They came at first light, and they kept coming. Wagons out of the dawn, riders strung along the creek trail, families walking from the near camps with children on their shoulders. By midmorning the flats around the stone well were covered with people, and Hollis Farr, who had taken it upon himself to count, stopped counting at five hundred and wrote in his minutes: five hundred souls, and more arriving.
It was the first anniversary of the signing of the compact. A year since the paper, a year since the water had been declared shared. Nate Gentry stood by the well-post and watched them gather, and he was fifty-four years old and had seen crowds before β cattle towns, courtrooms β but never a crowd like this: ranchers and tribal families, settlers and vaqueros, the governor's man from Santa Fe, Father Ignacio Ruiz in his black cassock moving through it all like a shepherd through a large and contented flock.
The feast had been a month in the planning. Three beeves roasted whole in pits dug the day before, mutton and pork beside them, beans in iron pots the size of wash tubs, bread baked in every oven within twenty miles and carried in on wagon beds. The tribal women had brought corn and squash and dried berries; the ranch wives had brought pies stacked like cordwood. Children ran everywhere with tin cups, and the tin ladle hung on the well-post, and all day long there was a line at the well β not from thirst, particularly, but from the wish to drink from it on this day, to have the story to tell.
Deya stood near the well most of the morning, thirty-three years old, at ease in the middle of it. People came up to shake his hand, and he shook them all. Elder Kanoa sat in the place of honor under a canvas awning, wrapped in his bright blanket, receiving visitors the way a mountain receives weather: without moving, and completely.
At noon, Kayd arrived. He had been released early that spring, the governor having commuted the rest of his two years after Father Ruiz carried up a petition signed by five hundred names, and he had walked out of the territorial prison a free man eleven days earlier, nineteen years old going on twenty, thinner than he had been, his eyes older. The crowd saw him coming down the trail and a sound went through them, and then they parted, and he walked through the middle of five hundred people with his head up, the way he had walked out of the courtroom. Deya met him halfway and embraced him, and Kanoa rose β the old man rose β and took Kayd's face in both hands and spoke over him in Apache, a blessing or a welcome or both. Nate watched from the well-post with something hot behind his eyes, and he wrote it down later in the blue book, though the words came hard.
Then came the reading. Father Ruiz stood on a wagon bed with the compact in his hands β the renewed agreement, the seal of the territory bright on it β and he read it aloud in Spanish first, his voice carrying over the flats. Then Hollis Farr read it in English, steady and clear. Then Kanoa stood, with Deya beside him, and read it in Apache, the old language rolling out over the crowd, and when he finished, five hundred people were silent together in a way Nate had never heard: not the silence of a courtroom, but the silence of a held breath.
Afterward they ate. They ate until the pits were scraped and the pots were empty and the children were sticky and drowsy. Someone brought out a fiddle, and someone else a guitar, and the dancing started on the packed earth by the well, boots and moccasins together. Reese Callahan danced with a rancher's daughter. Marshal Orson Bell, who had ridden in for the day, allowed himself one cup of punch and watched it all with his arms crossed and something close to a smile on his iron face.
As the sun went down, Nate found himself alone at the well for a moment. The ladle hung on the well-post, swaying in the evening wind. He lifted it down β it was worn smooth now, the tin thin at the lip from a year of hands β and drew water and drank, and hung it back. It swung, and settled, and hung still.
Deya came and stood beside him. They did not speak. Out on the flats, the fiddle played on, and the lamps were being lit, and five hundred witnesses settled into the evening of the day they had all agreed to remember.
A coyote sang from the rocks above the creek. Another answered, farther off. Nate put his hand on the warm stone of the well, and the water moved deep below, patient as ever, and the ladle hung on the post, waiting for the next thirsty traveler.
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Chapter 26
The Marriage