Nate stood at the window until they were gone, and then he went down to the barn. Reese was awake, sitting up with the blanket around his shoulders, and he'd heard.
"They're looking for me," he whispered.
"They're looking," Nate said. "They haven't found." He handed the boy the tin ladle, full. "Drink. Morning, we ride."
In the east the sky was going pale over the cerro, and the well stood in the yard like a promise and a question both. The account was not closed.
Chapter 10
The Line on the Map
They brought Gideon Pryce to the Coldwater porch because Bell said the ground itself ought to hear it. The surveyor came on a borrowed mule with his instrument case strapped behind him.
Bell had Reese Callahan's sworn statement in his coat. He had Nate's blue book page, copied and sworn. He had the brass token in a handkerchief. What he did not have was the reason three men were dead, and the reason had to be on paper somewhere, because men like Magnus Thorne did not kill for anything that couldn't be written down.
Pryce spread his map on the porch rail: the survey of the Stone Creek Basin, the aquifer line in red ink, and the penciled corrections, one on top of the other, the paper worn thin where the eraser had gone twice.
"Tell it," Bell said.
Pryce took off his spectacles and cleaned them, though they were already clean. "The aquifer line," he said, "is where the water runs. I surveyed it true in January. The stone well at Coldwater sits over it. My first line put the well on the Gentry side." He stopped. "Then Mr. Thorne sent for me."
Thorne had sent for him at the Cerro Blanco house, with the lamps lit and the brandy out, and had asked, in the tone of a man asking for the weather, whether the line might not run a little truer a quarter mile east. Pryce had said the ground was the ground. Thorne had named a sum that would have bought Pryce's instruments twice over and his silence once.
"He had me redraw it," Pryce said. "Twice. The second time put the stone well on the CB&L side of the line. On paper." He looked at Nate. "Mr. Gentry, I am sorry. The ground never moved. Only the ink did."
Nate said nothing. Deya stood in the doorway, her face stone. Reese sat with his head down.
Bell asked the question the way a man drops a stone into a well. "And Colt knew."
"Colt ran the chain for me on the second survey," Pryce said. "He saw the money change hands. He was drinking at the tally house and talking about hanging offenses, and Dawson heard him." Pryce's hands shook on the map. "I told myself the line was only ink. I told myself no one would bleed for ink."
Elder Kanoa had come down from the canyon that morning, summoned by Deya's cousin's boy, and he had stood through all of it without a word, his gray braid over his shoulder, his prayer bundle in his hands. He laid the bundle on the map, gently, covering the red line and the erasures both.
He spoke in his own tongue first, and then in Spanish for Bell and Nate, slow and certain.
"No paper changes water," he said. "The water was here when the stones were young. Men draw lines to say who may drink, and the lines move when money moves, but the water does not move. It does not read. It does not obey." He lifted the bundle, and the red line lay bare again, absurd and bright. "You killed for a line. The line is a lie you told yourselves. The water is still there, and it belongs to no man's ink."
Silence on the porch. The dog thumped its tail once against the boards. Out beyond the yard the coyote called, thin and far.
Bell folded the map β evidence now β and looked at Pryce, then at the token in his handkerchief, then at Nate's blue book where it lay open on the rail, the eleven o'clock entry facing up like an accusation.
"Mr. Pryce," Bell said, "you'll ride with me to the territorial court and swear to the redrawings. Both of them." He turned to Nate. "Mr. Gentry, keep that book close. It's the truest record in this basin."
Pryce nodded, a broken man but a lighter one, and Bell took his arm β not unkindly β and led him to the horses. Reese watched them go, and Nate put a hand on the boy's shoulder and left it there until the riders were dust.
That evening Nate walked out to the stone well alone. The sun was low and the water came up cold and clear, and he dipped the tin ladle and drank, and then he held it out, and the coyote came from behind the rocks and drank from his hand, and the dog slept on the porch, and there were no hoofbeats and no gunfire.