The smoke stood on the ridges in thin, patient columns, and from the valley floor it looked exactly as Caleb and Tasin had hoped β like the fires of a people who had come in numbers and meant to stay. He rode down from the east ridge in the early light with the smell of it in his clothes, juniper and dry grass and a little green sage Tasin had thrown on to make the smoke white and lasting. Behind him, among the rocks, there were in truth only a handful of old men and boys tending the fires, feeding them twig by twig, walking now and then between two fires so that anyone watching would count a man where there was only movement. It was a lie made of smoke, and Caleb prayed it would hold.
Flint picked his way down the loose stone of the trail, unhurried, because Caleb had asked him to be unhurried and because the bay had always taken his temper from his rider's hands. Caleb wore no gun belt. His rifle stood back at the camp, beside Tasin's lodge, where he had left it deliberately. In his shirt pocket, against his heart, rode his father's brass surveyor's compass, its case worn smooth as a river stone. It seemed right that it should ride with him now, not as a weapon and not as a charm, exactly, but as a reminder that a man could measure a piece of earth truly and write down what he found, and that the writing could outlast him.
Tess had tried, one last time, to come with him. She had stood in the gray before dawn with the Winchester in her hands and her jaw set in a way that reminded him so much of their father that it hurt, and she had said a lone rider looked like a target and two looked like a parley. He had told her that two Wrens going down looked like a family making a last stand, and that Bragg's men would count rifles before they counted reasons. He had asked her instead to stay at the spring basin, out of sight behind the cottonwoods with Tasin, and to keep her rifle across her knees and her finger off the trigger unless the talking failed entirely. She had not liked it. She had done it anyway.
Below him, Ojo Azul lay blue and still in its rock basin, holding the sky. The company barrier still stood across the narrows β fresh-cut posts and strung wire and a chained gate, ugly as a scar β but no company guard stood at it now, only dust and the memory of orders. Beyond the spring, on the flat where the trail from Paloma came down, dust was rising in a long, low plume, the kind thrown up by many horses moving at a steady trot. Twenty-eight riders, Marshal Callahan's scout had said. Bragg at their head, riding not for wages anymore, Caleb suspected, but for pride β and a man riding for pride had to be given a way to turn around that did not feel like crawling.
Caleb rode through the gap where the old trail crossed the basin's lip and down to the barrier, and there he stopped Flint in plain view, in the open ground before the gate, where every rider coming down the trail would see one man, alone, on a bay horse, with his empty hands resting loose on the saddle horn. He touched the compass in his pocket once, then let it be. He did not rehearse his words; every version he had tried on the ridge had sounded like a speech. Bragg's riders were neither buying nor judging. They were tired men on tired horses who had been told one more job stood between them and the end of a bad season.
The dust drew closer and resolved into horses, then into riders: hats and neckerchiefs, rifles in scabbards, a loose formation that tightened as it came. Caleb watched Bragg pick him out β a big man on a black horse, riding a length ahead β and watched the understanding pass down the line that there was no ambush visible, no row of rifles at the barrier, only smoke on every ridge around the valley. Bragg slowed. The line slowed with him, and then, a hundred yards out, stopped altogether, horses blowing and stamping in the sudden quiet.
Caleb raised one hand, palm open, no higher than his shoulder, and called out in a voice he kept deliberately ordinary, as if he were hailing a neighbor across a corral. "Bragg," he said. "Before anybody does anything that can't be taken back, I am asking you to ride up here and talk with me at the water. Just talk. I am not armed, and I will not keep you long." He let his hand fall. Then he sat Flint in the morning light before the chained gate, with the blue spring at his back and the smoke standing all around the valley, and he waited to see whether twenty-eight men would choose talking over the other thing.
Chapter 27
: The Talk at the Water