He turned his pony and rode back to the line. The half-moon did not move. Three hundred riders sat their horses in the morning light, and the dust hung in the air between them and the well, and Nate stood in his yard with his hands at his sides, and felt the hour settle over Stone Creek Basin like a held breath.
Chapter 4
Half-Moon Formation
Nate did not bar the gate. He opened it.
He walked down to the gate post in the full sight of three hundred riders, unhooked the latch, and swung the gate wide. The hinges creaked the way they always did β he had written mended gate hinge in the blue book more times than he could count, and it creaked anyway. He stood beside it a moment, one hand on the post, and then he walked back up the yard to the well, where Deya slept under his blanket, and began the morning's work.
The half-moon watched. Kanoa sat his paint pony at the center of the line, motionless, and Nate drew water, salted the cattle, swept the porch, and fed Job his handful of oats, all in the open, unhurried, as if it were any morning of his life.
When the chores were done, he built up the fire in the stove and made broth β salt pork and beans and the last of the winter onions, simmered long and thin. He carried the tin cup out to the well and knelt beside Deya and woke her gently.
"Broth," he said. "Caldo. Drink."
She looked at the cup, then at the three hundred riders on the horizon, then at him. She drank. When she had finished half, she pushed the cup back toward him with a firm hand. For you, the gesture said, as plain as speech. Nate drank a mouthful and handed it back, and she finished it.
"Keep talking," he told her, in Spanish. "Talk to me. What is your name?"
"You know my name," she said, in English. "The old man said it."
"Tell me again anyway. Awake keeps you alive."
"Deya." She said it the way a person might hand over a weapon. "Scout of the northern winter camp. Shot by company men at the arroyo. My cousins β " She stopped. "They were shot with me. They did not get up again."
Nate nodded. He offered no comfort. Comfort was cheap, and she would know it. "What else?"
She talked, then, in fits and starts, English and Spanish mixed. The winter camp. The failing springs. The CB&L men with their papers and their surveyor, marking the water. The night she was shot β Tayo going down first, then Itza, then the ball taking her in the side as she ran, the long crawl through the dark with the well in her mind like a lamp.
Through it all Kanoa watched from the line. Once, when Deya's voice faltered, Nate looked up and found the old man's eyes on him β not on Deya, on him β and there was something in that gaze he could not name. Measurement. Or memory.
At midmorning Nate went into the cabin and brought out the blue book and sat on the porch steps and wrote the day's entries: weather, wind, water, chores, visitors. In the visitors column he wrote, in his small neat hand: Kanoa, elder of the northern winter camp, and three hundred riders. He wrote it the way he wrote everything β plain, weathered, true.
Kanoa rode forward again then, alone, and dismounted at the foot of the porch steps. Up close the old man was older: the gray braid thin, the hands knotted, the prayer bundle at his belt worn smooth by decades of fingers. But his eyes were young β dark and clear and missing nothing.
"You write," Kanoa said, nodding at the book.
"I write."
"What do you write?"
"Weather. Chores. Water levels. Who comes," Nate said. "It is the only book I have."
Kanoa studied him. "A man who writes down the truth," he said slowly, "is either a fool or a brave man. The company men also write. They write lies on paper and call them papers." He gestured toward the half-moon. "A man shows his nature in the first hour of trouble. You opened your gate."
"It was already open," Nate said. "I never closed it."
The elder's mouth twitched β the ghost of a smile. He looked past Nate toward Deya sleeping by the well, and it faded.
"At noon," Kanoa said, "I will decide what is to be done about the well. Until then, the half-moon waits." He remounted his pony in one smooth motion that belied his years, and rode back to the line, and the morning settled again into its held breath.
Nate went back to the well. Deya was awake, watching him with those black eyes.
"He waits until noon," she said. "He thinks you are a company man."
"I am not."
"I know." She shifted, winced, and settled. "But he must be sure. The company has bought men before. Men with kind faces and open gates."
Nate sat down in the dust beside the well. "Then he'll be sure."