He closed the book. Above him the cottonwood leaves turned their silver undersides to the evening wind, and the water in the stone well lay cold and dark and true, and the three hundred men sat quiet in the gold light, and for the first time in weeks, Nate let himself believe that the truth might be enough.
It would have to be. Because Thorne was still out there, and the night was coming on, and the ledger was not yet closed.
*
Chapter 16
Who Shot Rafe Colt
They gathered in the ranch yard at Coldwater while the heat still lay low in the grass, the whole company of them, because this was the kind of truth that had to be spoken where everyone could hear it. Nate had set two benches in the shade of the cottonwood tree and brought out the blue book, though nobody asked him to open it yet. Marshal Orson Bell stood with his thumbs hooked in his belt, waiting for the words to be said aloud so they could become law.
Reese Callahan sat on the second bench with his hat in his hands. He was twenty-eight and looked older, the way foremen look when they have carried a bad order too long. He had ridden for the CB&L since he was nineteen. He had defected a week before, crossing the basin in the dark with his bedroll and nothing else, and now the reason sat in front of him like a debt come due.
Marshal Bell nodded. "Tell it plain," he said.
Callahan wet his lips. "Rafe Colt was the best rider we had," he said. "Rode point on the drive up from the border. He could read water in the ground the way other men read sign. And he was decent. That's worth saying. He didn't hold with what Wray was doing."
Dawson Wray was the CB&L manager, and his name dropped into the silence like a stone into the well. Everyone present knew the rest, or thought they knew it: Colt found dead on the trail in May, shot in the back, and the word gone out that the Apache had done it. Soldiers had been called. Camps had been searched. Two men had been killed in the searching β Tayo and Itza, names Kayd had not stopped carrying.
"Colt knew Wray was fencing water," Callahan said. "The diversion at the springs. The men Wray was paying off. The night before he died he told me he was going to ride to the marshal with what he knew. I told him to wait. I was wrong about that part."
"What happened?" Bell said.
"Wray sent Colt out on a survey run the next morning. Alone. Sent him up the west draw with instructions to check fence line." Callahan's voice stayed level, but his hands turned the hat round and round. "Wray told three of us to wait at the head of the draw. He said Colt was a liability β said if Colt was found dead with an Apache bullet in him, the soldiers would come down on the camps and the whole basin would go quiet for the taking.
"I didn't fire," Callahan said. "I'll swear that before God and before all of you. But I rode there. I heard the order. I did not stop it, and I have not slept a full night since." He lifted his head. "Colt was shot from the rocks above the draw. One shot. He never turned around."
Marshal Bell stepped forward then, and from a sack he produced the things that had been taken from Colt's body and from the scene. Colt's spurs β plain iron, well worn, the rowels nicked from use. Then a small cloth sack, and from it he shook onto the bench two bullets, misshapen from impact. "Dug from the ground behind the rocks," Bell said. "Not from the body. From where the shots went on through."
Father Ignacio Ruiz leaned forward, and Elder Kanoa with him. The bullets were .44 caliber. Colt himself had carried a .38. The Apache in the camps carried .44s too β that had been the whole point of the lie, and for a month it had worked, because a dead man with the right caliber in the wrong story is all a frightened basin needs.
"And this," Bell said, and unfolded the letter. Wray's letter. It had been found in the CB&L office safe by Eben Fisk, the clerk, who had confessed his own part and handed it over shaking. Bell read it aloud in his flat marshal's voice, and it was all there: the order, the caliber chosen to match the camp rifles, the instruction to strip Colt's saddlebags of the survey notes and burn them.
Callahan had tears on his face by the end of it, though he did not wipe them. "I stayed on a week after," he said. "I told myself Wray wouldn't do worse. Then I heard what happened in the camps. Then I left."