Weeks later, a traveller crossing Caldera Flats at noon would rub his eyes and look again, and some did, dismounting to make certain the heat had not conjured it. Where the earth had lain cracked and white, green was coming back in long patient ribbons, following the water. Grass stood ankle-deep along the channel. The gardens lay dark and rich, corn at a man's knee, beans climbing their poles, squash leaves broad as hats. The old burned mesquite grove, which all had thought dead past any prayer, had put out green shoots from its blackened limbs, as if the trees had only been sleeping, waiting to hear water underground with their roots.
The well-house stood at the heart of it, its stone walls cool in the fiercest hour, its door open, as the rule above it commanded. Silas Hart kept the channel clear, mended the troughs, and read the stone and the bees for any change in the spring's humour, and the spring gave no sign of failing. Travellers of every nation drank there. Smallholders drove their stock in from the dry ranges and drove them home fattened on grass by the water's edge. A trader from Tucson, an honest man this time, set up a fair exchange under the ramada once a month, and the beginnings of a true peace showed themselves, not in speeches, but in full barrels, shared meals, and children of three peoples playing one game in the dust.
Marshal Ward wrote once, a plain letter Saya read aloud at the fire: Bragg had been tried in Tucson on the forgery and the burning, convicted on both, and would have some years in Yuma to consider the worth of things honestly. Pruitt the clerk had turned witness and lost his office. The railroad was laying its line twenty miles east, on land it had bought and paid for, and if the depot-yard men wanted water, they could apply to the council of Caldera Flats like anyone else.
"They will be given it," Taklish said, to some surprise around the fire. "Freely. For the rule does not ask a man's business before it fills his cup. But it will be given, never sold, and never owned, and the giving is ours. That is not a small thing. That is the whole thing."
The old chief was failing gently that autumn, as very old men do even in good seasons, but he failed in comfort, in shade, with water at his hand and his granddaughter's gardens below his door, and he declared himself content. "I sealed this spring with Thomas Hart when we were young men and afraid," he told Silas one evening. "You opened it with my granddaughter when you were no longer young and had learned not to be. The water outlasted both our fears. See that the rule outlasts us all."
Saya walked the channel at dusk now as a healer walks among patients she expects to live. Her knowledge of roots and remedies, no longer spent on rationing sips, went into salves and teas for ordinary hurts, and folk came to the Flats for the healer as well as the water. In the evenings she sat with Silas on the well-house step, and what had begun in thirst and danger settled, unhurried, into the deepest companionship either of them had known, the kind that does not need announcing because the whole valley can see it, like grass coming back.
And on a bright morning near the season's turning, a wagon came in off the Tucson road: a tired family, a man and woman and a little girl of perhaps six, with dust on their clothes, an empty barrel in the wagon bed, and that quiet that thirst lays on travellers.
Silas saw them, and Saya saw them, and both, smiling, stayed where they were, because the well-house already had its keeper for that hour.
Tomi, seven years old and grave with responsibility, came out of the stone doorway carrying a cup with both hands, filled to the brim, walking the careful, spill-nothing walk of a child who understands the value of what he carries. He brought it to the little girl by the wagon wheel, and she drank, and her mother after her, and her father last, with his hat in his hand.
"There is more," Tomi told them, with great authority. "There is always more. That is the rule of this house. My uncle Silas carved it over the door."
From the step, Saya slipped her hand into Silas's at last, openly, in the full morning sun, and he closed his scarred fingers round hers.
Below them the channel ran shining through the green valley, past the gardens and the troughs and the playing children, out of the shadow of the burned grove where two fathers, long ago, had hidden a mercy and trusted the future to find it. The earth above it was no longer burning. It was a garden, a home, a promise kept.
And the spring beneath it ran on, cold and clear and endless, for every living thing, owned by no man, under the wide Arizona sun.