By full morning the cattle were secured on Rawlins' own range with men of both parties watching them, and Sloan stood in the canyon writing names and brands in a little book, his pencil slow and exact. The herd was real. It had been seen. Whatever Voss said in town now, he would have to say it against this.
But on the ride home Delgado, ranging wide, found fresh tracks at the well road crossing โ three horses, shod, heading not east toward Voss's ranch but west, toward Arroyo Seco, where only a lame man and one woman waited.
Chapter 22
: Ambush at the Well
The well-house stood fifty yards from Josiah's porch, a low shed of cottonwood logs roofed with brush and tin, and inside it the shaft went down forty feet through caliche and gravel to water so cold it ached in the teeth. In the drought summer of 1877 it was the one place within thirty miles where a bucket came up full, where herds and families and travelers drank and lived. Josiah had never charged a soul for it. Miriam had set that rule in the first year, chalking it on the shed door in her schoolteacher's hand: For whoever thirsts. The chalk was long gone. The rule remained.
He heard the horses before Aiyana did, or thought he did โ the small wrong sound of iron on stone where no rider had business being, up the dry wash behind the shed. His knee had stiffened where he sat with his father's rifle across his lap, the leg straight out on a crate. He could not walk to the well-house without the crutch Delgado had whittled him. He could not run at all.
"Three," Aiyana said from the doorway, quiet. She had her grandfather's rifle and a knife at her belt and her hair bound back. "They come around the corral. They do not come to ask."
The first man showed himself at the corral gate with a sledge over his shoulder โ a sledge, not a rifle, and Josiah understood the errand in that instant. They had not come to kill him, though they would do that if it served. They had come with sledges and, slung on the second man's saddle, a powder keg wrapped in sacking: to cave the shaft, to burst the lining stones inward and bury the water under its own roof, so that no digging would find it again in any time that mattered. Kill the well and the valley bent to Voss or died. Either answer suited Voss.
"House or shed?" Aiyana asked.
"Shed," Josiah said, and got his arm over her shoulder, and together they crossed the fifty yards in a hobbling, graceless run while shots cracked from the corral โ not aimed to kill, not yet, but to keep heads down while the man with the sledge reached the door. A bullet took splinters out of the lintel above them as Josiah fell through into the cool dimness, dragging Aiyana down beside him by her sleeve. Inside it smelled of wet earth and rope and the mineral breath of deep ground. The windlass creaked. Below them, black and patient, lay the water.
What followed was not a battle, whatever the valley would call it later. It was two people in a shed the size of a privy, holding a doorway against men who needed only to get one keg inside it. Josiah fired from a kneel behind the windlass, his bad leg sprawled useless, counting cartridges. Aiyana fired through the gap where a log had shrunk from its chinking, reloaded without looking, and once โ when a bearded man rushed the door with the keg clutched to his belly โ stepped into the open doorway and shot him through the shoulder. The man fell backward, the keg rolling unlit into the dust, and his fellows dragged him to the corral, swearing.
"That was a fool thing," Josiah said, his ears ringing.
"You cannot walk," she said. "Someone must be the door."
There was a stillness then, the stillness of men recalculating. Heat hammered the tin roof. Sweat cut lines through the dust on Josiah's face, and his knee throbbed with a deep, sick pulse, and beneath the pain he was aware of Aiyana breathing beside him, steady as a person drawing water. He thought of another doorway, five years gone, barred from the outside.
Then, distantly, a rifle spoke from the ridge above the wash โ not Voss's men. Delgado's voice followed it, hallooing, and there came the sound Sloan's party made returning at a hard trot, many hooves, and the fight went out of the corral like air out of a bladder. Two of the attackers got to their horses. The third, slower, dragging a leg where a ricochet had torn his trousers and the flesh beneath, made the mistake of running straight.
It was Rance Killion. Every man in the valley knew the foreman's long face and the pale scar through one brow. He ran with terror in him, and he ran the wrong way, onto the crumbled edge of the old dry cistern behind the shed that Miriam had used for wash water in better years โ and the rotted cover gave under him with a crack like a shot, and he went down twelve feet into the dark with a shout cut short.