He rode home with his saddlebags light and his money lighter, the calico left behind because the cartridges had cost more than the list allowed. Above the valley the sun stood hammer-hard in a sky without a single cloud to bargain with, and Josiah counted what he now knew the way a man counts cartridges before a long night: Voss held the paper, Voss held the fences, Voss was reaching, piece by quiet piece, for the water — and everyone Josiah loved was already standing inside the Colonel's ledger, whether they knew their page or not.
Chapter 14
: Night Riders at the Well
Aiyana had warned him before sundown, in the brief way she had of laying a fact down like a stone on a path. She had found fresh sign at the north ford — three horses that had crossed and recrossed, waiting sign, not traveling sign — and she had read in it the intention she had read before every staged raid that summer. Something would happen in the night, and it would happen where the valley would feel it most. Josiah's well.
So they watched together from the dark of the mesquite thicket below the well-house, Josiah with his rifle across his knees and Aiyana motionless beside him, her attention in her ears more than her eyes. The night was moonless. The windlass creaked once and then was still, and Josiah thought of Miriam, as he always thought of her near this well, which they had dug together in the first year of the ranch, her hands blistered beside his on the rope. He did not speak of it. Aiyana had a gift for letting a man's silence be a private country.
They came a little after one o'clock, four riders, leading their horses the last hundred yards over the stones to keep the sound down. Josiah felt Aiyana register them before he saw them himself. They wore sacks over their heads with eyeholes cut rough, and they moved like men who had rehearsed: two to the well-house door, one to the horse trough with an axe, one standing lookout with a carbine, turning slow circles in the dark. The leader carried a pry bar. The windlass housing gave with a crack of dry wood that seemed, in the stillness, enormous.
What they did next Josiah would remember longer than the fight. One by one, grunting, they rolled the loose stones that ringed the well-house — stones Josiah and Miriam had set as a border years past — and dropped them down the shaft. Each stone fell a long second and struck the water far below with a sound like a door closing deep in the earth. They were not stealing water. They were wounding the well itself, fouling and choking it, so that even if Josiah kept his land he would hold a ruined throat of stone. In a drought, it was a sentence passed on every family within thirty miles, and the men dropping the stones knew it and kept rolling them to the edge.
Josiah rose. Aiyana was already up beside him, and whatever she had intended to say about waiting for a better moment was discarded without a word. He fired first, not at a man but at the lantern the lookout had set shielded on the ground, and the dark slammed back whole. In that first black confusion Aiyana's rifle spoke once, flat and certain, and the man with the axe cried out and dropped it and reeled toward the horses, clutching his arm. Josiah fired again, close over the heads of the men at the shaft, and shouted for them to stand clear of the well or be shot where they stood, and his voice came out of the mesquite like a judgment they had not budgeted for.
They broke. Men who will drop stones down a well in the dark are seldom men who will stand and trade shots for the privilege. The lookout fired twice, wildly, toward the sound of Josiah's voice; splinters jumped from a mesquite limb above Aiyana's head and she did not flinch. Then they were all running for the horses, hauling themselves up by mane and stirrup leather, and the night filled with the clatter of hooves on stone, fleeing north, one rider hunched and cursing over his wounded arm.
It was over in less than a minute. Josiah's ears rang. He walked to the well-house with Aiyana covering the dark beyond, and together they looked down the shaft with a fresh-lit lantern. The water glimmered far below, clouded, still there. The stones had hurt it but not killed it. It would take days with a grapple and a bucket to clear, but it could be done, and knowing it could be done set his breathing right again.
"There," Aiyana said. She was crouched by the trough, lantern lowered. In the dust where the lookout had stood, something had fallen from a running man's body and lain unnoticed: a cartridge belt of good leather, its loops half full, the buckle plate broad as a man's palm.