He went down the stairs into the white glare of the street, and his hands were shaking β not with fear, he realized, but with the effort of having been polite to the man he now believed had killed Samuel Wren. Twenty gunmen at dawn. A title on Coyote Creek suddenly as fragile as paper. And one old map, and an old chief, standing between Harlan Voss and ten times the price.
Chapter 8
: Dawn at the Spring
They came out of the north an hour after first light, twenty riders strung along the Paloma trail in no hurry at all, because men who are sure of the end do not hurry the beginning. Caleb stood at the barrier and counted them the way his father had taught him to count anything β slowly, and twice. Twenty gunmen. Among them, in a buggy, sat Judge Orin Whitcomb in a black coat, grayer in the face than his name, and beside him Deputy Lyle Odell with a shotgun across his knees and a smile like a man already spending his pay. Harlan Voss rode at the front on a black horse, dressed for church.
On Caleb's side of the barrier there was no array at all. Tasin had sent the women and children and the old ones back into the rocks before dawn, and the camp stood empty in the morning light, lodges cold, which made it look more wronged, not less. Only the two of them waited at the barrier: Caleb with his father's map in an oilcloth roll under his arm, and Tasin, sixty-three years old, standing straight as a fence post in a clean cotton shirt, his hands open at his sides. Behind them the spring lay blue as its name, Ojo Azul, the Blue Eye, reflecting a sky that did not care what men did beneath it.
Voss reined up twenty yards off and did not dismount. "Chief Tasin. Mr. Wren." He spoke as if opening a meeting. "I had hoped the valley would be empty this morning. The company offered fair terms and fair warning."
"The company offered a paper," Tasin said. His English was slow and exact. "I have lived by this water sixty-three years. My father drank here. The paper is younger than my youngest grandchild, and it lies like one."
A few of the gunmen laughed. Odell laughed loudest. But Whitcomb had climbed down from the buggy, stiff in the knees, and was looking past the riders at the spring, and at the old chief standing unarmed before twenty rifles, and Caleb saw the judge's face become that of a man who came expecting paperwork and found something older instead.
"Your Honor," Caleb said, and stepped forward. He held out the oilcloth roll. "Before anything is done here, there's a document you ought to see. My father, Samuel Wren, mapped San Rey Valley in 1868. This is his survey, under his seal. It records this valley as common grazing land, and this spring's water as open to settler, livestock, and native alike β protected for all, owned by none. If that survey stands, sir, there was never anything for the territory to lease to Mr. Voss's company. His lease leases what nobody owned to give."
"Preposterous," Voss said. "Your Honor, this is a delaying trick. The boy kept this map in his saddlebag for two days waiting for an audience."
"A man keeps a thing safe until it matters," Caleb said. "It's mattering now."
Whitcomb took the roll. His hands were spotted and careful. He unrolled the map against the buggy's side, and bent over it, and the whole basin went quiet except for horse leather creaking and somewhere a raven remarking on the morning. Caleb watched the judge's eyes travel β the lines, the lettering, the spring basin drawn and named β and come at last to the seal and the signature.
"Samuel Wren," Whitcomb said, half to himself. "I knew of him. The territory used his surveys for twenty years and never faulted one." He straightened slowly. "Mr. Voss, this bears a territorial surveyor's seal dated 1868. If it is genuine β and it has the look of genuine β then it predates your company's lease by seventeen years, and it describes this valley in terms that do not agree with your filing."
"It is a picture," Voss said. "I told the boy yesterday. Pictures are not title."
"No," said the judge. "But they are evidence, when sealed. And this one flatly contradicts the instrument you have asked me to enforce." He looked from Voss to Tasin to Caleb, and Caleb saw caution and something like anger war in him. "I did not ride out here to preside over an eviction founded on a cloud. Nor," he added, looking hard at Voss, "was I told I would find a question of this size waiting for me. I was told the matter was routine."
Odell shifted his shotgun. "Your Honor, the company's got its orders fromβ"