Then he was gone up the granite track at a lope, dust standing behind him in the still air, smaller and smaller against the shoulder of the hills, until the desert took him the way it takes everything — completely, and without malice — and the ranch was its own again, and bigger for having been shared.
Chapter 29 — The Crossing
By October the crossing had settled into the shape Caleb had dreamed for it in the years when the tanks were only his private obstinacy, and it announced itself most plainly on the evenings when the stage was late.
The stage from San Miguel was due at sundown and came in at full dark instead, the driver cussing a broken reach and the lamp swinging, six passengers stiff and dusted to the eyebrows. There was a drummer with sample cases bound for the fort, a schoolteacher newly hired for the post school — a Miss Hale, twenty-three and composed as a headstone — a Mexican ore buyer going home to Hermosillo with his strongbox chained to his wrist, and a widow with two children and a carpetbag who had ridden the whole way from Tucson without once complaining within Caleb's earshot, which he counted the truest courage he had seen all year.
They came down the track past the stone in the lamplight, and the driver — old Pesqueira, who had driven that route when it was a mule path and Caleb a young scout — read the inscription aloud the way he read everything, at the top of his voice, for the benefit of the passengers and the general improvement of the desert.
"'Water for all who come in peace,'" he bellowed. "You hear that, señores? At Rourke's tanks the water is not sold by the cup to the thirsty. The teams drink, the people drink, and nobody asks your politics. It is famous now. In San Miguel they speak of it."
"They speak of it correctly?" Caleb asked, coming out of the dark with a lantern.
"They speak of it," Pesqueira granted, "which is as close as San Miguel comes to correct."
The passengers watered and washed the dust off at the trough while the teams drank, and the widow's little boy read the stone twice by lantern light, moving his lips, and then a third time to be sure, and announced to his mother that when he grew up he meant to have a stone of his own — though what it would say, he said, he had not yet decided.
The Kahlin family came in an hour later, quiet as weather. An old man, two women, a girl of perhaps fifteen, and a pack mule loaded with woven goods and dried meat for the San Miguel market — Sihas's brother's family, whom Caleb knew by sight and Tomás by name. They did not come to the yard. They watered at the lower basin, as the band always had, their own place by long custom, and the old man raised a hand across the lamplit dark in greeting and Caleb raised his, and the girl led the mule down to drink with the unselfconscious competence of someone for whom this was simply the road.
The cavalry patrol came last, near midnight, eight troopers and a sergeant named Doyle riding in from the fort with dispatches for San Miguel, their horses blown and white with lather. Doyle dismounted at the gate like a man arriving somewhere with rules he respected, and asked — asked, which in the spring he would not have — whether the patrol might water and grain at the ranch.
"Water's there," Caleb said. "Grain's in the barn, sergeant. Help yourselves and sign the book by the trough — Sadie likes a record of who passed. The lieutenant's made a habit of it."
"Lieutenant Gray speaks of this place in orders, Mr. Rourke," Doyle said, while his men led the horses down in twos. "The tanks are on the route map as neutral water, like the report said. Any patrol drinks here, any traveler. There's a copy of the order nailed in the guardroom." He looked toward the lower basin, where the Kahlin family's small fire burned, and toward the stage camp where the schoolteacher was reading to the widow's children by the lamp, and something in his young face arranged itself around the strangeness of it — soldiers, Indians, and civilians all watering at the same tanks in the same hour, and nobody reaching for anything but a bucket. "It isn't usual, sir, if you'll pardon me."
"No," Caleb said. "It isn't usual yet."
Later, when the patrol had picketed its horses and the stage camp had gone to its blankets and the Kahlin fire had burned down to a red eye in the dark, Caleb walked the tanks once, the way he had walked them every night for twenty years, lantern swinging, checking the basins by sound and shine. The upper tank stood full and black and still, holding the stars. From the lower basin came the soft knock of a bucket against stone as the old man's family made their last watering before sleep, and from the yard the stamp and sigh of twenty horses of three nations settling to the same tiredness.
He thought of the spring — of Elena's grave under the cottonwood, and of her saying, in the drought year, that a ranch was only ever the water it could share. He thought of Asto on the porch, and the ridge full of riders at dawn, and the gate standing open. He had not built any of it. He had only refused, at the one moment refusal was expensive, to close a gate that water had taught him to leave open.
"Well," he said to the tanks, and to no one, "you're doing it."
And the water, being water, said nothing back, and was there in the morning for all of them.
Chapter 30 — Sunrise Again
A year to the week after the morning the ridge filled with riders, Caleb woke before first light out of the habit of a lifetime and stood on the porch with his coffee, watching the east lighten over the granite.