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

Chapter 28

: The Water Belongs to No Man

Marshal Wade Callahan read the valley the way other men read a room, in one long look that took in the grounded rifles, the horses drinking at the basin's edge, Bragg standing hatless with his hands empty, and the smoke still standing patient on every ridge. He rode past his own posse without hurrying, stopped his horse beside Caleb's, and said, low, for Caleb alone: "Your father would have had words for this morning, and I expect every one of them would have been quieter than the trouble you nearly had." Then he raised his voice and did the law's business cleanly and without triumph. Bragg's riders were not under arrest, those who had grounded their rifles and done no violence; they would give their names to the posse, leave their company tally-books and Voss's written orders with him, and be free to ride for Paloma or wherever honest work waited. Bragg himself would come in and make a statement. No man was mocked, no man was manhandled.

By noon the posse had picketed the company horses and Tasin's people had come down from the cottonwoods and the rocks, first the women with gourds and tin cups, then the old men who had tended the smoke fires, walking a little stiffly from their morning's work of seeming to be an army, then the children, who went straight to the water's edge to splash. Tess came down with the Winchester over her shoulder, walked to the barrier, and stood looking at it with an expression Caleb knew well — the one she wore for a sum in the ranch books that would not come right. "Well," she said, "it will not come down by looking at it." But Callahan shook his head, courteously, and said there was a paper matter first, and that it would take ten minutes, and that those ten minutes had been seventeen years in arriving and could be stood.

The marshal had brought the ruling down from Paloma in a saddlebag, written in Judge Whitcomb's own hand, the judge being still abed with his grazed head bandaged. Callahan unrolled the paper and nailed it himself to the center post of the barrier gate, where the company's notice had hung, driving the nails with the butt of a borrowed hammer while the whole valley — riders, posse, Apache families, the Wrens — stood in a loose half-circle and watched. Then he read it aloud, in a voice that carried off the rock basin and back again. The survey of 1868, made by Samuel Wren and duly witnessed, was confirmed. The territorial lease claimed by the Voss Consolidated Water and Land Company was declared a forgery and void. The spring called Ojo Azul, and the waters of San Rey Valley, were common water, belonging to no man, open to settler, traveler, and Apache alike, to ranch stock and wild game, in drought and in plenty, and any fence, barrier, or toll raised against that right would be an offense under territorial law.

He read it twice, and the paper stayed nailed to the post, fluttering a little. Callahan stepped back. "Now," he said to Tess, with the ghost of a smile, "it can come down." And it came down by many hands, which was the only fitting way. Bragg himself took the chain in both hands and, when it would not yield, borrowed the posse's cutters and snapped it link by link, and set the pieces down in a neat pile. Riders who had come that morning to hold the barrier pulled its posts up out of the earth they had been driven into, rocking them loose one by one. Tasin's young men unwound the wire and coiled it properly, the way men coil a rope they respect, though the wire had been an insult to them. Apache women carried the posts to the firewood pile. Nobody cheered. It was better than cheering. It was people setting a wrong thing right with their hands, in no hurry, in the middle of an ordinary morning.

When the last post came out of the ground, Tasin walked down to the basin with his bad shoulder still bound, moving carefully and entirely without self-pity, and knelt — slowly, with Caleb's hand offered and refused with a small, amused shake of the head — and drank from his palm. Then he stood and gestured, once, at the open ground where the barrier had been, and at the riders and ranchers standing among his own people with their hats in their hands. "Your father stood here in 1868," Tasin said to Caleb, "when the survey chains were new, and he told me the paper would say what his word had already said. Men laughed that a surveyor trusted paper so little and his word so much. Today the paper has finally caught up with the word." He put his good hand briefly on Caleb's shoulder. "Drink, son of Samuel. It is your water. Which is to say, it is no man's, and therefore it is yours as much as any creature's that walks here thirsty."