Chapter 12: One Canteen
By sunrise the canteen stood in the centre of Taklish's lodge like a chief at council, and every soul in Caldera Flats had come to look at it.
No one touched it. That was the wonder Silas carried all that morning, that a camp of thirsting people could stand in a circle around water and let it be. Children pressed close and were drawn back by their mothers with the tenderness of women guarding a sleeping infant. Tomi, waking to find his wooden cup wet at the rim from the share Saya had saved him, drank in solemn silence and then asked the question the whole camp was asking.
"Is there a whole river hiding, Grandfather? Under the burned trees?"
"There is a beginning hiding," Taklish said. "A river is what men and patience may make of a beginning."
Saya took charge of the proof as she took charge of all precious things, by measure. The canteen was poured into her healer's gourd, and from the gourd she gave the morning's gift: a swallow for the two fevered elders, a swallow for the nursing mother whose milk had thinned to almost nothing, a swallow for the smallest child. Silas understood that rationing, done by loving hands, was not the opposite of generosity. It was generosity taught to last.
"And you?" he asked, when the gourd hung light again.
"I drank in the cave," she said. "That is more than most. It will hold me."
"It will not," he said, and offered her his own untouched share in its tin cup, and after a moment's pride she took it, because a healer who falls cannot lift anyone.
By mid-morning the council fire had become a place of work. Silas knelt in the dust with a stick and drew the valley as his father had taught him: here the burned grove, here the cave and the trickle, no stronger yet than a thread, here, lower, the dry stone cistern. Between them a long, sloping fall of earth and rock.
"A thread will not fill a cistern carried in canteens," he said. "But water loves a road downhill. We dig two works, not one. A shaft above the cave, straight and timbered, so men can go down and open the chamber wider. And a channel from the grove to the cistern, lined with stone, so that when the spring is freed it runs to us instead of away under the earth."
Joseph Bane crouched over the drawing, frowning. "That is a summer of digging, white man, for a camp with no summer left in it."
"It is three weeks of digging if every hand digs," Silas said. "And the trickle keeps the diggers alive while they dig. That is the gift of it. The water pays for its own freeing, a swallow at a time."
"Then every hand digs," Taklish said, and the council was over, because the old chief had a way of ending talk at the precise moment it turned into decision.
They marked the shaft that afternoon, Silas setting his father's compass on a flat stone, Saya driving the first stake while Tomi held the string with grave importance. By evening the trial cut stood knee-deep, the tools laid out in a row, picks and shovels and two good ropes, and the camp went to its blankets with a sound Silas had not heard there before: planning, spoken aloud, for a day beyond tomorrow.
At dusk, while the light lay red on the mesas, the trader Lemuel rode in.
He was a lean, smiling man with a pack mule and a habit of arriving wherever sorrow had made people ready to sell cheap. He brought salt, coffee, needles, news priced by the telling, and took his supper at Marta's fire under the law of hospitality. Then Saya, making her evening round, carried the gourd past his fire to the fevered elders, and Lemuel saw firelight strike wetness on its mouth, and saw an old man drink and close his eyes like a man at a sacrament.
Lemuel's smile stayed where it was. Only his eyes changed, the way a snare changes when the cord is drawn.
"Must be the last of your store, mother," he said pleasantly to Marta. "Hoarded deep, was it?"
"All good things in this camp are hoarded deep," Marta said, "including silence, trader. Eat your supper."
He ate it. He asked no more questions, which told Silas, watching from the lodge shadow, more than questions would have done. A thing Lemuel did not haggle over was a thing he meant to sell to someone else.
Before full dark his mule was packed. Before moonrise he was gone northward at a pace no man rides for salt or coffee, toward the ranch of Cornelius Bragg, carrying nothing in his saddlebags but a story worth gold to the man who owned every well for forty miles, and meant to own them all.
Chapter 13: Bragg's Gold