Chapter 25
: Smoke on the Ridges
They laid the fires all the next day, in the manner of a people who had signaled across these ridges since before there were maps of them. Not bonfires β nothing so honest as that β but small, carefully tended beds of green juniper and damp sage and last year's mesquite, one on every height that commanded the valley: the long spine above Ojo Azul, the twin knobs to the north where Bellamy's survey stakes still stood, the red shoulder of the eastern rim, the broken teeth of rock above Coyote Creek, point after point until the whole horizon was manned. Beside each fire, brush and bedding were arranged as men arrange a camp they mean to sleep in. Beside each fire, at Tasin's instruction, stood spare rifles planted upright and spare hats on sticks at intervals along the skyline β foolishness at a hundred yards, Caleb judged, and an army at a mile.
Tess rode the circuit with spare matches in a tin and her father's Winchester across her saddle, checking each station, learning each crew by name. She had argued to stay at the spring with Caleb and lost, and being Tess, had converted defeat into a command. "If Bragg can count," she said at the last ridge, looking down at the valley floor where the barrier still stood across the basin, "he'll count us at two hundred."
"If Bragg can count," Caleb said, "his men will count louder. That's who this is for."
Tasin moved among the fires in the afternoon like a man half his sixty-three years, his bound shoulder notwithstanding, setting each crew its hour and its order. The signal was simplicity itself, agreed before witnesses as his people set such things: when Caleb's fire rose on the spring rock, the inner ring would light; when the inner ring stood in smoke, the outer; ridge calling to ridge around the whole valley until the circle closed. "My grandfather's grandfathers did this to call the bands together for the hunt," the chief said. "And twice, in my father's time, to persuade enemies that the rocks themselves had grown warriors." He fed a green branch to his own fire and watched the first test curl rise, blue-gray and deliberate, against the evening sky. "It is not a lie, exactly, Caleb Wren. We are all here. We are merely letting the smoke say how many hearts that is."
By dusk the valley wore a stillness so complete it rang. The Apache families had drawn back from the basin to the cottonwoods, unhurried, visible, unarmed in the open ground β grandmothers, children, old men mending harness β a camp at peace in its own country, while above it every ridge stood ready. Caleb climbed to the spring rock with his father's compass in his pocket and the map's memory in his head, each contour line now a place where friends waited with matches. Flint he left below with Tess's station. What he meant to do at dawn, no horse could help him with.
He slept an hour and woke to a darkness thinning at the edges, and to a sound the valley carried faithfully from far off β hooves, many hooves, unhurried as men ride who expect no resistance worth hurrying for. Twenty-eight riders were coming down from Salt Creek in the gray before sunrise, Bragg at their head, to take a spring they believed held by a wounded chief, a boy rancher, and whatever law had not yet arrived. Caleb stood, rolled his bedding tight as a soldier, and put a match to the fire laid on the rock beside Ojo Azul.
The first smoke went up straight in the windless dawn, a single dark column over the water. Then, as if the earth had exhaled, the inner ring answered β five fires, eight, blooming along the northern heights and the eastern rim. Then the outer ridges took it up, point calling to point, until smoke stood all around the San Rey Valley in a great unbroken ring, and the rising sun lit the columns from within like lamps. Along the skylines the planted rifles and the hat-crowned sticks stood black against the brightening sky, and crews moved openly between fires feeding them, letting themselves be seen, letting the valley below do the counting for Bragg's hungry men.
Caleb watched the riders check and bunch at the valley mouth, a quarter-mile off, their formation loosening the way ice loosens β not breaking, not yet, but hearing the water move beneath it. He could not see Bragg's face. He did not need to. Twenty-eight men had ridden out to seize a spring from a handful of holdouts and found instead a country apparently held in force on every height, by hundreds, waiting in the rocks with the patience of people whose home it was. Whatever Bragg's courage, his arithmetic was the same arithmetic Caleb had done in the kitchen β and the sum had changed.
"Now," Caleb said to the empty rock and the blue eye of the spring below him, his father's compass warm in his hand. "Now we talk."
Chapter 26
: Riding Out Alone