The Ledger of Cold Water and Sand

Nate looked at her across the lamplight and nodded, and wrote the word in the margin beside the eleven o'clock entry, because some accounts balanced in words and some only in the keeping of them. Outside, the coyote called once from the dark beyond the well — a thin, high sound, there and gone — and the dog on the porch lifted its head and then laid it down again, and the night went back to being what the book said it was: quiet, not a sound, except the truth, which had started to make its own noise.

Chapter 9

The Empty Saddle

He came after midnight, on a horse lathered white, and he didn't ride up the lane — he came through the arroyo behind the barn, on foot at the last, leading the animal, and stood in the dark between the stalls breathing hard.

Nate knew the shape of him before he knew the face. Reese Callahan, twenty-eight, CB&L foreman, the honest one, the one Bell had asked after. He had his hat in his hands and his eyes on the ground, and when Nate stepped out of the barn with the lantern, the boy — he was hardly more than that — flinched at the light like a deer.

"Mr. Gentry," he said. "I need to hide. Just tonight. Just till I figure — " He stopped. "They'll say I ran."

Nate led them both into the barn and shut the door. Deya was there before he called her — she'd heard, and she stood in the loft doorway with the rifle she could barely hold, and when she saw who it was she lowered it slow.

Reese told it sitting on a hay bale with his head in his hands, and the lantern threw his shadow big against the wall. He had helped bury Rafe Colt. He had been there when they laid him in the ground at the northern camp, and he had seen what he wasn't meant to see, and it had been eating him for three days until he couldn't eat at all.

"There were no Apache signs," he said. "Wray told the marshal unshod ponies. I walked that arroyo on my knees. There was nothing unshod there. There were CB&L shoes, our own irons, all over that ground — and one set of boot prints with the heel worn on the outside, like Wray walks. I've ridden behind it two years."

Nate said nothing. The lantern hissed.

He wasn't shot in the chest. Not when we found him. The chest wound was done after. The killing shot was in the back, under the shoulder blade. Somebody turned him over and put another one in him to make it look like a fight.

He looked up, and his face was wet. "I helped dig the hole, Mr. Gentry. I threw dirt on a boy I ate supper with, and I never said a word, and now Wray's got me down on that affidavit as a witness to the raid, and I never saw any raid."

"He was going to talk," Reese said. "Colt. He'd been drinking at the tally house three nights back, and he said the fence line wasn't straight, that the survey had been moved and somebody was going to hang for it. Wray heard him. Everybody heard him." He wiped his face with his sleeve. "I think that's why he's dead. Not Apaches. Paper. Lines on paper."

Nate poured water from the tin ladle into a cup and put it in the boy's hands. Reese drank.

"You can stay," Nate said. "Barn's yours. But in the morning we ride to Bell. You tell him what you told me, word for word, and you swear it."

Reese nodded, and the relief on his face was so plain it hurt to look at. But then the barn door creaked, and all three of them froze — and it was only the coyote, nosing at the gap under the door, drawn by the lantern light. Nate opened the door a crack and the animal looked in with its yellow eyes, unafraid, and melted back into the dark.

He bedded the horse down and gave Reese a blanket and the rifle to keep by him, and he went up to the house and wrote it in the blue book: Callahan come in the night. Saw the burial. No Apache signs. Colt shot in the back, chest wound after. Wray's heel print. Hides in my barn.

Deya followed him up and stood at the table, and she put her good hand on the page, over the words, as if to hold them down. She said the cousins' names once, quiet, and then she said Colt's name, and Nate understood that the dead were being gathered now, all of them, into one account, and the book was getting heavy.

Before dawn, hoofbeats on the lane — two riders, moving slow, stopping at the gate. Nate was at the window with the rifle before the second beat faded. The riders sat their horses in the gray light, looking at the house, looking at the barn. CB&L men; he knew the cut of the hats. They sat a long minute, then turned and rode back, unhurried, as if to say: we know where to find you.