"Then the Kahlin will not make war on this house," Makya said. "We will camp at your tanks, Rourke, if you permit it — as guests drink, not as thieves in the night — until my sister's son can ride and until this matter of the canyon is finished. We have a debt to settle too. Not with you." His gaze lifted toward the east and the road to San Miguel. "With the man who put a knife in Kahlin blood and pointed our grief at your gate."
Caleb Rourke removed his hat. Asto, who had learned to read men the way others read tracks, knew it was not a small thing.
"Water's for whoever's thirsty," the rancher said. "Camp by the lower tanks. Your nephew stays in my barn till he can sit a horse, and my girl will fuss at him about the stitches."
Along the ridge, rifle by rifle, the muzzles lowered.
Chapter 7 — The Prisoner
They brought the prisoner in a little after full dark, and Caleb heard the trouble before he saw it: a horse coming too fast down the tank road, a man's voice raised in protest, and then the particular silence of Kahlin riders who have finished arguing.
Caleb was on the porch with his coffee gone cold, watching the fires of the camp at the lower tanks prick the dark one by one. Three days the band had been there, and the wary peace had held — held the way ice holds on a cattle pond in March, bearing weight if you did not stomp. Asto was mending by hours now; he had eaten broth sitting up and cursed the stitches in two languages, which Sadie pronounced a medical triumph. Makya had ridden out at noon with six men and come back at dusk with twelve and something extra.
The something extra was slung belly-down across a led horse, bound hand and foot, with a gag of knotted cloth in his mouth and his hat long gone. The riders swung him down at the edge of the yard — not roughly, Caleb noted, but without tenderness either — and cut his feet loose so he could stand. He stood swaying, a white man in a trail-grimed shirt, one boot split at the seam, his eyes doing the quick arithmetic of a man counting exits.
"Makya says they took him on the north ridge," Tomás said quietly, coming up beside Caleb with his cigarillo unlit between his fingers. "Two hours past. He had a canteen, a field glass, and a rifle with the sights filed for close work. He was watching the tanks. Watching us." He translated the last from a rider who spoke without looking at the prisoner at all. "They ask what you want done. Their law says a spy's life is the camp's to take. But the camp is on your ground, and you are the man of the water here. So the asking is yours."
The prisoner's eyes had found Caleb's face during this, and clung to it the way a drowning man clings to a plank.
Caleb set his cup down on the porch rail. "Take the gag out," he said. "A man can't answer for himself around a mouthful of rag."
A rider cut the knot with one economical pass of a knife. The man worked his jaw, spat dust, and the words came out of him all in a rush, hoarse and tumbling.
"Name's Delgado. Rufe Delgado. I'm nobody, mister, I'm a hired hand, I ride messages, that's all, I never shot at nobody— they jumped me in the dark, I was lost, I swear to God I was just lost—"
"Lost men don't carry field glasses," Sadie said from the doorway. She had the Winchester in the crook of her arm, unhurried, the way another woman might carry a broom. "And they don't file their sights down for brush shooting either. That's an Army pattern glass, Rufe Delgado. Where'd a lost hired hand get that?"
Delgado's mouth opened and shut. His eyes went ridge, gate, camp, girl with the rifle — exits again, all of them closing.
"Who sent you to watch my tanks?" Caleb asked it mildly, without moving from the porch. Mild had served him better than loud for forty-four years.
"Sutter," Delgado blurted, and then flinched at the sound of his own honesty, as if the name had been pulled out of him like a tooth. "Abel Sutter. It ain't what they think, I wasn't to shoot nobody, I was to count. Count the Injuns, count their horses, see if the sick one— the scout—" His gaze flicked toward the barn and away. "See if he was still breathing, and when he stopped. That's all. That's God's truth. Sutter pays me by the week and he don't pay enough for dying, you tell those—"
He stopped, because Caleb had come down off the porch and stood in front of him, close enough that Delgado had to look up.
"You're not going to die tonight," Caleb said. "Not here. Nobody dies at my gate if I can stand in the way of it, and I am standing in the way. But understand your position, Rufe. Those men on the ridge — that's Chief Makya's band, and they believe white men ambushed an Army pay escort two days back and left the blame on them like a brand on a stolen horse. They believe it because their scout saw it happen and near died bringing the word home. Now you're found crawling their ridge with a glass and a brush rifle, and you work for Abel Sutter." He let that sit. "Tomorrow the chief will want to ask you questions himself. I'd think hard tonight about whether Abel Sutter is a man worth lying for. Men who pay by the week have a way of not attending funerals."
Delgado swallowed. Something in his face — not courage, Caleb thought, but the first clear sight of his own grave being measured by other men's hands — moved across it and stayed.