Chapter 27: The Marshal Comes
The spring had run one full day and night before the riders from Tucson were seen on the north trail, raising a long plume of dust. Joseph Bane, watching from the mesa with his ribs still bound, counted seven horses and lowered his glass with a slow grin.
"One rides tall in a black coat," he called down. "And he wears a star."
Marshal Elias Ward came into Caldera Flats at an easy walk, his posse behind him, their horses lathered from the hard ride. He was a lean, grey-whiskered man of sixty with eyes that had looked at too many liars to be fooled by one more. He reined in at the cistern, where the water now stood waist-deep and clear, and took off his hat to the sight of children filling gourds without fear.
"Seventy-one days, they told me in Tucson," he said. "And now this. Somebody tell it to me straight, and start where the paper starts, because paper is why I rode three days."
They laid it before him in Taklish's shade ramada, with Bragg brought out under guard to hear his own ruin spoken aloud. Saya set down Old Marta's written testimony, taken at the telegraph station in her own words. Joseph laid down the treaty marker stone, dug from the grove where it had stood since before Bragg ever saw this valley. Silas opened his father's notebook to the coded page and set Thomas Hart's survey notes beside it, dated and witnessed forty years gone.
Ward read a long time. The only sounds were water running in the channel and Bragg's breathing, which grew shorter with every page.
"This deed you filed in Tucson," Ward said at last, tapping Bragg's paper with one finger, "claims the flats were sold to you by a man named Abel Dray. Trouble is, Cornelius, Abel Dray died in eighteen sixty-nine. And your county clerk, a nervous fellow named Pruitt, sang like a church choir the morning I showed him the forgery. He took your money. He has given me the true ledger, with your payment writ plain."
Bragg's face went the colour of old ash. "A valley of savages and a squatter's spring," he said. "That is all this is. The railroad would have made this country worth something."
"The railroad," Ward answered, "does not get to steal country to make it worth something. I have a warrant for the forgery, another for hiring men to burn a storehouse with a child inside it, and a third concerning the wells your riders closed to women coming for water." He stood, and his men stood with him, and the sound of it was final. "Cornelius Bragg, you are under arrest. You will ride to Tucson in irons, and you may explain the worth of things to a judge."
"You cannot hold a man on an old woman's story and a dead man's scribble," Bragg said, but the fight had gone out of his voice, and when the irons closed on his wrists he did not resist. Rufus Kane was dead at the cave mouth by his own dynamite, and no warrant would trouble him now. Bragg looked once at the cistern as they led him past, at Tomi filling a cup for a posse horse, and something in his face twisted that was not quite shame and not quite grief.
"I would have paid gold for that water," he said.
"You were offered the chance to drink of it freely," Taklish said. "All men were. That is the difference between us, Bragg. It was never the paying we refused. It was the owning."
Saya, who had ridden through Kane's ambush to reach the telegraph wire with Joseph at her side, stood before the marshal with her chin high. "And the flats?" she asked. "Will the paper in Tucson leave my people in peace on their own land now?"
Ward took a folded document from his coat and handed it to Taklish, whose land it was. "The governor's office has confirmed the old treaty boundaries and struck the railroad claim from the record as founded on fraud. The depot, if the railroad still wants one, can be built on land honestly bought, like other men's work." He put his hat back on. "What is under this ground belongs with the ground, and the ground is yours. What you do with the water is your affair. From what I have seen riding in, your affair is being better handled than most men's."
He drank then, because Taklish offered, from the chief's own cup, and pronounced it the coldest water in Arizona Territory, and for a moment the stern face creased into something near a smile.
That evening the posse camped by the channel as guests, and no man among them was turned away from the water, and none was charged a cent for it, which one young deputy declared the strangest and finest thing he had seen in seven years of riding.
Bragg ate his supper in irons, watching the sun go down red over the mesas, and said nothing more at all.