"Because I'm a coward, and cowards spend the truth last, when there's nothing else in their pockets." Delgado's laugh was a wreck of a thing. "If Gray hangs me tomorrow I'm dead one day. If Sutter's quit of this country and I'm the only tongue left that knows the stones — I'm dead every day after. But if that box comes up out of the ground with the seal in it, I've got a prayer: a man who points the Army to its own stolen payroll is a man the Army might not hang. Might. It's the only coin I've got left, Rourke. I'm spending it."
Caleb stood. The moon was up, fattening toward full, laying a road of light across the yard. Asto had been listening from the barn doorway, propped on his crutch, eyes burning holes in the dark.
"Tomás," Caleb said. "Saddle three horses. Quietly. And Rufe — " he looked down at the prisoner, "— if you've lied to me about one stone, I'll leave you to explain it to Makya. If you've told it true, I'll say so to Gray's face. That's the best coin I can give you back."
Asto spoke from the doorway, in English, each word set down like a stone of the cairn itself: "I ride."
"You can't," Caleb said. "Your ribs — "
"I saw it begin," Asto said. "I will see where it is buried. If I do not go — " he shifted on the crutch, and whatever the movement cost him crossed his face and was mastered, "— I am only the wounded boy in the barn, and they will say I dreamed it. I ride."
Caleb held his look a long moment. Then he nodded once, the way men nod at weather they cannot change and would not change.
"Tonight, then," he said. "We ride at moonrise full — and God help us beat the Pruitts to their own shovels."
Chapter 16 — The Night Ride
They saddled the horses in the dark, working by touch and by the thin light of a lantern Tomás kept shuttered in the barn doorway. Nobody spoke above a murmur. Out in the yard the Kahlin camp was quiet, cookfires banked down to red eyes, the camp's horses standing hip-shot and still, and the whole ranch seemed to be holding its breath.
Sadie held Asto's horse. She had held her tongue through the whole of Delgado's confession, through supper, through her father's quiet decision, and it ran out at the barn door.
"He can barely sit a chair, Pa." She said it low, so it would stay between them. "His side's near healed twice and torn once. You're asking him to ride half the night in the dark."
"I'm not asking him anything." Caleb cinched his saddle and tested the girth with two fingers. "The canyon's his. No other living man knows where in it those stones lie. I asked if he could. He said he'd be carried or he'd ride, and he wasn't particular which, but he was going."
Across the barn Asto stood with his good hand flat against a stall post, breathing the way a man breathes when breathing has to be thought about. His right forearm was bound in a clean splint of cloth, and Sihas was at his other side, retying the bandage over his ribs with short, hard pulls that made him show his teeth. She spoke to him once in their own tongue, quick and fierce. He answered the same way, and whatever she had said, she gave a single nod and stepped back from him like a woman returning a borrowed thing.
Makya came out of the dark by the corral as they led the horses through. The old chief looked at the three of them a long moment — the rancher, the old hand with his cigarillo unlit, the nephew standing crooked beside his horse — and then he spoke to Asto, and not to Caleb.
"Tell him," Asto said, when the chief had finished. His voice was thin but steady. "My uncle says: bring back the truth. Nothing else in that canyon is worth your blood. He says—" the ghost of a grin crossed his face "—he says if I die on the road, I have his permission to be ashamed of it."
"Tell him I'll do my best to keep him too embarrassed to die," Caleb said. Tomás translated, and the old man's face moved, just barely, in the dark.
They rode out the back way, away from the gate, single file along the wash behind the barn where the ground was sand and would not carry sound. The moon was two days past full and high enough to silver the whole desert. Caleb rode point out of habits forty years old, reading the ground without thinking about it: no dust ahead of them, no movement on the ridges, the night birds quiet in the brush, which meant nothing larger than themselves had passed lately.
Asto rode in the middle, upright by will. Twice Caleb heard his breath catch on nothing — on a step of the horse, on a stone turned under a hoof — and each time the young man turned it into a cough and rode on. Tomás drifted back beside him once and said something in the Kahlin tongue, soft, and Asto answered with a word that might have been thanks and might have been a curse on all mothering.
They stopped at the halfway rocks to breathe the horses and pass the water skin. Caleb poured a palmful for each horse first, then drank last himself, the way his father had taught him and the Army after him. Asto drank with his head tipped back and his eyes on the stars, and for a moment he looked less like a wounded man and more like what he was — twenty-one, and back in his own country.
"You remember this ground, scout?" Tomás said. He was rolling the cigarillo between his fingers, not lighting it. He said it the way he said most things to Caleb — half to the man, half to the boy he'd known sixty years.