"No," she said. "It is the hours. We will use them."
Behind them, Kaya was already drawing water, and the bucket going down into the cool dark was the steadiest sound in the world.
Chapter 16
Dust on the Western Ridge
Ferris kept his promise before the second sunrise had burned the frost from Dry Creek. Amos heard the riders first, not as a sound so much as a change in the yard โ the mules lifting their heads in the corral, a hen scattering from the porch step, Nascha going very still at the well with a bucket in her hands. He stepped out with his hat in one hand and Ruth's registration paper folded in his shirt pocket.
They came up the Fortuna road in no hurry at all, nine of them this time, spread wide so their dust made them seem more. Ferris rode at the center in a clean black coat, as if a clean coat could make a dirty errand respectable. Two of the men carried rifles across their saddles. One, a lean fellow Amos did not know, had a loop of rope at his pommel, and the sight of that rope did more to harden the women behind Amos than any rifle could have done.
"You had your seventy-two hours to think, Delaney," Ferris called, reining in beyond the gate. "Thinking time's done. Hollis wants this yard cleared by noon, and I mean to see it done peaceable if you'll let me."
Amos walked to the gate and laid a hand on the top rail. "This well is a federal public water station," he said. "You read the paper yourself. These women are under its shelter, and the hours on that shelter ain't run out. You know the law you're sworn to, Marshal, even if Hollis pays you to forget it."
Ferris smiled without any mirth reaching his eyes. "Papers get lost. Fires happen. Widowers get confused about dates." He let the words sit in the morning air where everyone could hear the threat inside them. "Step aside and nobody needs to learn how this ends the hard way."
Nascha came to stand at Amos's shoulder, not behind him. She had faced hunger, flight, and the taking of her men without bending, and she did not bend now. "We have taken nothing," she said, clear and even. "We drank water that was offered to the thirsty. If that is a crime in Fortuna, then let your judge say it before witnesses, not your hired guns at a gate."
One of the gunmen laughed and spat into the dust. The sound was small, but Amos felt the whole yard tighten around it. The women had gathered near the house and the well house, some holding nothing but each other's hands. An old woman began to speak low in Apache, a prayer or a counting of names, and the younger ones steadied at the sound of her voice.
Ferris raised two fingers, and his men eased forward a horse-length. Rifles did not rise, but hands settled nearer to them. Amos thought of the rifle inside his own door, thought of Ruth's grave under the cottonwood, thought of how a man could lose everything he had left in the space of one foolish minute. He kept his hand flat on the rail and his voice low. "You ride through this gate against that paper," he said, "and you'll have to explain it to more than me."
"To who?" Ferris scoffed. "There's nobody coming, Delaney. That's the part you never did understand about this country. Help is a story folks tellโ"
He stopped. He stopped because Nascha had turned her face to the west, and because the mules had turned too, and because even the gunmen, feeling their horses stir, looked up toward the ridge that ran long and red above Dry Creek. Dust stood there where no dust should have been at that hour, a pale plume rising against the morning, slow and deliberate and growing. It was not the dust of nine men trying to look like twenty. It was the dust of a column.
They watched it in silence while the plume resolved into shapes: first the guidon, small and bright, then the blue line of riders in pairs, then the glint of sun on brass and bit. Cavalry. United States cavalry, coming down off the western ridge at a walk that wasted nothing. And behind the troopers, walking in the dust with their heads up and their hands bound before them, came a column of men on foot โ company overseers, by their clothes, though among them Amos saw a second file, Apache men, wrists still roped from the camp they had been taken from.
Ferris had gone the color of old paper. His two raised fingers, forgotten, stayed in the air a moment too long, and then he brought his hand down slowly. His gunmen suddenly found great interest in their reins, in the sky, in anything but the yard they had come to clear.