She went out through the gate without sound, and the arroyo took her, and Josiah stood by the well listening to his cattle settle, her warning standing in him like a drawn breath that would not let go.
Chapter 4
: News on a Lathered Horse
The horse came in at dawn at a dead run, white at the mouth, its sides pumping like bellows, and Josiah was out of the lean-to with his boots half laced before the rider hauled up at the gate in a slide of dust and gravel. Frank Delgado, twenty-eight, a rider who worked for half the small ranches in the valley, sat swaying in the saddle with his hat gone and his shirt dark with sweat.
"Rawlins," Delgado said. "Ben Rawlins. His cattle are gone, Josiah. All of them off the night pasture, and the gate standing open, and Clara โ Clara's down with the fever, burning, and the children alone with her while Ben's out following the trail alone, on foot part of it, like a fool. Pearl sent the little ones to the spring house and came out to the road herself to flag me, barefoot, nine years old and standing in the road like a sentry. I couldn't โ I took her back up to the house and rode straight here."
Josiah was already moving. In a drought a man's fear was never for himself; it was the picture Delgado had carried in โ a woman burning with fever in a house gone quiet, four small children around her, and the shallow well at the Rawlins place, which everyone knew went brackish and low every August and was lower now than anyone could remember.
"How's their water?"
"Spring's a puddle and the well's drawing sand." Delgado swung down and nearly fell, caught the gate, and stood breathing hard. "Ben's well never was yours. Last week he was hauling from the river. River pools are fever water now, Josiah, you know it. Whatever Clara drank โ " He shook his head and did not finish.
Josiah did not waste the minutes on blame. He rolled the two oak barrels out of the barn shade and set them under the windlass. Bucket by bucket he filled them, the rope burning a familiar line across his palms, while Delgado, recovered enough to be useful, harnessed the wagon team โ two patient mules who had not worked in a week. They chocked the barrels and wedged them with sacking. Josiah threw in his rifle, a sack of meal and salt pork, the tin dipper, blankets, and the small store of quinine he kept in a coffee tin.
Delgado watched him work and said, "Voss's foreman was at the crossing yesterday. Rance Killion. Asking after Rawlins' stock, casual as weather. Asked me if the drought had Ben ready to sell yet."
"And you said?"
"I said Ben Rawlins would sell his boots first and walk barefoot. Rance laughed like I'd made a joke." Delgado's face was hard. "Maybe it's nothing. It's been sitting in me all the ride, is all. A man asking after cattle the day before cattle vanish."
"Filing it away is enough for now," Josiah said. "A fever can't wait on suspicions. Get up."
They went out through the gate as the sun cleared the eastern ridge and laid the valley bare, the wagon creaking under the weight of water, which shifted and sloshed in the barrels like something alive that wanted out. It was a good sound and a frightening one. Every bucket had come out of the one well in thirty miles that did not fail, and Josiah felt anger rise at the mystery of the valley โ that water should be so plentiful in one stone throat and so absent elsewhere that a woman's life might turn on a wagon's speed over six miles of rutted track.
He drove standing for stretches to spare the mules, one hand on the reins, watching the road. Delgado rode ahead on a horse borrowed from the corral, scouting the crossings where the track dipped through the arroyo, for cattle on the move in the night leave a road a blind man could follow โ unless, Josiah thought, remembering Aiyana at his gate in the blue dusk, whoever drove them wanted the following done in a particular direction.
They met no one. The land lay empty and shimmering, the mesquite shadows still long. Once, a hawk rose from a fence post and hung above them before it tipped away toward the river.
"How far behind us is Ben, do you reckon?" Delgado called back.
"Ben's on his trail and won't leave it till dark or sense stops him. The children are the errand. Pearl's nine. She's done her part standing in the road. Now we do ours."
The Rawlins roof showed at last over the cottonwoods, and then the yard, too still, the spring house door open, no smoke from the chimney though the morning was young. Josiah's hands tightened on the reins before he knew they had. A house with a sick woman and four children in it should make some sound, some sign, and the silence coming off that yard had the quality of the silence he had ridden home to five years before, and it put his heart up into his throat like a fist.