"It takes profit to spoil a name," Aiyana said. "A spring can be cleaned in a morning, Merritt. A people cannot." She tied her gourd at her belt and looked once more at the ridge, empty now, and at the boot print drying in the mud at the basin's edge, the nick in its heel sharp as a signature. Whoever had arranged the morning's work had walked away from it whistling, she did not doubt — and had not reckoned on the two people in the valley most certain to be blamed for it arriving first, together, and washing it clean.
Chapter 10
: A Town Ready to Burn
The town learned of the spring the way fire learns of grass. Josiah and Aiyana had cleaned it in the morning, but a fouled spring needs only one rider who saw two figures at the basin and rode away before they rose from their work, and by the time Josiah led his horse down the main street of Cienega Wells that evening, the story had grown its teeth. The Apache had poisoned the north spring. A settler had been seen helping them at it, or hiding it for them, depending on who held the talking end of the tale.
They had gathered outside the saloon and spilled into the street, thirty men in the falling light, and the talk had the rhythm Josiah remembered from the months before regiments marched — short sentences, passed hand to hand like powder. The Rawlins herd, gone. The spring, fouled. Clara Rawlins burning with fever and no fit water near her house. Old Kessler saying his boy had seen smoke signals. No one checked anything. Checking was not the mood. The mood wanted a direction, and toward the cottonwoods was the direction it had already chosen.
"We ride at first light and we finish it," a man Josiah had known ten years was saying, standing on a crate so the last rows could hear him. "We have buried enough. We have thirsted enough. There is one camp that profits from every drop of our misery, and I am done pretending I do not know its name."
Josiah tied his horse where the shadows were and stepped up onto the boardwalk, and because he had no crate he simply stood a head of conscience above his own fear and spoke into the first pause the way a man steps into cold water. "You do not know its name," he said. "That is the trouble I rode in to speak on. I cleaned that spring myself this morning, with these hands. I know what was in it and I know who it was meant for. It was meant for you. Not your throats — your tempers. A dead coyote does not walk into a basin and arrange itself. Men did that, men on shod horses, hoping you would do exactly what you are doing now, which is to saddle up and make widows on evidence a child could walk through."
"There it is!" someone shouted. "Merritt defends them. Merritt always defends them. Ask him whose water they drink free!"
"Any man here may drink free at my well," Josiah said, "and most of you have, and some of you have sent your children with buckets and I filled them. I will fill Ben Rawlins's buckets tonight. What I will not fill is a graveyard dug by a lie. The Apache lost hunters to rifle fire from ambush this spring. Their corn was trampled by shod horses. Their water was fouled like ours. Whoever hates them hates us the same way, with the same hands — and he is counting on us to save him the trouble and do the killing for each other."
The shouting took him then, all of it at once, the way weather takes a roof. Names he had not been called in Arizona before. Hands on his shirt. Someone spat, and missed, and no one apologized for it. The man on the crate let it run its course with the satisfaction of a conductor, and when Josiah's voice could no longer be heard even by Josiah, he stepped down out of the crowd's reach, because there was no one in it any longer who had come to listen.
Dr. Amos Whitaker caught his sleeve at the edge of the boardwalk, where the lamplight ended. The doctor's bag was in his other hand and his coat was already on, and he spoke low and fast. "I cannot get them to hear sense and I cannot leave Clara Rawlins to hear nonsense. She is worse, Josiah. The fever has taken her sight for spells. Ben has no clean water fit for a sickroom and four children drinking ditch leavings." He pressed a small wrapped parcel into Josiah's hands — quinine, and a phial, and folded cloths. "Ride it out there tonight. Your well water. As much as your horse can carry and then some in the morning. If this town rides at first light, it rides past Ben's gate, and a man will not leave a burning wife to join it, and a house with water in it is a house that can be defended with patience."