Chapter 1
: The Tin Cup
By noon the light had gone white over the Cienega valley, and the heat stood in the air like something that had weight. Josiah Merritt worked the windlass with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, listening to the rope creak and the bucket knock once against the stone lining of the well. Below him the water lay black and cold, deeper than any other well for thirty miles, and it did not seem to fall even in this summer when the river had shrunk to a chain of warm pools and the arroyos ran with dust.
The summer of 1877 had taken the grass first, then the weaker cattle, then men's tempers. On Arroyo Seco his own small herd stood thin in the shade of the mesquites, ribs showing, too tired to bawl. The corral fence leaned. The barn roof wanted tar. What he had was the well, and the land Miriam's father had left them, and a rule he had kept since before the war took anything else from him.
The tin cup hung on a nail driven into the well post. It had hung there five years without a night inside. Miriam had put it there herself, in a better season, and said a man could tell what sort of place a ranch was by whether a stranger had to ask twice. Josiah had never taken it down. Travelers knew it. Apache passing at a distance knew it, though most took their water at dusk and left no sign but damp earth. Nobody thirsted at his gate. That was the whole of it, and in a dry year it cost him more than feed.
He was pouring a bucket into the trough when he heard the horse.
It came slow up the arroyo track, head low, picking its way as if the ground hurt its feet. The rider sat loose in the saddle, hat pulled down, one hand gripping the horn. Dust covered him to the eyebrows. When he drew near the gate he tried to speak and made only a dry sound, and Josiah saw that his lips had cracked and his eyes were filmed and wandering, blinded by glare and thirst.
Josiah did not ask his name. He unhooked the gate, led the horse in by the bridle, and helped the man down with an arm under his shoulders. The man was heavier than he looked and smelled of horse sweat and alkali. Josiah settled him in the narrow shade of the well post, filled the tin cup, and held it while he drank.
The first cup went too fast and came half back up. Josiah waited, gave him the second slower, a mouthful at a time, the way he had learned on campaign. Color worked back into the stranger's face by degrees. He blinked, wiped his mouth with the back of a dusty hand, and looked around him — at the trough, at the thin cattle, at the burned ruin beyond the yard that Josiah did not explain to anyone.
"You're Merritt," the man said at last.
"I am."
"I rode past twice this week on the east road and didn't stop." He turned the cup in his hands. There was a brand burned into his saddle leather, half hidden by his leg, and when he shifted Josiah saw it plain: the Voss iron, a broad V with a bar across it. One of Colonel Harlan Voss's riders, then. Voss, who owned half the grazing land east of the Cienega, who had sent men three times to buy this well and had raised his price each time Josiah refused, who had let it be known around the valley that a poor man sitting on the only deep water in a drought was not a neighbor but an obstruction.
The rider saw that Josiah had seen. Something tightened in his face, shame or defiance.
"I lost my canteen two miles back," he said. "Horse stepped in a hole and I went off and it burst on the rocks. I'd have made the river if the pools weren't — " He stopped. "I knew you'd give it. That's the talk. That you'll give it to anybody."
Josiah took the cup, rinsed it, and filled it again. "Drink your fill. Then we'll water your horse slow, or you'll founder him."
"You know who I ride for."
"I know."
"And still?"
Josiah looked out over the yard, at the heat shimmering off the caliche, at the ruin with its blackened chimney standing like a tooth. "The well doesn't ask who a man rides for," he said. "Neither do I, when he's thirsting."
The man drank, and for a while neither spoke. The windlass rope ticked against the post in the hot wind. Somewhere a cow shifted and a bell clanked once.
When the rider could stand, he stood a long time holding the saddle. He thanked Josiah without meeting his eye and rode out toward the east road, sitting straighter now, the horse's head up a little. Josiah hung the tin cup back on its nail, where the sun caught it and made it shine, and watched the dust of the man's going hang in the still air long after he had passed out of sight.