The old woman reached the trough. Tomás was there to meet her, hat in hand. She looked at the water first, and then she looked up the yard at Caleb, and Caleb took his own hat off, and held it, and waited.
Chapter 5 — Parley at the Gate
The old woman drank coffee with Tomás at the trough, and neither wasted any of it on talk that didn't matter. Caleb watched from the porch. When she stood at last and mounted easily and rode back up the trail toward the northern line, she did not look back. Her whole walk down and back had been a sentence everyone could read: they had not killed her at the trough. That was the first fact of the day, and it belonged to her.
"She is his mother," Tomás said, coming up the yard with the empty cups. "Asto's mother. The chief's sister. She asked after the boy like a woman checking whether the world agreed with her heart. I told her he sleeps, that the fever broke, that we sewed the arm and gave him water at the trough before we knew his name." Tomás's hands were not quite steady on the cups. "She cried without a sound, Caleb. Standing there. Then she said her brother would come down to the gate now, to meet you the way he comes to meet you."
"And how does he come?"
"On foot. Alone. Unarmed." Tomás looked up at the ridge, at the hundreds standing in the sun. "She said: the way a chief comes to a man he has not yet decided about."
Caleb nodded. He went into the house and came out without a pistol — he had not worn one this morning at all, and that was deliberate — and without a hat. On the porch he took down the water gourd that hung by the door, the old gourd Elena had lacquered herself in the first year, and filled it fresh at the trough; the chill of the water came through it into his hand.
"You're going out the gate," Sadie said. It was not a question either.
"I'm going out the gate," Caleb said. "To the gate, not past it. He's walking down to a fence line, I'll meet him at it. You stay on the porch, Sadie. Tomás, stay by the barn door where he can see you. If anything goes wrong — and it won't — you get to the boy and you keep him alive, because he's the whole answer."
He walked down the yard at an ordinary pace, the gourd in his left hand, his right hand empty and open at his side, aware the whole way of the silence above him, of being watched by more eyes than had ever watched him at once, and he made himself think about small true things: the loose corral rail, the smell of the morning, Elena saying you come humble to old water. The gate stood open, as it always stood. He stopped inside it and waited, and presently Chief Makya came down the trail.
He was an old man and not diminished by it; age had only burned him down to the essentials, the way the granite was burned down to stone. Tall still, straight, his hair white at the temples, his face a map of a hard country. He wore no paint and carried no weapon that Caleb could see, and he walked with the unhurried economy of a man who had decided long ago not to be frightened in front of his people.
He stopped ten paces off, outside the gate, on the desert side of the line, and the two men looked at each other across it the way men do when the next words will shape everything after.
Makya had some English — trade English, enough for what mattered — and what mattered now arrived with care, each word placed like a stone.
"You are Rourke," Makya said.
"I am."
"My sister's son rode from us four days past, scouting. His horse came to this place in the night. There was blood on the saddle. There was blood on the ground by your water. The horse's mouth was dry and cracked, as a horse's mouth is, who has run far with no water. And my nephew is not anywhere his mother can see him." The old eyes did not waver. "So I ask you, once. Where is the boy? And hear this, so there is no mistake: there are those among us who say the whites at the canyon cut him for sport, as was done in the old years, and that you have finished here what they began there. If this is true, say it now. It is better for you if it comes from your own mouth."
Caleb let the silence have a moment of its own first.
"Your nephew is in my barn, Chief," he said. "He's alive. He took a bullet along his left ribs and a knife in his right arm, and he was dying of thirst in my yard at sundown yesterday, two feet from my trough, when I found him. I gave him water before I knew his name — not because he's yours, but because he was thirsty, and water at this place is for whoever is thirsty. That's the rule of these tanks. My daughter and my friend sewed his arm. His fever broke before dawn. He warned us you'd come at first light, and what he said was: do not run, and do not shoot. He spent his strength on that — on keeping your people and mine from killing each other over his sickbed."