The Spring Belonged to No Man: A Young Cowboy, an Apache Chief, and the Map That Saved Their Valley

Chapter 24

: Twenty-Eight Riders

The news came at dusk on the second day, carried by a boy from Paloma riding a lathered mule and a message he had plainly rehearsed the whole twelve miles so as not to garble it. Voss was in irons, the company offices stood padlocked under the marshal's seal, and the men who had drawn Voss wages for years were gathering at the old line camp on Salt Creek under Bragg. The boy swallowed and delivered the number like a stone he was glad to be rid of. "Twenty-eight riders, Mr. Wren. Bragg says the company's dead but the spring ain't decided, and he means to decide it before the marshal gets guards posted out there. He means to hold Ojo Azul and sell it back to whoever wins."

Tess, who had been shelling beans into a pan, set the pan down with great care. "Twenty-eight," she said. "Against what? A wounded chief, a prisoner who switched sides, and us?"

"And the marshal," Caleb said. "With maybe six men he trusts, a day's ride scattered across the county making arrests." He looked east, where the valley lay in the last of the light, the spring at its heart unseen and suddenly as exposed as a coin on a table. "Bragg isn't wrong about the arithmetic. If he sits on that water with twenty-eight rifles, every paper in Paloma is just paper until somebody's bled to take it back. He knows it. Voss taught his men that much — possession isn't nine points of the law out here. It's all ten."

Callahan rode in an hour after dark with two deputies borrowed from the county seat and confirmed the worst of it in his unhurried way. Bragg had been Voss's field lieutenant for five years, a competent, humorless man who had never once been asked to think about whether a thing was right, only whether it could be held. The company's remnant had pay owed them — back wages Voss's collapse had frozen — and Bragg had promised them the spring as their settlement: hold the basin, charge for water, and let the railroad or the territory buy them out. It was not loyalty moving those riders. It was hunger wearing loyalty's coat, which Caleb privately thought the more dangerous of the two.

"Can you hold the ranch?" Callahan asked.

"The ranch isn't the prize," Caleb said. "They won't waste a day on us. It's the spring, straight for the spring, likely at tomorrow's dusk or the dawn after, when they think the valley's empty." He heard himself deciding as he spoke. "Marshal, your place is Paloma — the prisoners, the files, the judge when he can sit up. If Bragg burns this county's records and frees Voss, no ruling survives it. The spring is mine to look after. Mine and Tasin's."

Callahan studied him the way he had studied the forged lease, looking for the flaw in the paper. "Twenty-eight is a hard number, son."

"I know the number," Caleb said. "I counted it all the way here."

They rode before moonrise, he and Tess, with Sorrell left bound and guarded in the Paloma jail as a witness too valuable to risk and too dangerous to bring. At the spring the Apache camp was already astir — word travels the valley faster on foot than any boy on a mule — and Tasin sat by his fire with his shoulder bound under a clean cloth, his granddaughter's broth untasted at his knee, listening to his young men argue for war the way young men do, with their whole hearts and half the facts. The chief raised a hand and the argument died like a snuffed lamp.

"You have brought me a number, Caleb Wren," Tasin said. "Twenty-eight. It is a good number for a fight and a bad one for a graveyard, because graveyards do not care how many they hold." His dark eyes found Caleb's across the fire. "Your father stood on this rock in the year of the survey and told me this water would bring men with rifles someday, and that when they came, the valley must be worth more standing than fallen. I did not fully understand him then. A man cannot water his horses from a principle, I told him." The old chief smiled his dry smile. "Samuel laughed at me. He said, 'Tasin, someday you will.'"

"I'm not asking your people to die for a principle," Caleb said. "Or for paper. I'm asking them to help me make twenty-eight tired, hungry men believe a fight will cost more than it pays — before anybody fires." He looked up at the dark ring of ridges around the valley, thinking of his father's maps, every contour line drawn by a man who walked this ground. "Give me the high places, Chief. Give me every ridge by tomorrow nightfall. I have an idea that needs smoke, and this valley in the spring has never yet failed to provide a wind."