The men went inside to their dinner, and Caleb stood in the street with his father's compass suddenly heavy in his pocket. Railroad surveyors in the valley. A line deciding its route. A lease on grazing land worth a poor man's fortune as grass β and a rich man's empire if steel ever ran across it. Voss was not stealing water, Caleb understood, while Flint stamped at a fly. Voss was stealing the ground under the water, at grass prices, the week before it turned to gold.
Chapter 6
: Ten Times the Price
The Continental Pacific had taken the four best rooms on the second floor of the Paloma Hotel. Transits and tripods stood stacked in the hall, and a smell of cigar smoke and ink drifted down the stairs. Caleb stood at the clerk's desk, working out how a rancher with dust on his boots gets a chief surveyor to talk to him, when the man himself came down the stairs with a roll of linen maps under his arm and saved him the trouble of asking twice.
"Mr. Bellamy," Caleb said. "My name is Caleb Wren. Five minutes of your time, if you'll spare it. It's about San Rey Valley."
Bellamy was forty, sunburned across the nose, with the ink-stained fingers of a man who still drew his own lines. He looked Caleb over the way surveyors look at ground that might not be what it seems. "Wren," he said. "There was a Wren surveyed this country back in sixty-eight."
"My father. Samuel Wren. He drew the first map of the valley." Caleb nodded toward the dining room. "Let me buy you a coffee, sir. I've ridden twelve miles, and the coffee here is the only thing in town nobody's tried to sell me yet."
Bellamy laughed despite himself and led the way in. Over coffee strong enough to stand a spoon in, Caleb told it plain: the company barrier at Ojo Azul, the lease the foreman had waved, Tasin's camp given until dawn, and the land office clerk who could not find a survey his own office had once recorded. He had learned from his father that facts, laid in a row, make their own argument.
When Caleb finished, Bellamy was quiet a moment, turning his cup in its saucer. "You understand what you're accusing them of," he said. "A forged lease. A grabbed valley. That's a hanging sort of claim to make about Harlan Voss."
"I'm not accusing yet," Caleb said. "I'm asking why. Why this valley? Why now?"
Bellamy rose and took his roll of maps to the window, where the afternoon light came in. He unrolled a long linen sheet across a side table β country Caleb knew the way he knew his own hands, drawn in a stranger's ink. Peaks, watercourses, a dozen thin lines ruled in pencil, fanning south from the northern hills. One, inked bolder than the rest, ran straight through San Rey Valley.
"The Continental Pacific is choosing its route this month," Bellamy said. "Three lines under study. Two go north through hard rock, at a fortune in trestle and tunnel. The third comes through your valley, Mr. Wren. Level ground. Water at the one thing a railroad cannot do without β a spring that never fails. A line must water every twenty miles or die, and Ojo Azul sits where the engineers want their tank and townsite."
Caleb stared at the bold line crossing the valley, through the spring basin, through Tasin's camp, through ground his father's map had named common to all. "And the land along it?"
"Any fool can buy desert for a dollar an acre today," Bellamy said. "But an acre with a depot on it, an acre where a town will stand β that acre sells for ten times the price the day the route is announced. Whoever holds that valley when the directors sign holds the townsite, the water rights for the tanks, the depot grounds, the whole purse. Mr. Voss is not stealing grazing land, son. He is buying himself a railroad town before the railroad knows where it's putting it."
He thought of his father riding that valley in 1868 with chain and compass, writing common land on it, never imagining the words would one day be worth a man's murder to erase. He thought of Tasin's people, given until dawn by a foreman with a paper lie in his pocket.
"Does the railroad know how he's getting it?" Caleb asked.
"The railroad knows nothing, officially." Bellamy rolled the linen tight. "Surveyors see ground, Mr. Wren. We are not paid to see men. But I'll tell you this much, free. My party reports to the directors in nine days. If there is clean title in that valley, we'll write it down. If there is trouble β blood, lawsuits, a question before a court β the directors will not touch it. They will go north and spend the fortune instead."
Caleb stood and put out his hand. "Then there's still time to make some trouble of the honest kind."
"See that you make it in a courtroom," Bellamy said. "Not with a rifle."