When he had finished writing, he sat a long time with the pen in his hand, and then he added one more line, under the rest, as if it were a sum: They were not raiding anything. They were counting what was theirs.
Chapter 7
The Man Who Bled in the Arroyos
The news came by way of Hollis Farr's boy, who rode in on a mule at noon with his mouth dry and his story too big for him. He'd heard it at the Farr place from a CB&L teamster hauling salt: a rider named Rafe Colt had been found dead on the supply trail, shot through the chest, and Dawson Wray was telling it as an Apache raid on the northern camp.
Nate listened with his hands on the corral rail and his face giving nothing. The boy kept glancing past him toward the bunkhouse, where Deya was. Everyone in the basin would know about the Apache woman at Coldwater by now. News rode faster than men did.
"When?" Nate asked.
"Last night, they say. Before midnight."
The boy took the water Nate offered and rode back the way he'd come, and Nate stood in the yard a long time after the dust settled. Deya asleep in the bunkhouse. The cousins in the wash. And now a CB&L rider dead, and the word raid on Wray's tongue before the body was cold.
He found Deya sitting up when he went in, the blanket folded beside her, her shoulder bound fresh. She had heard the hooves and the voices. He told her what he knew in short pieces, and watched the word Colt cross her face like a shadow. She knew the name, or the kind of man. She shook her head hard at the word raid β no, she said, no.
That evening the coyote did not come to the well. Nate dipped the tin ladle and set it on the stones and waited until the light failed, and the blue book entry for the day ran longer than usual: Colt dead on the supply trail, per Farr's boy. Wray calls it Apache raid. Deya says no. Coyote did not come.
Marshal Orson Bell rode into the CB&L main camp the next morning with his badge pinned straight and his jaw set. Dawson Wray met him at the tally house with his hat in his hand and grief on his face that didn't reach his eyes.
Colt had been riding the northern camp circuit, checking the fence line where there'd been trouble β wire cut, posts pulled, the kind of mischief Wray laid at Apache feet. He hadn't come back by ten. At first light a herder found him in the arroyo below the supply trail, shot through the chest, his horse gone. The tracks at the scene, Wray said, were unshod. Small ponies. It had all the marks.
Bell wrote it down in his notebook, every word, and asked to see the body. They'd buried him already, Wray said, out of respect. Bell asked to see the place where he'd fallen. Wray said he'd take him out directly, first thing.
"I'll want your foreman's account too," Bell said. "The young one. Callahan."
Wray's smile held, but something in it went flat. "Reese'll tell you what I told you, Marshal. He helped lay the boy in the ground."
Bell nodded and wrote that down too. Then he rode for Coldwater Ranch, because there was an Apache woman there with a bullet wound in her shoulder, and a widowed rancher who kept a ledger, and in Bell's experience a man who wrote things down every day was either the most honest man in the county or the most careful liar, and either way worth a visit.
He found Nate mending a harness in the yard, and Deya in the doorway of the bunkhouse, thin and upright, watching him with eyes that missed nothing. Bell tipped his hat to both of them and stated his business plainly: a man dead, an affidavit to take, questions to ask. He asked Nate where he'd been two nights past, at eleven o'clock.
Nate didn't blink. "Here," he said. "At the well."
"Doing what at eleven o'clock at a well, Mr. Gentry?"
"Writing in my book," Nate said. "And feeding a coyote out of a tin ladle."
Bell wrote that down, and he wrote down that Deya had been asleep in the bunkhouse, and that the dog β a yellow mongrel that had come up wagging β had been asleep on the porch, and he wrote down the date from Nate's blue book when Nate showed him, open, unhesitating, the page for that night in a careful hand.
Riding back toward the CB&L camp with the sun in his eyes, Bell thought about Wray's grief that didn't reach his eyes, and about a coyote eating out of a man's hand at eleven o'clock at night, and about how the territory paid him to be by-the-book but the book hadn't covered any of this. He would take Wray's affidavit in the morning. He would look at the arroyo where Colt had bled out. And he would keep his notebook open, because something in this basin was being buried faster than the ground allowed, and he meant to find out what it was before the next shovelful landed.