When they reached the basin, Elder Kanoa was waiting at the ranch house, and Nate told him everything, and the old man listened without moving, the way he listened to weather. At the end he said only, "Then the paper is settled. Now the water."
Chapter 22
The Manhunt
Dawson Wray ran south with the first frost. He had been Thorne's manager, the man who moved the money and moved the men, and when the clerk confessed and the surveyor confessed, Wray took a horse and a saddlebag of company coin and crossed into Texas, where he believed the law had shorter arms.
He was wrong about the arms. Marshal Orson Bell rode out of Santa Fe with a federal warrant in his coat and a reputation that had crossed more state lines than Wray ever would. Bell was a big man gone to iron gray, and he hunted the way a river hunts: steady, patient, downhill.
They found Wray in a saloon in El Paso, three weeks into his freedom, drunk on whiskey he was buying for the whole room and telling anyone who would listen how he had outsmarted the territory of New Mexico. He was standing on a chair when Bell walked in, mid-sentence about the fools in Santa Fe, a glass raised high. The room went still the way rooms do when weather comes through the door.
Bell crossed the floor and took the glass out of Wray's hand and set it down. He read the warrant aloud, every word, while Wray swayed on the chair and the sawdust settled. Then Bell put the chains on him, right there, the iron clicking loud in the quiet, and led him out past the batwing doors into the white Texas light. Wray's boasting followed him all the way to the wagon, and then, somewhere on the north road, it ran out.
The ride back took eleven days. Bell kept Wray chained at the wrist to the wagon seat and fed him from the same pot, and by the time they reached Stone Creek Basin the manager of the CB&L was a hollow-cheeked man with his fine clothes gone to rags and his cleverness gone somewhere Bell had not needed to chase.
The hearing was held in the same courthouse where Thorne had been undone. Wray stood in the dock and listened to Reese Callahan describe, again, the movement of the bribe money through his hands. He listened to Eben Fisk describe the orders Wray had carried from Thorne to the clerk's desk. His own lawyer said little. There was little to say. The warrant had been read in El Paso, and the chains had done the rest of the arguing.
But the hearing held a second matter, and it was the one the basin had come to see.
Kayd was nineteen. He stood when his name was called, and he did not look small, though he was young enough that his beard came in patchy. The charge was manslaughter: the killing of Vess, the CB&L rider, on the night the fences went up around the stone well. Everyone in the room knew the story. Vess had drawn first. Kayd had been defending the well, defending the compact, defending people who could not defend themselves that night. The law, being the law, called it manslaughter anyway.
The judge asked how he pleaded. Kayd said, "Guilty," in a clear voice, and the room shifted, because half the people there had expected a fight and the other half had prayed for one.
His appointed lawyer rose to speak of youth, of provocation, of the rider's drawn gun. Kayd stopped him with a look. When the judge asked if he wished to say anything before sentencing, Kayd stepped forward to the rail.
"I did it," he said. "Vess is dead by my hand. I was right to stand where I stood, and I will not say I was wrong. But I will take what the law gives me, because the compact we signed is worth more than my pride. If I run from this, the paper means nothing. So I stand here."
He stood straight. He did not flinch when the sentence was read. Two years. The judge's voice caught, just slightly, on the number, as if he wished it were otherwise and knew it could not be.
Nate sat in the second row with the blue book in his lap, and he wrote it all down afterward in his plain hand: Wray brought north in chains, boasting drunk in a Texas saloon, caught by Marshal Bell. Kayd standing for manslaughter and taking his sentence without flinching. He wrote that the boy β he was a boy, nineteen β had walked out between two deputies with his head up, and that Deya had stood at the back of the courtroom the whole time, motionless, and had not looked away once.
That night at the ranch, Father Ignacio Ruiz came for supper, and Hollis Farr with him, and they ate in silence for a long time. Finally the priest said, "He will be remembered for that."
"He will," Nate said. "I'll see to it."
He opened the blue book by lamplight and wrote one more line under the day's entry: Kayd took it standing. Remember this when the water runs clear.