Tomorrow would be another page. That was the promise the book made, and the whole of the promise he kept.
Chapter 2
Thirst
The riders came at dusk.
Nate saw them first from the fence line, a thin dark seam along the top of the ridge, moving east to west against the last of the light. He stopped with the pliers in his hand and counted. Six, maybe seven. They rode in a loose line, going someplace in a hurry, and nothing about their hurry looked like it concerned him. He finished the splice and walked home with his shadow stretched long before him.
In the blue book that night he wrote: riders on the ridge at sundown, six or seven, heading west. Then he fed the coyote and sat on the porch and watched the dark come down over Stone Creek Basin, and tried not to think about what six or seven riders might want out this far.
He woke in the gray before dawn with the feeling that something was different. There was a sound under the wind, faint and wrong — a dragging, hitching sound from the yard — and Nate rose with the Winchester and opened the door a crack.
The woman lay halfway between the arroyo and the well.
She was crawling: the way she pulled herself forward a few inches at a time on her belly, her hands clawing at the dust. Her hair was black and tangled with burrs. Her shirt was torn and dark down one side, and the color of that darkness told him what the next hour would ask of him.
He stood on the porch a long moment, the Winchester heavy in his hands. A wounded Apache woman crawling toward his water in the gray morning, and nobody else within twenty miles.
He set the rifle inside the door and did not take it with him.
The tin ladle hung from its hook on the well's stone lip, as it always had. He drew the bucket up hand over hand, listening to the rope creak, and filled the ladle brimful. The woman had stopped moving. Her cheek was against the ground.
Nate set the ladle down on the stone lip of the well, close enough for her to reach, and stepped back three paces. He sat down in the dust and waited.
He asked her nothing. Not her name, not who had shot her, not where she had come from. The country had its questions and its answers, and he had learned the difference between them. What mattered was the ladle, and the water, and the stone lip between them.
Her hand moved. It was a small thing, a twitch of the fingers against the dust, and then her eyes opened — black eyes, glazed with fever, fixing on him with a wariness that cut through the glaze like a blade. She looked at the ladle. She looked at him. She did not reach for it.
"Es agua," he said. It is water. His wife had spoken Spanish to the Mexican hands back in the cattle days, and some of it had stuck to him like dust to boots. "Agua," he said again, and nodded at the ladle.
She watched him for another long count. Then, with a sound between a sob and a snarl, she pulled herself the last few feet to the well, seized the ladle in both hands, and drank. Water ran down her chin and her neck and into the dark wound at her side. She drank until the ladle was empty, and then she held it out toward him without a word, and he rose and refilled it and set it back on the stone lip and stepped back again, and she drank again.
The third ladle she drank slower. The fourth she only sipped, and then she set the ladle down with great care, as if it were made of glass, and looked at him.
"¿Quién eres?" she said. Who are you.
"Gentry," he said. "Nate Gentry. Esta es mi agua. Es tuya ahora también." This is my water. It is yours now too.
Something crossed her face that he could not read — not gratitude, not trust, but something older than either. She tried to rise, failed, and lay still against the stone of the well with her head back and her eyes on the lightening sky.
He went into the cabin and came back with the blanket from his bed and spread it over her. Six or seven riders on the ridge at dusk. A woman, shot in the side, crawling to his well at dawn. He had a feeling, deep and cold as the well water itself, that the two were one story, and that he had walked into the middle of it.
In the blue book, later, he would write the entry in his small neat hand: found her at first light, crawling from the arroyo. Shot. Gave water. She lives.
The woman slept then, or something close to sleeping, with the blanket drawn up to her chin and her torn shirt dark beneath it. Nate sat on the porch steps with the Winchester across his knees — not aimed at anything, just there — and watched the sun come up over Stone Creek Basin, and waited for whatever the day intended to bring.