He turned his pony and rode back into the line. Nate stood alone in the dust between the ranch and the half-moon, the sun climbing toward noon, and the wind carrying the smell of dust and juniper across the yard, and the torn paper gone from his hand into the keeping of an old man who had ridden three hundred strong to take a well he now meant to defend.
*
Chapter 6
Two Graves in the Cactus
Deya slept through the worst of the night, which was something. Nate sat in the chair by the stove until the lamp burned low, and when he woke with his neck bent wrong and the tin ladle cold in his fist, the girl โ no, the woman, she was thirty-three and carried a shoulder wound like weather โ was standing in the doorway with the blanket over her shoulders, looking past him at the east window.
She pointed. Not at anything. At the direction of the light, or the lack of it. Then she said two names in Spanish, slowly, as if teaching him the shape of them.
"Tayo. Itza."
He repeated them the way she had said them. She nodded once.
She came to the table and sat down hard, like sitting took all she had, and with her good hand she drew in the spilled salt: a line, and two short strokes crossing it, like fence posts. She pointed at the line. "C-B-y-L," she said, and then in Spanish, more of it than he could follow, but he caught lรญnea, and the word for paper, and the word for dead.
He wrote the two names at the top in his careful hand. She watched the letters form, and when he tapped the page and raised his eyebrows, she began.
Tayo and Itza were her cousins, sons of her mother's sister, scouts for the ranchitos up the canyon. Four days back they had gone out with nothing but a borrowed field glass and a torn strip of a surveyor's map, tracing a line Pryce's crew had cut across the high desert the month before. They meant to walk it end to end and mark where it lay against the old trails. That was all. They carried no guns.
They had not come back.
She told him where they would have been at dusk on the fourth day: near the north fence line of the Cerro Blanco outfit, where the new wire ran straight as a plumb line through the cholla. She said it in Spanish and drew it in the salt, and Nate copied the sketch into the blue book and wrote under it, in his own hand, four days gone, cousins Tayo and Itza, shot near CB&L fence while tracing surveyor's line โ Deya's word.
He saddled the roan before the sun was up and left the tin ladle of water by her bed and the rifle where she could reach it. He told her in gestures that he would ride to the north fence and be back by dark, and she held his sleeve a moment and then let go.
The country north of Coldwater was a place that taught a man what his own size was. He rode with his hat pulled down and his eyes open, and the roan picked its way through the rocks like it was reading them. By midmorning he found the fence line, the new wire glinting, the posts set deep, and beyond it the CB&L land running up to the white flank of the cerro.
He found the graves first: two fresh mounds in a wash below the line, where the cholla stood thick enough to hide them from anyone not looking. The earth was turned raw and patted down, and at the head of each mound someone had laid a flat stone. He dismounted and stood between them and took his hat off, because there was nothing else he knew how to do, and the wind moved through the cholla needles with a sound like dry rain.
He did not dig. He walked the wash slow: here a boot heel, there a drag mark, a shell casing glinting in the sun. He found two casings, rimfire, and a stain on the rocks that the sun had baked to rust. The line of the shots ran toward the fence, not away from it. They had been fired on from the CB&L side.
Near the lower mound, half-buried where a boot had kicked it, he found the token. It was a brass disc, stamped with the letters C B & L around a steer skull, the kind the company gave its riders for the tally house. He turned it over in his palm. It was scuffed but not weathered. It had not lain there long.
He put it in his vest pocket and looked back at the two mounds, the two flat stones, the two names he had written that morning in the blue book. Tayo. Itza. Four days dead, and nobody but a wounded woman at a ranch well had spoken their names aloud.
He rode home with the light going copper on the rocks, and at the well the coyote was waiting, bold as a dog now, and he dipped the tin ladle and held it out, and the animal drank, and Nate wrote it all down in the blue book by lamplight while Deya slept.