. Four hundred dollars is a lot of soul in this country."
He rode back to his two men and the three of them went out at a walk, unhurried, the flag bright in the sun.
Sadie came down the steps. "Papa."
"I know," Caleb said. "Go and tell Tomás. Then we'll sit at the table, all of us, and we'll talk it through like Christians. And Sadie — " he watched the dust hang over the road a long moment, "— put the coffee on. Sundown's a while yet, and nobody in this house is selling anybody. But your Mr. Sutter doesn't know that, and I find I don't mind him spending the afternoon wondering."
Chapter 13 — The Refusal
They talked it through at the kitchen table the way the Rourkes did everything — with the books open, in Sadie's case quite literally, because she had brought the ranch ledger down as if the answer might be hiding in a column of figures.
"Four hundred dollars," she said. "That's the mortgage note and the winter feed and the new windmill gear, all of it. I want it in the record that I know what it is we're refusing."
"It's in the record," Caleb said.
"If we hand them over — " She stopped, and her pen hovered. "If we hand them over, Asto hangs for a thing he saw, and Delgado hangs for a thing he did, and whatever Sutter's buried out in Box Canyon stays buried, and we get paid for the shoveling."
"That's about the shape of it."
"And if we refuse?" Tomás asked quietly. "Then the column comes, and a young lieutenant decides whether we are patriots or criminals before his breakfast cools. I have known lieutenants, Caleb. Some decide with their eyes. Some decide with the first voice in the room — and the first voice in that room will be Abel Sutter's."
"Then we'll have to be the second voice," Caleb said, "and louder in the only way that counts: we'll have to be true. Tomás — you've known me since we were boys stealing your mother's plums. In all that time, have you ever seen this place sell a guest? Any guest? A man come to this water with his tongue out, did we ever once ask his name and business before the bucket?"
"No," Tomás said. "Elena would have risen from the cottonwood and scalped us both."
"She would," Caleb agreed, and smiled a little at nothing. "It's not a policy, what we've got here. It's just the place. The day Coyote Tanks sells a man who drank from it, the water goes bad in the rock, far as I'm concerned, and everything after is just waiting for the roof to fall." He stood up and took his hat from the peg. "Sundown's coming. I'll give him his answer."
Sutter was at the gate when the light went long and red, sitting his horse with the white flag furled now and tied to his saddle, his two men spread fifty yards back with their hands in plain sight.
"Well, Caleb," he said. "The sun's doing what you asked it. Let's hear the weight of that soul."
Caleb walked out through the gate and stopped where the road began, so that what passed between them would pass on neutral ground. "You can tell the Army this," he said. "Asto came to my trough half dead, and I gave him water, and I'd give it again tomorrow. He's a witness to a murder, Abel — the only living witness to what happened in Box Canyon — and a witness is not mine to sell. Delgado's the Kahlin's prisoner, taken spying on their camp, and he's not mine to sell either. The Kahlin are camped at my tanks under a life debt and a truce, peaceful, fed by their own fires. Every word of that is true, and I'll sign it in front of any officer in the Territory."
He paused. "So no. Not for four hundred. Not for four thousand. Not for the ranch. You can put that in your report, and spell my name right: R-O-U-R-K-E."
The smile did not go away. Caleb had begun to understand that the smile never went away; it was painted on the man like lettering on a wagon, and what changed was only the light on it. Now it took the sunset and looked almost gentle.
"You've just made the biggest mistake of a well-spent life," Sutter said, not unkindly. "I want you to remember, later, that a man rode out here under a flag and offered you gold and a clean name, and you chose a wounded Apache and a thief over your own daughter's future."
"I chose my daughter's future," Caleb said. "She has to live in this house after. I won't have her living in one that did this."
"Then hear the weather report, friend." Sutter gathered his reins. "The column's already marching. It's not a question of if, it's a question of what they find when they get here, and what they'll find is my report, my word as their contracted guide, and you standing in a yard full of hostiles with a prisoner. By tomorrow's sunrise you'll be a traitor, Caleb Rourke — that's not a threat, it's a timetable. And when they hang that scout, if there's time before the rope, you can tell him the water was worth it."