It took the better part of an hour, the way real things take time. Three hundred men dismounted, led their horses to the cottonwoods, and stacked their rifles butt-down and muzzle-up, the way men stack arms when the fighting is finished. They sat in rings by the stone well, passing the dipper, drinking in turns, quiet as men at a table. From any honest distance it looked like exactly what it was: a council, waiting.
Nate stood at the fence and watched it happen, and felt something in his chest loosen that had been tight since the first hoofbeat.
Behind them, at the well, three hundred men drank water in turns, and the tin ladle passed from hand to hand, and nobody wrote that down except Nate, later, in the blue book, in the plain hand of a man keeping the day's account: riders came. sat by water like a council. no shots.
Chapter 12
Witnesses
Nate sent the summons out at dusk, riding west along the wagon road with the blue book wrapped in oilcloth inside his coat. Four names. Not men who owed him, not men who owed the company. Men who would stand under oath and say what they had seen.
He reached Fort Verde first, where Marshal Orson Bell kept a desk behind the plank front of the town's only stone building. The marshal was eating supper off a tin plate when Nate came in.
"You ride in the evening for trouble, Nate," Bell said. "Say it quick."
"I need you at Coldwater Ranch the day after tomorrow. As a witness. There is a torn map and a forged paper and three hundred men sitting quiet by my well, and I need someone whose word the territory trusts to see it."
Bell chewed a long time. "Then come I will, and bring my own eyes."
The marshal pushed the plate aside and wrote the date on a slip of paper like a man who keeps his promises in ink.
Father Ignacio Ruiz was saying compline in the little chapel at Mission Santa Cruz when Nate found him, and Nate waited on the back bench until the priest had blown out the candles one by one. Ruiz listened without moving.
"You ask the Church to witness against a company?" he said.
"I ask you to witness for the truth. There is a prayer over water your people know. If it is spoken at the well, men will remember it was spoken."
"I will come," Ruiz said. "And I will bring what water asks of us."
Hollis Farr, the neighboring rancher, he found mending a fence in the last of the light. Farr listened, squinting, and spat in the dust.
"Thorne's boys ran survey stakes through my north section last month," he said. "You want me to stand against the CB&L?"
"I want you to stand next to a fact."
Farr grinned. "Then I'll stand."
The surveyor's office sent one man: a thin, graying fellow named Cobb, assistant to the territorial surveyor, who would not look at the riders until he had looked at the tree, as if trees were the only honest parties present.
Two mornings later they gathered under the cottonwood tree at the west end of the ranch, where its branches threw shade wide as a barn floor. Marshal Bell arrived first, his star pinned straight, his face set like a man walking into a courtroom. Father Ruiz came next in his black coat, carrying nothing but his breviary and a small wooden cross. Hollis Farr rode in chewing a straw, his rifle left at home by what Nate took for a deliberate choice, and Cobb rode at the rear, still not looking at the riders.
Three hundred men sat in their rings by the stone well, quiet as men at a table. The morning was clear and the water ran bright over the dipper's edge when Deya carried it up.
Nate stepped forward and held up the blue book. "This is my ledger," he said. "Twenty years of days in it. What I say today, I have already written, and what I have written, I will say." Then he stepped back, because this part was not his.
Deya unrolled the torn surveyor's map on a plank set between two sawhorses. The tear ran jagged down the middle, and along it the ink of the aquifer's true course showed through the place where the altered line had been drawn over it. She had pieced it with strips of flour-sack cloth so it would lie flat. The four men came close and looked, and nobody spoke for a long minute.
"The clean copy hides the aquifer's true path," Deya said. Her voice was stronger today. "The torn piece is the piece that was cut out. This is what the land says. The other is what a man was paid to say."
Marshal Bell leaned over it, then straightened. "I see it," he said.
Cobb, the surveyor's man, took a magnifier from his pocket and went over the tear inch by inch. His hands shook. "The hatching," he murmured. "The hatching is original. The overlay—" He stopped, and looked up, and said nothing more, which was itself a kind of testimony.