The Well Belonged to the Thirsty: A Widowed Cowboy, Twenty-Five Women at His Gate, and the Promise His Dead Wife Left Behind

Nascha's hand found Amos's sleeve, once, briefly, the way a person steadies herself on a rail in high water. "Those men," she whispered. "Amos. Those men walking — I know the tall one's walk. That is—" She could not finish. She did not need to. The column came on down the ridge, and the morning, which had held its breath at the gate, began at last to let it go.

Chapter 17

The Freed Men

Captain Henry Aldous rode through the gate as if he had been expected for supper, touched two fingers to his hat brim for Nascha, and only then looked at Marshal Ferris. He was a spare man of fifty with dust worked into every seam of his uniform and the particular tiredness of someone who had ridden through the night on orders he believed in. Behind him, his troopers halted in the yard in good order, and the bound overseers were led to the shade of the barn and set down under guard, where they stared at the ground and said nothing at all.

"Marshal," Aldous said pleasantly. "You're a long way from your office, in interesting company. We'll talk directly." He turned in his saddle. "Sergeant, cut those Apache men loose. Gently, now. They've had enough of ropes to last them."

The sergeant and two troopers went down the line with knives, and the ropes fell away strip by strip. The freed men stood blinking in the full light, wrists raw, shoulders stooped from labor that had never been theirs to give. For a moment none of them moved. Freedom, Amos understood, could arrive so suddenly that the body mistrusted it, the way a starved horse must be kept from drinking too deep too fast.

Then Nascha called a name. "Goyan!"

The tall man at the head of the file lifted his head. He was younger than his sister by some eight years, leaner than Amos remembered men ought to be, with a healing cut above one eye — but his grin, when it came, was unmistakably a brother's grin, and Nascha crossed the yard faster than Amos had ever seen her move. She took her brother's face in both hands, spoke to him rapidly in their own tongue, laughed once through tears she did not bother to hide, and then, with great dignity, presented him to Amos as formally as if they stood in a parlor in Fortuna.

"My brother," she said. "Goyan. He kept the others together when the company men wanted them scattered and afraid. Goyan — this is the man whose well your sister's people found. This is Amos Delaney."

Goyan extended a hand that trembled only slightly. "Your name was spoken in the camp at night," he said in careful English. "The women had reached the well. That news was bread to us." His grip was hard and honest. "We are in your debt."

"You're in nobody's debt for water," Amos said. "Sit down before you fall down. All of you — there's shade, there's food coming, and nobody here is going to hurry you."

What followed, Amos would remember longer than the standoff, longer perhaps than anything since Ruth's death. The yard, so lately braced for violence, became a place of finding. Women came down off the porch calling names they had been afraid to say aloud for weeks. An old man wept openly when his son knelt before him and pressed his forehead to his father's knees. Two small cousins, who had attached themselves to the ranch kitchen, dragged a shy young freedman by the sleeve to where his wife stood speechless with a ladle still in her hand, and the cheer that went up when they embraced set the mules shying and everybody laughing at once.

Aldous, watching it all, dismounted and accepted a cup of coffee from Amos on the porch. "We hit the Hollis camp at first light," he said quietly. "Federal orders, signed in Santa Fe — investigation into unlawful seizure of labor, unlawful holding of persons, the whole sorry ledger. The company's books were worse than the informants said. Ferris's name appears in them, Delaney. More than once, beside sums of money." He looked toward the gate, where the marshal stood between two troopers now, his gunmen disarmed and sullen in a row. "He'll be held for the magistrate. I wanted you to hear it from me before the talk starts in town."

Amos nodded, his throat too full for a ready answer. He watched Nascha moving among the reunited families, translating for the troopers, directing girls to carry water and bread, pausing to tie a strip of cloth around a freed man's wrist where the rope had bitten deep. She had carried twenty-five women through the desert to a stranger's gate on the strength of an old promise — and now, impossibly, the men were coming home to the same yard.