"No," Erik said. "They don't. They have to eat, and they have to drink, and they have to be held somewhere a man can't see from the road. Sit down at my well, Captain, and I'll tell you where I'd hide them if I were a thief with a town to fool. I cut hay there in August. I know it the way I know my own cellar."
Chapter 15 — The Coulee
They sat in the well's thin shade with the map drawn in the dust at their feet — Erik sketching with a stick, Gray Elk and Alcott knee to knee like men over a fire, Mila turning the words, and the dipper making its rounds as if the afternoon meant to teach them all its manners.
"Hay Coulee," Erik said, and drew a long crooked line. "Runs off the bench north of Flint's claim — land Flint swears is his by a filing nobody's seen the paper of. It's deep, Captain. Sixty feet in places, brush-choked, with a seep spring at the blind end that never went dry even this year, because I watered my team there in August and it ran cold enough to ache your teeth."
He marked a cross at each end of the crooked line.
"Two mouths. West mouth here, wide, where a wagon can go in — that's the mouth a stranger finds. East mouth here, a slit between two buttes, comes out on the back of the Sorensen place. Between them, a mile of coulee floor with grass standing in it that the wind never got to. In August I cut two loads of hay off that floor and thought myself lucky. A man could winter a herd in there and the prairie would never tell."
"A man could hide an army in there," Alcott said slowly.
"A man could hide several hundred horses, with a camp of five or six rifles at the west mouth to hold them, and never light a fire that showed. The grass is there. The water is there. And it's close — that's the heart of it, Captain. In a dry autumn a thief doesn't trail a stolen herd thirty miles past every well in the valley. He tucks them close, where his own men can spell the guard, and he waits for the first snow to cover the tracks and the agency road to empty." Erik looked up from the dust map. "He waits, and he spends the waiting raising a militia to march the other way."
"There's more," he said. "In August, when I cut the hay, I found white stakes set in a line at the west mouth — survey stakes, fresh. I thought it another of Flint's paper fences and thought no more of it. A man does not stake what he has not walked. Flint's people have walked that coulee with their eyes open, this summer, before ever a horse was stolen in this valley."
Alcott's face worked. "Stakes prove ambition, Halvorsen. Not rustling."
"No. But a coulee proves where. And where is what a scouting party is for."
Gray Elk had been following the dust map with a horseman's whole attention, and now he spoke at length, his eyes on the crooked line. "My father says the coulee is known to his people," Mila said. "His grandfather wintered ponies there in the deep snow year, before any white house stood in this valley. He says the place is good, and the thieves knew the country or were led by one who did. He says that also is a kind of brand, and it will read the same way when the time comes."
Gray Elk spoke then, briefly, and Mila's translation came quiet after.
"My father says: it is the place he would choose, if he were such a man. He says also that his young men will want to ride there now, this hour, with their rifles, and that he will hold them — for one scouting only. A small party. Eyes first. War after, if the eyes say war."
"Scouting party," Alcott repeated. "Whose?"
"Mixed." Erik let the word sit in the dust between them. "That's the whole of it. Mine to guide — I know the ground. Nils, because his legs are young and his tongue's getting wiser. One of the band, because they'll read sign I'll walk past. Two of yours, Captain, because the town must believe its own eyes and no one else's. Five riders. We go at first light, we look, we come back with the truth — and until we return, the rule of this well holds over the whole farm: no man of either side lifts a gun except to save a life. The band camps on the bench. Your men camp at the creek. My well serves both, and both wait."
Alcott rubbed his jaw. "Two of mine. You'll have Peterson and young Bixby — Bixby's got eyes like a hawk and a temper I'm tired of feeding; let him spend it on a long ride. And from the band?"
"The band sends Mato," Mila said, before her father had finished speaking, and in her own voice added, "My brother tracked the herd's going for half a day before the trail died in the rocks. He knows their gait the way you know your children's faces. There is no better man on this prairie for this work."
Mato, at the well curb, inclined his head the smallest fraction — a man accepting a chore, not an honor.
"First light, then," Alcott said, and rose, and put out his hand to Gray Elk, who looked at it a moment as at a new thing in the world, and took it. "God give us a true report, gentlemen, and the patience to wait for it."
Later, when the militia was making its camp at the creek and the band's lodges were rising on the bench, Erik stood alone by the windmill and read the sky the way he'd read it ten thousand evenings. The air had a new edge in it, iron under the dust. The season was turning above them while they all talked.