Sloan closed the irons on his wrists without haste. "Maybe so, Colonel," he said. "But you will tell that to the judge with these on." And he led him out into the white street, where the whole town watched in silence, and no one, not one soul, stepped forward to walk beside him.
Chapter 27
: The Compact
They met at the well on Arroyo Seco at first light, when the stones of the coping still held the night's cool, and came in two parties the way wary peoples have always come to water: the settlers down the wagon road in a loose line, Rawlins at their head with his hat in his hand, and the Apache council down from the ridge path single file, Chief Nahlin walking first with his daughter Aiyana at his shoulder. No rifles showed. That had been agreed the night before, by messengers who rode in darkness, and the absence of them made every man there feel the weight at his hip where a weapon was not.
Josiah stood by the well-house with the bucket rope in his hand, and the tin cup on its nail caught the early sun.
Nahlin spoke first, through Aiyana, though half the settlers present had enough of his tongue by now to follow the shape of it. "This water was here before the word for owning was brought to this valley," she said, her voice steady, carrying. "It does not rise for one people. My father says: the drought has taught all of us the same lesson, and a lesson learned together should not be unlearned separately when the rains remember us."
Ben Rawlins answered for the settlers, awkward and honest. "We took our turn at being fools," he said. "We let a rich man point us at each other like dogs at a fence. My herd's back, no thanks to my own judgment. What we want is writ down fair, so no man's children have to beg another man's pardon for a drink."
So it was writ down, on the well-house door itself at first in charcoal, while a proper paper was drawn at the table Josiah's neighbors carried out and set in the shade. The terms were simple because thirst is simple. The well at Arroyo Seco and the two springs above the canyon would be shared by rotation: so many hours of drawing for the ranch families, so many for the Apache camp, the hours turning with the sun and marked on a notched stick kept at the well. In the worst weeks, when the water fell low in the shaft, the rotation would halve for everyone alike, settler and Apache, herd and garden, and no one would water stock at the drinking hours. A guard of two would keep the well by night — one from each people, changed at moonrise — not against each other, Josiah insisted, and Nahlin nodded at the words before Aiyana could render them, but against any man, of any blood, who came to do harm to the water itself, as harm had been done to the spring in the spring of that year.
"No man's thirst shall be made a weapon again," Aiyana said, and wrote it in English on the paper in her clear hand, and below it in her father's tongue, so that the promise stood in both languages and neither could later claim the other had sworn a different oath.
There were objections, because there are always objections. A settler from the far fork asked who would punish a man who drew out of turn. Nahlin answered that one himself, in slow English he had kept in reserve like a good knife. "His own people punish. Yours, yours. Mine, mine. A thief of water shamed before his own fire — this is heavy. Heavier than your jail." And the man, after a moment, nodded, for every man there had seen shame work where locks had not.
The women settled the matter of the hours, as the women had carried the water all along. It was Clara's list, kept through her fever in Pearl's school copybook, that showed which families had drawn and which had waited, and Aiyana's mother corrected it from memory of the camp. No man argued with either of them.
When the paper was read aloud twice and understood, Nahlin stepped forward and drew the cup from its nail. He dipped it himself, drank, and handed it to Josiah, who drank from the same cup and handed it to Rawlins, and Rawlins to Sowe, and so the cup went around the whole circle, settler and Apache, old and young, until it came back empty to Aiyana's hand. She hung it on its nail again, where it rang once, softly, against the stone.
Then Nahlin took Josiah's forearm in the old grip, wrist to wrist, and the settlers watched a poor cowboy and an old chief stand so, in the dust by the well, and understood that they were seeing the only kind of treaty that had ever held in that country: not the kind written in a distant capital, but the kind two men kept because their own hands had made it.