If the seventy-two hours began when Desba, Haseya, and Kaya first came down the creek path asking for water, then the women had until tomorrow's dusk β no more. If it began when Nascha led the full party through the gate at first light the next day, they had until the morning after. Amos was not a lawyer. He was a rancher with a rifle he had not fired in anger in years, and a well half the valley would need before the rains.
He stood at the kitchen window with cold coffee and watched Nascha organize the camp as if the ranch were a village that had simply forgotten its shape. Two women tended the fire. Three carried water not only for drinking but for washing, sparingly, the way people do who know water as a covenant and not a convenience. Desba sat mending a torn dress with stitches so small Amos could barely see them from the porch. No one wasted anything. No one raised her voice. Grief, he was learning, could be very quiet and still fill every acre.
On the ridge to the east, something moved that was not cattle.
He did not reach for the rifle at once. He reached for the field glass Ruth's brother had left behind, and he took his time.
What was there was riders. Three, perhaps four, sitting their horses at the line where his land rose toward the Fortuna road, far enough to claim they were only passing, near enough to count heads in his yard. The sun struck a buckle, a rifle barrel laid across a saddle, the pale hat of a man who did not trouble to hide. They stayed the length of his looking and then withdrew, unhurried, over the ridge β not gone, he understood, but reporting.
Nascha had seen them too. She came to the porch without being called, her bracelet catching light β turquoise and black, the red diamond at its center like a drop of something that would not dry.
"Company men," she said. It was not a question.
"Watching," Amos said. "Counting."
"They counted us at the wash before they burned it," she said. "Counting is the first work they do."
He set the glass down. "The paper your friend left me β Ruth's paper β it gives you until tomorrow night at the surest reading. Maybe a morning more. After that it gives nothing. I won't dress that up."
Nascha looked toward the cottonwood, toward the graves, as if consulting someone. "My mother walked with Ruth to the office in Fortuna," she said. "She told me before she died that your wife spoke of the well as a promise made to whoever came thirsty. She did not say it would save us. She said it would stand between us and them for three days, and that three days is a long time if the people inside them do not waste them."
Amos felt the papers against his chest. He had spent two years wasting days, letting fences sag and cattle drift, because wasting them had hurt less than using them. Perhaps the drawer had been Ruth's way of waiting until the waste in him ran out.
He made his decision the way he made most true things β not in a blaze, but in a settling, like silt coming to rest in a bucket until the water clears.
"Then we won't waste them," he said. "The paper says anyone may shelter. It doesn't say some of you, or the ones who can prove a paper of their own, or the ones a marshal approves of. It says anyone. So it will be honored. All of it. Every hour of it, for every woman inside that gate, until the last minute runs out β and when it runs out, we'll have whatever we've built inside the time. Food counted. Water carried. The barn made ready. And I'll ride the boundary myself so no man can say he didn't know this ground was claimed under federal law."
Nascha studied him a long moment. "They will come before the hours end," she said. "Ferris will come. He does not wait well when Hollis is paying him not to wait."
"I expect he will," Amos said.
"And when he comes inside the hours, with men?"
"Then he'll have to read," Amos said, and was surprised to find something almost like Ruth's dry humor in his own voice. "Whether he likes reading is his affair."
She nodded once, and went back to her people, and within the hour the ranch had changed its rhythm β stores inventoried, water barrels filled and covered, the gate bar oiled so it would move fast and true. Amos walked the fence line at noon with the document in his shirt and his rifle in the crook of his arm, not threatening the empty ridge, just present on his own land, visible, a keeper at his station.
On the ridge, late in the day, the riders showed again. This time there were more.
Chapter 13
Riders from Fortuna