They pulled him out with the well rope, alive, his arm broken and his face gray as ash, the powder keg lying where it had fallen in the yard, unlit, between the shed and the sun.
Chapter 23
: Killion Talks
They kept Killion in Micah Trent's storeroom, because the town had no jail that would hold a determined man and because Trent, having confessed his own silence, insisted on the burden of the cot and the water jug as rent on his conscience. The foreman's arm was set and splinted by Old Sowe, who came down from the Apache camp with herbs in a cloth and handled his broken bone with the same indifferent skill she would have given a horse, and would not meet his eyes. Killion watched her hands and said nothing. Pain had burned something out of him — not the cruelty, Josiah thought, but the swagger that had covered it, the way ash covers a coal.
Sloan questioned him in the mornings, when the light laid a white bar across the floorboards. The marshal did not threaten. He sat in a chair too small for him with his hat on his knee and his book open, and asked the same questions in the same order, and wrote down the silences as patiently as the answers. On the first day Killion said Voss would have him out by nightfall. On the second day he said the town was doing Voss's hanging for Apache gold. On the third day Delgado stood in the doorway and said, mildly, that riders from the county seat were a week away, and that the men of the valley had begun to talk at Rawlins' table about a rope and a cottonwood and no waiting at all, and that this talk was not theater. Killion looked at Sloan then, to see if the marshal would deny it.
"I do not hang men without a court," Sloan said. "I also do not promise what a valley will do when I am asleep. You are deciding something, Rance. Take your time about what it is."
That night Killion asked for Josiah.
They brought him in on the crutch, and Aiyana came no farther than the door, and the storeroom smelled of flour sacks and kerosene and Old Sowe's poultice. Killion lay propped against grain bags, his splinted arm across his chest like a man already laid out, and for a long while he studied Josiah's face as though it were country he had once crossed wrongly.
"The cattle," he said at last. "I will give you the cattle. I took Rawlins' herd in March off the north range, two nights' work, my boys and me. We ran them up the river trail and laid a false trail east — moccasin prints, a broken lance, all of it mine. The Colonel wanted the valley believing Apache thieves, believing it hard, before the dry came on. The spring too. We fouled the settlers' north spring with dead stock and lime on his word, so they'd come begging to his water or leave. It's all wrote down nowhere, Merritt. It was all his mouth to my ear. But I did it. Write that I did it."
Sloan's pencil moved in the lamplight, unhurried. "On whose orders?" he asked, as if it were any other question.
"Harlan Voss's. Every bit. You think I'd steal two hundred head for the pleasure of the brand work?"
"And the well today," Sloan said. "The keg."
"His orders, since the herd went wrong. Cave it, he said. Make it a hole full of stones. He said a man gives water free because he can afford pride, and we were to take the affording from you."
Josiah's hand tightened on the crutch until the wood creaked. He had come prepared for the cattle and the spring. He had not prepared for the other thing, and somehow his body knew before Killion spoke that there was another thing; the room seemed to narrow around the lamp.
"There's more," Killion said, and now he did not look at Josiah at all. He looked at the ceiling beams. "Doyle never left the Territory that fall, Merritt. He's in it. Up by Soldier's Wash, under stones, since 'seventy-four — killed in a card fight in Tucson, the Colonel said, but there was no fight, there was a man paid quiet money. Doyle was the Colonel's foreman before me. And in October of 'seventy-two, the Colonel sent Doyle here with two men and a can of coal oil and a bar for a door."
"The house," Sloan said quietly.
"The fire was Voss's work. Doyle's hands, Voss's word. The lady of the house had refused him her husband's well, wrote refusals in a book, he knew of the book and feared it. Raiders were to be blamed. It was to look Apache. It was always to look Apache." Killion's breath went ragged. "I was not there. God or the devil knows I was not there. But I heard Doyle drunk on it in Tucson the winter before he died, and I held my peace for wages, same as Trent held his. Write that too, Marshal. Write all of it."