"Get off my road, Abel."
Sutter touched his hat brim with two fingers — a salute, almost, and the most insulting thing he'd done all day. He turned his horse, then checked it once, and the smile came back over his shoulder a final time.
"One more piece of weather. Men who bury things get nervous, Caleb. Nervous men dig early. Sleep light."
He rode east into the falling dark, his men falling in behind, and the dust of their going hung in the road long after the sound was gone.
Sadie was waiting inside the gate with the Winchester nowhere in evidence and her hands clasped hard together, asking without words. Caleb put an arm around his daughter's shoulders and they stood a moment, the two of them, looking at the empty road and the first stars.
"He smiled the whole time," Sadie said.
"He smiles when he's lying," Caleb said. "Your mother used to say a man like that's telling the truth only when the smile slips. It never slipped." He squeezed her shoulder once. "Come on. We've got a camp full of guests and a column coming, and there's work wants doing before either of us sleeps."
Behind them, down at the tanks, the Kahlin fires were coming on one by one in the dusk, steady as stars of their own — and somewhere out in the dark to the east, a man was riding hard to make sure a rope would be ready by sunrise.
Chapter 14 — A Day's Grace
The scout came in at midday the next day, riding the kind of hard that wrecks horses and saves lives, dust to his eyebrows, and he was talking before his horse had fully stopped.
Tomás heard him out by the trough and came up the path at something close to a run, which for Tomás Ibarra was an event on the order of an earthquake.
"Dust," he said. "West, on the fort road. A column — the scouts watched it make its noon halt at the big bend of the arroyo, a day's march out. Forty, maybe fifty horses. Led horses with them, and a guidon." He wiped his mouth. "It is Gray, Caleb. It can only be Gray. He will water his horses at the tanks tomorrow, at sunrise, if he marches at the Army's hour."
"Then we've got the day," Caleb said. "A day's grace. God gives worse gifts." He looked out over the camp. "Go to Makya. Tell him everything, exactly — no softening. Tell him the chief's council is his own affair, but if there's a decision being made down there, I want to hear it from his mouth and I'll come down or he can come up, his choosing."
The council lasted through the long heat of the afternoon, and Caleb did not intrude on it. He mended harness on the porch where he could be seen to be mending harness, and he watched the camp the way you watch weather build over the mountains: young men gathered in knots, broke apart, gathered again. A horse was brought up and saddled, then unsaddled. Twice, riders looked up the hill at the house, and Caleb felt the weight of being examined by people deciding whether his promise was a roof or a painted cloth.
Near evening Makya came up the path, with Asto's mother beside him and two of the older men behind, and Tomás walked at his shoulder to translate. Asto, against every order in the house, had gotten himself to the barn door on a crutch of cottonwood Sadie had cut him, and stood there white-faced, listening.
Makya spoke for a long time, in paragraphs, and Tomás turned it over piece by piece, his cigarillo forgotten.
"The young men say run," Tomás said. "Into the hills, scatter like quail, leave the soldiers an empty camp and a rancher to explain it. They say the soldiers' paper promised peace at the agency and the peace was hunger. They say no white officer has ever ridden to Apache water with justice in his saddlebags. The young men are not wrong about the past, Caleb. Makya says that too."
"And Makya?" Caleb asked.
Tomás listened again. "Makya says: a man who runs from the truth looks exactly like a man who runs from guilt, and the soldiers cannot tell the difference because there is no difference to see. He says the band's name is accused, and a name cannot be cleared from hiding. He says the boy — " the nod toward the barn door, "— the boy saw, and the boy will say, and the Kahlin will stand behind their saying in the open, at their water, with their hands empty." Tomás paused. "He says you gave his sister's son water when it would have been easier to let him die, and the Kahlin do not run out on a man standing in the open. If the truth is to be buried, it will be buried with witnesses. They stay."
Sihas spoke then, briefly, and Makya nodded, and Tomás translated with something like wonder in his voice: "She says she will cook for fifty soldiers if the soldiers come hungry. She says a man cannot shoot a woman who is feeding him. She says it muddles the aim."
Sadie, beside Caleb, made a small sound that was half laugh and half something else. Asto, in the barn door, said something in his own tongue, loud enough to carry, chin up, and his uncle turned and answered him — one sentence, flat as a hand coming down on a table.
"He will speak to the officer," Tomás translated. "On his feet. Makya tried to spare him and the boy refused before all the men, and now it is a matter of his honor, which even a chief does not argue with twice in one day."