Then Father Ruiz stepped forward and asked for the ladle. Deya filled it from the bucket, and the priest held it up in both hands, and spoke the water prayer in the old tongue, the words rolling slow and deep as the well itself. When he finished, he spoke it again in English, so the marshal and Farr and Cobb could set it down in the record they were already forming in their heads: a prayer that water be shared, that no hand be raised against it, that the giver and the taker be bound by the drinking.
Nate wrote it all in the blue book that evening, sitting under the cottonwood after the witnesses had ridden out: Bell saw. Ruiz prayed. Farr stood. Cobb measured. And beneath that, one more line, in the plain hand of a man keeping the day's account: the map tore, but the land did not.
Chapter 13
The Day the Ranch Stood Empty
They came at noon, when the light lies flat and merciless and there is nowhere for a man's intentions to hide. Nate saw them first from the well curb: a column of riders coming down the wagon road, twelve or fourteen of them, dust white behind them, and at their head a man in a black coat who rode like a banker and carried himself like an owner. Magnus Thorne had not come to look at his maps. Magnus Thorne had come to collect.
Beside him rode Dawson Wray, the company manager, with a leather folio under his arm. The armed riders fanned out when they reached the ranch yard, and Nate noted, with the part of his mind that never stopped keeping accounts, that their rifles were uncased and their horses still saddled. Thorne dismounted in the yard as though he owned the ground under the horse's hooves, which was precisely the claim he had come to make.
"Gentry," Thorne said. "I have a court order. It awards the CB&L the well and the water rights appurtenant. You will step aside, and your guests will disperse."
Nate said nothing. He had learned long ago that silence costs a man nothing and gains him the other man's next sentence.
"Dated April second," Wray said. "Filed at Fort Verde. Proper and final."
Nate took the paper. The date stood at the top in a clerk's practiced hand: April 2. Below it the order ran in the long, careful sentences of the law, awarding the well, the flow, the ground within a quarter mile of the stone curb, all of it to the CB&L. At the bottom, the clerk's signature: Eben Fisk. The docket number sat beside it, neat as a nail head.
"April second," Nate said.
"April second," Thorne said. "Served according to the forms of law."
Nate looked past him at the empty yard, the empty barn, the locked house with its shutters drawn. Then he walked to his saddlebag and took out the blue book, and the twelve riders and Thorne and Wray watched him do it the way men watch a gambler reach for his last card.
"This is my ledger," Nate said. "I have kept it twenty years. April second. Let me read it to you." He turned the pages, worn thin at the corners, until he found the date in his own hand. "April second," he read aloud. "Rode to Fort Verde for salt. Gone the whole day. House locked."
He closed the book and looked at Thorne.
"My house was locked," Nate said. "Nobody was here. If your order was served that day, it was served to an empty ranch, a locked door, and a yard with nothing in it but dust. No man knocked. No man nailed paper to my door."
Wray's face had gone a shade paler. "The docket—"
"The docket says what the clerk wrote," Nate said. "It does not say where the clerk was standing when he wrote it. My book says where I was standing. Fort Verde. Buying salt. Ask the mercantile. Ask the stable."
Thorne's jaw worked. He had the look of a man who has paid for certainty and received something else entirely. "A man's diary is not evidence," he said.
"It is evidence of the days," Nate said. "And this diary says your paper was born on a day when there was no one here to receive it. A court order served to nobody is a letter to the wind. You can ride back to Fort Verde and ask Eben Fisk to swear he served it. I would like to hear him describe my locked door."
For a long moment nobody moved. The armed riders sat their horses. The three hundred by the cottonwoods sat where they were. Deya stood at the well curb with the ladle in her hand, and Kanoa stood beside her, and neither of them moved either.
Then Thorne turned, slowly, and looked at Wray. Wray would not meet his eye. The manager's hands had closed on the folio until the leather creased.
"Keep your paper," Nate said, and held the order out to Wray. "You will need it. For the trial."