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

Chapter 23

The Trial

They held the trial in Fortuna three weeks later, in the schoolhouse, because the courthouse roof had failed in the winter rains and nobody had yet found the money or the will to mend it. By then Amos could ride sitting straight, though he let Haseya drive the wagon, his bad arm in a clean sling and his hat in his lap.

Ranchers stood along the back wall. Settlers' wives filled the scholars' benches. At the front sat nine of the women from the wash, Nascha among them, their presence already a kind of verdict. Goyan sat with them, free and thin, his wrists still marked where the camp irons had been.

Judge Whitmore heard the charges in order. Kidnapping, for the men and boys taken from the wash and held at the Hollis labor camp under guard and without lawful process. Contract forgery, for the labor papers produced afterward, signed with marks that witnesses swore were copied by a clerk's hand — among them a paper bearing Goyan's name, drawn up two days before he was seized. And murder, for the death of an old man named Tsosie, who had refused to leave his wife's grave at the wash and had been beaten for refusing, and who had not survived the wagon ride to the camp.

Marshal Doyle Ferris sat at the defense table without the badge the company had paid to pin on him — a badge, the prosecutor showed, issued by no lawful authority in Arizona — and looked smaller for it. His lawyer argued orders, and paper, and hard methods in a hard country, for two days.

The witnesses undid him in less. The camp clerk, promised leniency, brought the true ledger and the false one and laid them side by side like a matched pair of pistols. A teamster described the night cages. Haseya stood, composed, and described the morning the riders came to the wash — and when the defense suggested that the women had imagined coercion, Desba rose from the bench without being called, and the judge, after a silence, allowed her to speak. Age, in that room, still carried its own authority.

"You ask if they were forced," Desba said. "A man who is not forced does not need a chain. We found the chains. This court has them. Let the chains answer."

They had them indeed, entered as evidence, and the clerk laid one across the table where Ferris could not avoid seeing it. Amos, watching the marshal's face, saw there not remorse but arithmetic — a man still counting what each word might cost him, long after the sum was settled. It helped Amos, strangely. Pity would have been harder to carry home than contempt.

Amos testified on the second afternoon, briefly. He told how Ferris had ridden to Dry Creek wearing authority he did not own, how he had threatened Nascha at the gate, and how the shot that tore Amos's shoulder had been fired at a woman standing unarmed beside a well. The prosecutor asked why he had stepped into the line of it. Amos considered the schoolhouse, the benches, the women who had walked six miles to learn whether he was still a man worth trusting. "Because it was my gate," he said. "And she was my guest." The lawyer sat down, having gotten more than he asked for.

The jury of twelve men — ranchers, a storekeeper, two miners, a blacksmith — was out for less than an hour. Guilty on all counts. The judge sentenced Ferris to twenty years at Yuma, and stripped the Hollis company's territorial charter in the findings he forwarded to Tucson; by the time the verdict reached the yard at Dry Creek, the company's creditors had already begun picking its bones in three counties, its camp stood empty with its gates chained open, and its fine wagons were being sold to pay the wages it had stolen.

That night there was no celebration at the ranch, exactly. The women cooked more than usual, and Goyan ate slowly, like a man relearning that a meal could simply end when he was full. Nascha found Amos by the well after supper, looking toward Fortuna, where nothing now showed but a smudge of lamplight on the horizon.

"Justice," she said, testing the word.

"Part of it," Amos said. "Tsosie is still dead. The years at that camp do not come back." He flexed his healing hand. "But no other boy grows up thinking a paper with his name forged on it can take him. That is something. Ruth would have counted it."

"She would have counted the jury too," Nascha said. "Twelve men from this valley, Amos. A year ago they would not have sat in a room with us."

He nodded, and they stood in the quiet while the water settled in the dark below them, deep and patient, waiting for whoever came next.