He came out of the dusk from the east, when the mesas were burning red and the first thin stars stood in a sky still pale with heat.
The lookout saw him first and called down, not in alarm, but in wonder. A lone rider in such a season was either lost, or mad, or carrying a purpose. His horse was a gaunt bay, picking its way down the stony trail with care. The man sat tall, hat low, a shovel and pick bound behind the saddle, and an old Army canteen slapping empty at his knee.
"Rifles," Joseph Bane said, and two young men moved without haste to the edge of camp, where they could be seen and where they could see.
The rider stopped a full bowshot out. Slowly, so no man could mistake his meaning, he lifted his rifle from its boot, leaned down, and laid it in the dust beside his horse's feet. Then he took his pistol from his belt by two fingers and laid it beside the rifle. He untied the canteen, held it up, and shook it. It rattled hollow. Last, he raised both hands, open and empty, and rode forward at a walk with the reins loose on his horse's neck.
"He comes as a beggar or as a guest," Old Marta said from the fire. "No thief shows his hands."
Saya stood with Tomi behind her skirts and studied the stranger as he dismounted. He was perhaps thirty-six, lean and weathered, with eyes the color of river stone. His coat was mended at the elbows. Around his neck hung a brass compass cracked across the glass, and he touched it once, as a man touches a thing that remembers for him.
"Evening," he said. His voice was low and unhurried. "My name is Silas Hart. I was a scout once, and after that a digger of wells. I saw your smoke two days out and lost it, and found your trail today by the buzzards circling nothing. That told me plain enough what kind of trouble lives here."
"You rode into a dying camp with an empty canteen," Joseph said. "That is a fool's arithmetic, white man."
"It would be, if I'd come to take." Silas looked past him toward the cistern, where Tomi stood clutching his wooden cup. He saw the cracked lips, the jars under their coverings, the horses with heads hanging. Something crossed his face then, not pity, but recognition, as if thirst were a country he had lived in.
He reached, slow and open-handed, into his saddlebag and brought out a small cloth bundle. Inside lay his own last ration: a strip of dried meat, two hard biscuits, and in a stoppered bottle, perhaps a cup of water he had been hoarding against the ride out again.
He set the bottle in the dust before Taklish, who had come forward in silence, leaning on his staff.
"That is all I have in the world to give," Silas said. "It is not much. But a man does not pass a camp where a child holds out an empty cup and keep his own water in his bag. My father would have taken the strap to me, and he would have been right."
No one moved. Water offered freely, in such a time, was so rare it had become almost suspect, like kindness from an enemy.
Saya stepped forward. It was her place; the water was under her hand, and the giving and refusing of it were hers to answer for.
"If we take your water, stranger, we cannot pay it back."
"I did not offer it as a loan."
"White men who come to Caldera Flats," she said, "have come for land, for silver, for grazing. They smile first. I have buried people their smiling brought to grief. Why should I believe your hands are empty of anything but weapons?"
Silas did not flinch, and he did not plead. "You should not, yet," he said. "Belief is dear at any price, and dearer now. Leave my rifle in the dust. Keep a man watching me while I sleep. I ask only to be heard by your council, because I dig wells, and because where men see a dead valley, I have sometimes seen water that has only gone hiding."
"You can find water here?" Tomi burst out, holding up his cup. "Under the ground? Truly?"
Silas crouched down, slow, until his eyes were level with the boy's. "Truly, I have found it in places as dry as this, little man. And truly, I have failed in places that looked kinder. Any man who swears more than that is selling something."
The boy looked at the bottle, then at Saya. Saya looked at her grandfather.
Taklish bent, with the care of age, and picked up the stranger's water, and poured it himself into Tomi's wooden cup, to the brim, while the whole camp watched in a silence so complete that the pouring could be heard, thin and bright, like the first note of a song the valley had almost forgotten.
Chapter 3: When the Ground Lies