Bragg came at midmorning, bringing paper to do guns' work.
They heard the horses first — shod hooves on hardpan, unhurried, the sound of men who believe the road belongs to them. Eight riders. Cornelius Bragg rode at their head in a cream coat no dust had ever been allowed to settle on, beside him a county deputy with a saddlebag of documents and a reluctant face. Rufus Kane rode at Bragg's right hand, saying nothing, watching everything — the shaft, the channel, the covered cup of spring water by Saya's door.
The camp gathered without being summoned. Joseph stood with his weight off his bound leg, leaning on a crutch Silas had cut, and would not sit though Saya commanded it twice. Tomi pressed against Chief Taklish's side, wooden cup in hand.
Chief Taklish received them standing, where all might hear.
"Cornelius Bragg," he said. "You come to a camp with empty water jars. Have you brought water, that you ride with eight horses?"
"I have brought law, Taklish," Bragg said pleasantly, and dismounted. "What a man cannot settle with kindness, the Territory settles for him. Deputy, read your paper."
The deputy unrolled a document stiff with seals and read in a flat voice. By a deed recorded at Tucson, the lands called Caldera Flats, with all timber, range, and waters thereupon and thereunder, had passed to Cornelius Bragg and the Caldera Railroad and Cattle Company. All persons on said lands without written lease were trespassers, to vacate within three days, after which removal would be effected by the sheriff. Any excavation or diversion of water was forbidden from this hour.
The silence that followed had a weight you could set a kettle on. Somewhere a baby, too thirsty for a proper cry, made a small, dry sound.
"Three days," Bragg said, almost gently. "More grace than the paper requires. Take your people east to the agency, Taklish. There will be flour there, and beef, and a government well that does not ask you to dig through stone with spoons. This —" he gestured at the flats, the mesas, the drying gardens, the graves of four generations at the valley's edge "— is a depot ground now. A railroad cannot turn aside for sentiment, any more than a river can."
"Your river," Taklish said, "flows uphill toward your pocket. I have watched it do so for twenty years."
Bragg smiled as at a child's riddle. Then his eye found the covered cup by Saya's door, and the wet stain by the shaft, and his face sharpened.
"You have found water," he said. It was not a question.
"We have found a promise of water," Silas said, stepping forward from among the diggers, hat in hands. "Which is more than a paper has ever dug, Mr. Bragg. I never yet saw a deed sweat."
"And you are?"
"Silas Hart. I dig wells."
"Hart." Bragg weighed the name. "There was a Hart scouted for the Army in the seventies. Thomas Hart."
"My father."
"Your father once cost me a silver claim by telling tales about where water did and did not run. How the world shrinks." He turned back to Taklish. "The paper covers waters thereunder, old man. If your digger has opened something on my land, it is my water, and I will thank him with a fair wage when he comes to my ranch for it." He mounted with the ease of a man twenty years younger. "Three days. I will send wagons on the third morning. I am not without Christian feeling."
Kane, who had not spoken, leaned in his saddle as the riders turned. "Stone falls hard in this country, Hart. Careful it don't fall again — on a bigger scale."
They rode out in their own dust. The deputy rode last, and at the camp's edge he hesitated, looked back at Taklish, and touched his hat in a gesture no one could mistake for triumph.
That night the council fire burned small, for wood was nearly as precious as water. Marta spoke first, poking the ash. "I remember the marking of the boundary when I was a girl no taller than Tomi. Soldiers came with an iron chain and a stone with the eagle cut upon it, and my father set his hand on that stone and the captain set his, and it was sworn the flats were ours so long as grass grows. Bragg's paper was not there. My eyes were."
"Where is the stone now, grandmother?" Saya asked.
"Under the twin junipers beyond the north arroyo, if floods have spared it. The eagle will still be on its face."
Silas sat with his father's notebook on his knee. "A deed can be forged in an afternoon," he said. "In Tucson a clerk keeps the true books. If Marta's words were carried there, and the boundary stone found, a marshal could smell which paper is honest."
Taklish looked long into the small fire. "Then words must ride," he said at last, "faster than Bragg's wagons. And they must ride tomorrow, before his three days become an excuse for rifles."
Chapter 19: Riding for Proof