They left in too much haste to bother with the rope corral. When the last rider vanished, Caleb lifted the loop of rope and led out Dulcie, then Pet, then Rooster, who tossed his head and blew hard at the smell of home on Caleb's shirt. Three horses, thin from short feed but sound. He rested his forehead against Dulcie's neck, grateful past speaking.
Behind him, Tasin said quietly, "They will not forgive being shamed in daylight, Caleb Wren. Men like Voss do their real work after dark."
Caleb looked north at the settling dust. "Then we had better be ready for the dark."
Chapter 12
: Blood and Sage
They carried Tasin into the shade of the cottonwoods on a blanket slung between two poles, though the chief protested the whole way that a man shot through the shoulder, and not the leg, could walk like a Christian. Caleb told him he was not a Christian and to lie still, and Tasin laughed once, shortly, and then was silent when the movement tore at the wound.
In the camp the women took charge with the calm of people who had done this before. They cut away the bloodied shirt, washed the shoulder with water from Ojo Azul heated over a small fire, and packed the wound with a poultice of sage and other leaves Caleb did not know, pounded to a paste that smelled sharp and clean. The bullet had passed through the muscle high on the shoulder without striking bone β the best kind of bad fortune, the oldest woman said, if a man had to be shot at all.
Caleb held the bowl of water and handed cloths when he was told. His hands, which had been steady on the hillside, shook a little now, and he was ashamed until he saw that Tasin was watching him and had noticed.
"Fear comes after," Tasin said. "Your father was the same. When the survey stakes were pulled up by claim jumpers in the first year, Samuel stood between them and my young men with nothing in his hands but his compass chain, and talked until the sun moved. That night at my fire his hands shook so he spilled his coffee, and he cursed himself for a coward." The chief's dry smile appeared. "I told him a coward does not spill coffee after. He spills it before, and runs."
"He never told me that story," Caleb said.
"He told few stories about himself. He was a man who believed a deed should do its own talking." Tasin's eyes rested on Caleb for a while. "He walked this valley with me in the year of the great dry summer, before you were born. We found this spring choked with fallen rock, and we cleared it together, stone by stone, drinking from our cupped hands like boys. He put it on his map with a mark he used for no other place. Not a claim mark. A promise mark, he called it. He said water in a dry country is God's business, and men are only its poor clerks."
The woman binding the shoulder tied off the cloth and said something low in Apache. Tasin nodded and closed his eyes. The camp settled into its ordinary sounds β children at their games again, a dog worrying a stick, the clink of a pot. It struck Caleb how near all of it had come to being ashes that morning, and for what: paper, and a railroad that had not yet chosen its road.
One of Tasin's grandsons came up with a folded sheet of company paper, oil-stained and torn, found in the dirt of the rope corral. He gave it to his grandfather, who handed it on to Caleb, the words being in English, in a clerk's quick hand.
Caleb smoothed it against his knee. It was a list of holdings in the valley, each with a figure and a date β offers made, offers refused, a column headed pressure to be applied. He read down names he knew: the Ortega place, the Widow Hale's quarter section, two homesteads north toward Paloma.
At the bottom of the list, last and underlined twice, stood his own.
Wren ranch, Coyote Creek. Offer declined (by letter, March). Next. Sale to be secured before railroad announcement, by purchase or other means.
Other means. Caleb read the two words twice. He thought of a corral gate opened in the night and three horses driven east to be held like hostages against his good behavior. He thought of a rifle padded with a neckerchief on a hillside above a judge. He thought, for the first time in daylight, of a barn beam in the autumn of 1883, falling where a beam had no reason to fall.
"They had this planned before the horses were taken," he said. "We are not an afterthought. We are the next page."
Tasin opened his eyes. "A man who writes his intentions on paper believes no one else will ever read it. That is the arrogance of paper men." He lifted his good hand and let it fall. "Go home, Caleb. Your sister waits for word, and a ranch alone is a house with its door open. My riders will watch the spring, and my wound and I will argue here together."