The riders came with the first grey light, when the camp's fires were low and the guard at the grove path was changing. Cornelius Bragg had chosen his hour like a man who had studied war in books written by other men's blood.
Tomi heard them first. The boy had gone with his wooden cup to the channel head, where damp sometimes gathered before dawn, and the sound came to him across the flats โ not loud, but wrong: too many horses, moving too steady, with iron in it.
He ran, barefoot over ground that cut his feet, and his thin shout woke the camp before the first shot did.
"Riders! Mr. Silas! Riders from the east!"
Bragg came at their head in a black coat, his white beard trimmed like a judge's, as if arriving at a courthouse and not a theft. Rufus Kane rode at his right hand, rifle across his saddle horn, and behind them came fourteen men with hats pulled low and faces set to the work. They did not come to talk. Bragg had talked in that valley before, with gold in his hand, and the valley had refused him.
"You are trespassing on land deeded and recorded!" Bragg called, and his voice carried well โ it was a voice made for courtrooms and railroad meetings. "The shaft and works upon it are company property as of this morning. Stand away from the grove, and no one need be hurt."
Taklish walked out into the open ground, alone, unhurried, his blanket over his shoulders and nothing in his hands. Seventy-one days of thirst had pared him to wire and bone, and he had never looked more like a chief.
"This land was old when your paper was a tree," he said. "Ride back, Cornelius Bragg. The marshal will settle your deed. That is what you told the sheriff, is it not? That paper settles things? Then wait for your paper."
For a moment Bragg's face showed the man beneath the beard. "The marshal," he said, "will find company men holding this ground when he comes. Possession, Chief. Even savages understand possession."
He lifted one gloved hand. Kane's rifle came up with it.
The camp had not spent the night idle, nor had Silas spent it trusting Bragg's patience. While the council heard the plan for the seal, Joseph and the young men had dug shallow pits across the grove path and covered them with brush and dust, strung rope at a horse's chest height where the trail narrowed, and rolled loose rock onto the slope above the shaft, held by a prop and a lariat.
The first two riders through the narrows found the rope. It did not kill them โ it was not meant to kill them. It unhorsed them into the dust in a tangle of cursing and thrashing animals, and the pit took a third man's horse to its knees. Joseph's shot from the rocks cut the lariat, and the loose rock came down across the path in a roaring slide, not on the men, but before them, sealing the trail like a gate slammed in a rich man's face.
Then the firing began in earnest.
Silas fired from behind the cistern stones with Saya at his left, loading his spare rifle with hands that did not shake at all now. "The rocks!" he shouted. "Keep them off the shaft โ do not chase them, let them come to the rocks!"
Kane's men dismounted and worked forward from boulder to boulder like the hired professionals they were. They were good, and they were many, and the camp's ammunition was counted in handfuls. A bullet struck dust from the stone an inch from Silas's cheek. Another split the shaft's head-timber. Down in the cut, two old men and Marta herself passed tools up the line, refusing, absolutely refusing, to leave the works.
"Grandfather!" Saya cried. Taklish had not moved. A gunman swung toward that still figure, and Saya was already moving, out of cover, when Tomi's scream stopped every heart in the valley.
The boy had climbed onto the shaft scaffold, his wooden cup in his hand, waving it as children will at soldiers, as if to show the riders this was a place of cups and not of rifles.
Kane himself levelled at the movement. His shot struck the scaffold timber above the boy's head, and Tomi clung on while the whole fight seemed to check for one breath.
"Enough!" Bragg roared, and whether he feared a dead child on his hands before the marshal came, or saw his advantage leaking into delay, his hand chopped down. "The cave! Kane โ take men around the upper trail and secure the cave mouth. We hold the water underground, and the rest is thirst and arithmetic!"
Kane was already moving, with four men, up the slope toward the rocks above the grove โ toward the cave mouth, the marked chamber, and the seal โ and Silas, reloading on the run, went after him through the smoke with Joseph at his shoulder and Saya's voice behind them both.
Chapter 25: Kane's Last Shot