Cornelius Bragg rode into Caldera Flats at noon the next day with six horsemen and a wagon behind them, and he timed his coming for the hour when thirst is a weight on a man's judgement.
Silas saw the dust first from the shaft, where the trial cut now stood waist-deep. Then came harness and the creak of the wagon, and Bragg himself, big in the saddle despite his fifty-five years, his coat brushed, his hat white as a church shirt, his face pleasant as a man bringing gifts to a christening.
The wagon carried gifts, and meant every eye to see them. Flour. Salt pork. Coffee. Dried apples in an open barrel, so their smell walked ahead like a herald. And at the wagon's tail, lashed upright and sloshing, two full water barrels.
Children drifted toward that wagon like plants leaning toward light, and were called back.
"Chief Taklish," Bragg said, dismounting and removing his hat. "I heard in Tucson that the dry has hit your people cruel hard. It shamed me that a neighbour should suffer while my wells run. So I have come to do a neighbour's part, and a Christian's."
"You have come a long way with a wagon," Taklish said, "to do so small a thing as kindness. Kindness usually rides lighter."
A smile moved in Bragg's beard and did not reach his eyes. "Then here is my mind, plain. This valley is dying, chief. Your people cannot live on it, and I can use it. A railroad depot. Grazing. A town, one day. Sell me the flats, sign the paper my lawyer has drawn fair and legal, and this wagon is yours today, and gold with it." He nodded, and Rufus Kane, lean and still as a holstered pistol, set a leather sack at Taklish's feet and loosened its throat so the coins showed. "Fifty double eagles to begin. Provisions every month for a year. Wagons to carry your people to good land with water in it. Refuse me, and I ride away neighbourly as I came. But the wagon rides with me. A man cannot give twice."
The silence that followed had thirst in it, and hunger, and the smell of apples.
Silas stood at the shaft's edge, pick in hand, and said nothing, because it was not his council and not his land. But his eyes met Saya's, and hers were furious and afraid, for she knew to a mouthful what refusal cost.
Taklish looked at the gold a long time. Then he looked at the children who had crept close again, their faces lifted to the water barrels like flowers to a rain that had not fallen.
"Tomi," the chief said. "Bring me my cup."
The boy came with the wooden cup, empty, held with both hands. Taklish held it up so Bragg could see the dust in its hollow.
"When I was a boy," Taklish said, "my grandfather gave me water from this valley in such a cup, and told me the valley was not ours to keep, only ours to keep faith with. A man may sell his horse, Mr. Bragg, his gun and his boots and the coat off his back. He cannot sell the ground his fathers are buried in, because it was never a thing he owned. It is a thing he owes." He set the cup down in the dust between himself and the gold, gentle as a man setting down a sleeping child. "Take up your sack. Feed your apples to your horses on the ride home. We will keep our thirst. It is the last thing in this valley that is wholly ours, and we are not ready to part with it."
Kane's hand moved, not far, but enough that Joseph Bane stepped forward and two young men with him. Bragg stopped his gunman with two raised fingers, still smiling, and bent to retie the sack with deliberate calm.
It was as he straightened that he saw it.
Saya, thinking only of the fevered elder whose hour it was, had come from the lodge with the healer's gourd, and the gourd was wet at the mouth, and a single bright drop fell from it into the dust and darkened it.
Bragg looked at the dark spot. He looked at the gourd. He looked, for the first time, at the fresh-dug shaft beyond the lodges, its spoil heap pale as new bone, and at Silas Hart standing there with a pick in a dying camp that had no business digging for anything but graves.
"Digging, chief?" he said softly. "In this heat? A man digs like that when he knows where a thing is buried."
"A man digs," Taklish said, "when he has decided to stop waiting to die."
Bragg set his white hat back on his head. "Then I wish your digging joy, sir," he said, and mounted, and rode out with his wagon creaking behind him and the water barrels sloshing, full and untouched. But at the valley's mouth he reined in once and sat looking back a long while, and Kane sat beside him, and neither man was smiling anymore.
Chapter 14: Sabotage