They gave him water first, and a bowl of cornmeal and meat, and let him eat sitting on a stone beneath the great cottonwood with his hands unbound. Jonas knew the courtesies of armed men well enough to understand: he was not a prisoner awaiting torment, but a matter awaiting judgment, which was graver. Grandmother Saba sat near and pronounced, in accented English, that he was too thin for a rancher. "Your cattle eat. You do not," she said. "This is a foolish arrangement." Jonas, who had not eaten since noon the day before, could find no argument.
Then Chief Nahlin came into the circle. He was about fifty-eight, tall, straight as a lodgepole, with deep lines at the eyes and a gravity that needed no feathers or paint. He wore a plain shirt and a silver concho, and his authority without display, because it fit. He sat, gestured for Jonas to remain seated, and studied the younger man's face as if searching it for a road he had once traveled.
"You have your father's jaw," Nahlin said at last, in careful, excellent English. "And his way of sitting still when sitting still is the hardest work. I knew Amos Hale. I have waited thirty years to pay what I owe him. It is time you knew its name."
He told it plainly, as a man lays stones. In the spring of 1851, Nahlin had been a youth, proud and foolish, and had ridden out alone after raiders who had taken horses from his people's camp. The rains came up the Rio Sombra faster than any man could outrun them. The flood took his horse and carried him, battered and half drowned, against a snag of driftwood in a torrent the color of brick. With the river filling his ears, he understood he was finished. Then a rope came out of the rain. Amos Hale β twenty years old, traveling west with nothing but a mule and a stubbornness his descendants would inherit β had gone into the flood on the end of his own rope, tied to a cottonwood, and dragged the young Apache out by main strength, though the river took his mule, his provisions, and very nearly them both.
"He did not know my name," Nahlin said. "He did not ask it before the rope, only after, when we lay in the mud like two drowned dogs, laughing because we were not dead. For three days we shared his dry blanket and my knowledge of the country until the waters fell. When I offered him horses, he refused. He said a man does not sell another man his own life back to him." The chief's mouth turned briefly. "Your father was the most irritating honorable man I have ever known. I see the condition runs in the family like poor eyesight."
His father had been dead five years, and grief, Jonas had learned, does not diminish so much as it learns quieter rooms. He took the silver locket from his pocket and opened it. Inside were no portraits β Amos Hale had distrusted likenesses β only the engraving matched on the case: two willow trees bending over water. "He marked the place where it happened," Jonas said. "He never told me whose life he pulled out of that river. Only that the trees leaned together afterward, like they were talking it over." Nahlin looked at the locket a long time. "Then the debt is witnessed," he said softly.
Then the chief's face changed, and the wryness went out of it. "Now I must pay honesty for honesty. Your brother Micah came to us two years ago, and again last spring. He surveyed under Bell Mountain for the railroad men, and then β alone β he found what their maps do not hold: a lode of silver beneath the mountain, rich beyond the dreams of the men who sent him. He came to warn us. He refused Harrow's gold and took instead our promise that the valley would be defended." Nahlin paused. "Micah is dead. It was no fall, whatever Cinnabar was told. Ezekiel Harrow's men staged the accident when he would not sell the location, and they failed to take it from him before he died. He died keeping our secret."
Jonas sat very still, the bowl forgotten in his hands. Micah β loud, laughing Micah, who could read a survey chain in the dark and cheat at cards with his whole heart β dead of a cliff fall, the letter had said, the inquest a half-hour formality in a town where Harrow Consolidated owned the bank, the assayer, and half the council of Cinnabar besides.
"Harrow believes the knowledge passed to you," Nahlin said. "Brother to brother, father to son β this is how such men think. His spies watch your ranch. His men burned the wagon at the crossing, hunting a guide who had once found our canyon mouth, and the child they carried off is of our blood." The chief leaned forward. "You were brought here because the debt demands I save your life. And you may lose it because a baron in Cinnabar has decided you are the map he could not buy."