The shaft died in the night, and no one heard it die.
That was the part Silas could not forgive himself for, standing before sunrise with the camp gathered silent around the ruin. A cave-in makes a noise, like the earth clearing its throat. But earth that is helped, shovelled and levered by knowing hands in the dark, can fall as quietly as a held breath let out slow, and someone had persuaded nearly a ton of it.
The trial shaft, three days of the camp's believing made solid, stood choked with its own spoil. The walls Saya had helped him dress were gone. The timbering Joseph had hauled from the far canyon lay split and buried like broken bones. And the tools, picks and shovels and ropes, even his father's compass, had been scattered across the grove in a wide, deliberate arc.
The meaning was: we can reach you in the dark and touch anything you love.
Joseph Bane said it plainer. "Kane," he said, and spat. "Bragg's dog has been in our camp like a thief, and we slept around our own well while he fouled it."
But not everyone looked at the grove. Some looked at Silas.
He felt the slow turning of faces, the old suspicion rising like heat off stone. An elder named White Clay spoke it aloud, with terrible courtesy. "The white man found the water no Apache could find. The white man chose the place to dig. The white man told us the shaft must stand unguarded, for who would harm a well?" His eyes were not unkind. That was the worst of it. "Now the shaft is filled in the night without a sound, and the white man slept at the far side of the camp, where no man can say what his hands did after dark."
Saya stepped forward so fast her shadow crossed Silas's boots. "You speak of a man who drank last in the cave and gave his share away at the fire—"
"I am not on trial before friends," Silas said quietly. "Let him finish. A camp that cannot ask its questions out loud will answer them in whispers, and whispers dig worse holes than shovels."
It might have gone hard then. Grief needs a shape to strike at, and his was the only white shape in the valley. Taklish sat unmoving, letting his people spend their anger in words, and Silas bore it, because some blame was honestly his: he had asked for no guard, trusting the desert night, and the night had been walked through by enemies.
The deliverance, when it came, came small, and on bare feet, tugging at Saya's skirt.
"Auntie," Tomi said, in the carrying whisper of a child who has been saving a thing up. "Why did the horse man wear his spurs in the soft place? Horses do not go in the soft place. Grandfather says spurs are for horses."
The camp went still in a new way.
Saya knelt. "What horse man, little one?"
"In the night I woke because my belly hurt from being hungry, and I went behind our lodge, and I saw a man at the digging. Not our man." He pointed at Silas without doubt. "Taller. With the hat pulled down. He was throwing the shovels, Auntie, one, one, one, like he was angry at them. And when he walked in the soft place by the ash tree, his feet made crying sounds. Ching. Ching. Like the trader's money, but sad."
Silas was already moving. The soft place was the pale apron of ash and dust at the grove's edge, undisturbed all summer, and in it, clear as print in a primer, ran a line of boot prints coming from the north rocks and going back to them. He knelt as his father and ten years of tracking had taught him, and the camp knelt with him.
Beside the right heel, pressed deep where a man shifts his weight to throw, sat a small, unmistakable wound in the dust: the star-shaped mark of a spur rowel, sunk and dragged an inch as the foot turned.
"Our men go barefoot or in moccasins at night in their own camp," Taklish said from behind them, and every head turned, for the chief had come among them unmarked. "And the well-digger was given a blanket by my granddaughter's fire, where Old Marta, who does not sleep, sat awake until the moon set. His sleep was witnessed by a better guard than any I would have set."
White Clay bowed his head to Silas, stiffly, as a man pays a debt. "I asked my question out loud," he said, "as you wished it asked. I am answered."
"Then pick up a shovel," Joseph Bane said, and thrust one into White Clay's hands and another into Silas's, his grin the first unshadowed thing the morning had produced. "Whoever filled our hole has made one mistake a child could point out." He looked down at Tomi, gravely. "Tell them, scout. What do the spurs mean?"
"It means he has to walk back," Tomi said, "and we will be awake."