The two riders behind them were closing again — one of them had a fresh horse or a reckless one — when the ridge above the tanks came up out of the dark ahead, and on it, a single Kahlin watcher stood up against the sky and lifted his rifle over his head. Tomás shouted Asto's name in the Kahlin tongue, a long carrying cry, and the ridge answered: along its whole length, silhouettes rose and stood, rider after rider, still as a fence line of men, too many to count in the dark and all of them looking down.
The two pursuers reined in so hard their horses slid. For one held breath they sat there, in range of the ranch and out of range of wisdom, and then they wheeled together and were gone south into the night, the sound of them shrinking under the sound of Caleb's own horses.
They came down the last slope at a walk, the horses trembling and blown white at the mouth, and the camp was awake — hands reaching up out of the dark for Asto as he slid down into them, Sihas's voice among them first and sharpest. Caleb swung down stiff as an old hinge. Before he asked after the proof, before he looked to his horse, he went to the trough, scooped a palmful of the tank water, and held it to Asto's mouth where they held him.
"Drink first," he said. "Everything else after. That's the rule of this place."
Chapter 19 — Home by Dark
Sadie had not slept. She had sat on the porch since midnight with her father's spare Winchester across her knees and the coffee gone cold in the pot beside her, watching the wash behind the barn where the riders would come back, and listening to a silence so complete it had begun to feel like a sound of its own. Sihas sat with her in the dark, wrapped in her blanket, saying nothing for hours at a time — and somehow that was better company than talk. Twice Sadie had started to speak and not finished, and twice the older woman had simply reached over and laid a hand on her wrist for a moment, the way you steady a cup from spilling.
The shots, when they came, were so far off she felt them more than heard them — three, then two, then a scatter of them, out beyond the ridge, like somebody chopping wood in another county. She was on her feet with the Winchester up before she knew she had stood. Sihas rose beside her, unhurried, and put the rifle's muzzle down with two fingers, gentle as a woman closing a door.
"Running," Sihas said, in her careful, sparse English, and pointed at the sky as if the shots had left something written on it. "Not standing. Running shots. They come."
It was near dawn — the east gone the color of a pearl, the yard just beginning to separate out of the gray — when the hooves came down the back wash, walking, three horses. Her father's voice, low, before she saw him. Then the shapes: Tomás leading, her father holding the middle horse's reins with one hand and its rider up with the other, and Asto folded over his saddle like a sack of meal, one arm dangling.
They got him down between them and carried him into the kitchen, and Sihas took charge the way a general takes a field — table cleared, lamp lit, water on, cloths torn without asking whose sheet it was. The graze along Asto's ribs had torn wide open, ugly and welling, and the knife-cut arm had burst its splint. Sadie held his shoulders while Sihas washed the wound clean with boiled water and packed it with a poultice of things Sadie couldn't name, then bound him tight and snug as a swaddled child. Asto's eyes opened once during it, found Sadie's face above him, and focused with an effort she could see.
"The proof," he said. His mouth was dry as paper. "Tell me it is—"
"Under my hand, Asto," she said, and it was true — the grain sack lay on the shelf by the door where her father had set it, oilcloth and ledger and seal inside. "It's home. You're home. Sleep now." His eyes closed like a man being allowed, finally, to set down something heavy.
After that came her father's preparations, and she would remember them all her life for how quiet they were. He washed the blood off his hands at the pump, drank a cup of coffee standing, and then went through the ranch the way he went through a bill of sale — item by item, nothing missed, nothing hurried.
The gate: swung wide and tied open with a rope, so no man arriving could wonder whether it meant to close. The rifles: gathered — his, hers, Tomás's — and stood inside the house against the wall, out of sight of the yard. Sadie stared at that one. "Pa—"
"If the lieutenant rides in and the first thing he sees is a rifle," Caleb said, "he'll talk to the rifle, and rifles don't listen well. Our hands are our argument today, Sadie. Empty ones." He took the kitchen table by one end and nodded her to the other. "Now help me carry this out."
They set the table on the porch, square to the yard, and Sadie laid a clean cloth on it the way she would for a wedding or a circuit judge. Onto the cloth went the proof, arranged like goods at a hearing: the paymaster's ledger, open at the last written page; the brass seal beside it, heavy and bright; and the silver concho hatband laid out in a straight line, concho by concho, like a signature written in metal. In the barn, Tomás sat with Delgado and told him the cavalry would come with the sun, and afterward Delgado was washed and given coffee and a seat on the porch bench — a witness, not a prisoner, because her father said a man who looks like a prisoner gets listened to like one.