Chapter 6: Men Who Guard Water
The sun stood white over Miller's Well before the heat had settled into the stones, and already the trough shone with water no Apache hand would be allowed to touch that day.
The well stood in a hollow a half-day's walk from Caldera Flats, where a windmill turned slow in the hot wind and a trough ran green at the edges with life. Three riders sat their horses in the shade of the pump house, rifles across their saddles, hats low. Their leader, a broad man named Doss with a scar through one eyebrow, watched the trail as if he owned the dust on it.
The women came at mid-morning, as women from the camp had come for as long as any living soul could remember. Old Marta walked first, a clay jar balanced on her hip, her gray braid wrapped in faded red cloth. Behind her came two younger women with jars, and a girl leading a mule whose ribs showed plain under its hide. They did not come begging. They came as neighbours come to a shared well in hard country, with empty vessels and the right of long custom in their steps.
Doss raised one hand before they reached the trough. "That is far enough, grandma."
Marta stopped. The mule stamped at the smell of water, and the girl hauled hard on the rope to hold it.
"This well has never had a gate," Marta said in careful English. "Our grandmothers drank here. In the dry years before your windmill, our men helped dig this ground with their hands."
"Ground belongs to Mr. Bragg now," Doss said. "Trough, windmill, and water. He bought the paper on it in Tucson, and paper is law." He spat into the dust. "No more filling jars here. No more watering stock."
One of the young women stepped forward, her jar clutched to her chest. "The children —" she began.
Doss swung his rifle down and laid it across his knees, not aiming, only showing. The other riders shifted, and their horses closed the way to the trough like a fence made of flesh. "Children ain't my orders," Doss said. "My orders is no water leaves this hollow in Apache jars. Turn around while turning is still free."
For a long moment no one moved. The windmill creaked. Water lapped against the trough's edge, spilling into a mud hole where dragonflies hung in the heat — water wasted on dirt while the women stood and looked at it. Marta's hand tightened on her jar until her knuckles paled.
"You guard water you did not make," she said at last, quiet. "Rain did not ask Mr. Bragg's leave to fall. Remember that you said no, when the day comes that you are thirsty in a strange place."
She turned, and the others turned with her. The girl wept without sound as she dragged the mule away. They walked back into the white glare with their jars empty, and the windmill followed them a long way, creak and sigh, like a thing breathing easy in a land where everything else held its breath.
At dusk, thirty miles east, Cornelius Bragg sat at a table of polished walnut in a ranch house built thick against the heat, and studied a map drawn to his liking. Lamplight pooled on the paper.
Rufus Kane stood at his shoulder, hat in hand, his shadow long across the map.
"Here," Bragg said, and set a thick finger down on a blank stretch labelled in a clerk's neat hand: Caldera Flats. "The line from Tucson will want a depot where the ground is flat, the grade is kind, and a town can be raised around a water tank. That valley is the place God built for it, and a band of starving Apaches is squatting on my depot yard."
He drew his finger along a ruled red line. "Rails here. Stock pens here. A man who owns the depot ground owns every steer that moves through this territory. I have the deed, duly bought and paid for." He smiled without warmth. "Paid for, at any rate. The clerk who signed it will not be correcting anybody's memory."
"Deed won't move them," Kane said. "Taklish is old, but he ain't soft. And now they got that well-digger in camp, poking at washes."
Bragg looked up, his eyes pale and patient. "Then we make thirst do what paper cannot. Miller's Well is shut to them as of today. The north spring is watched. Every trough between here and the mesas answers to me. A camp can hold out against men, Rufus. It cannot hold out against an empty jar."
"And the digger?" Kane asked.
"Watch him. If he finds so much as a mud puddle worth naming, I want to know before Taklish does." Bragg rolled the map and tied it with string. "Then they will sell me their home for a drink, and thank me for the bargain."