Chapter 5
: Tracks That Lie
Pearl Rawlins met them at the yard gate with her mother's composure worn like a dress too big for her, and behind her, in a line by age, stood the other three, solemn as mourners. Clara lay in the back room in a fever that had taken her past knowing them; her skin was dry and scorching to the touch, her breath shallow, her hair damp only at the temples where Pearl had laid wet cloths until the water in the house gave out. Josiah sent Delgado for the dipper and gave her well water by spoonfuls between her cracked lips, slow, the way he knew, while Pearl held her mother's head with both hands and a steadiness that shamed grown men of his acquaintance.
"You did right, Pearl," he said. "All of it. Now your part is to rest, and ours is the rest of it."
They got Clara cooled with cloths wrung out of the barrel, got the quinine into her a little at a time, got the children fed in the kitchen where it was coolest, and left Delgado โ who proved to have a gift for being unhurried with small children โ in charge of the house. Only then, with the sun climbing, did Josiah walk out to read the night pasture.
Ben Rawlins had followed the trail east before first light, and the trail wanted to be followed. That was the first thing. It read "Apache" the way a printed notice reads, large and in the open: the pasture gate unlatched and standing wide, a drag of many cattle moving fast, and among the hoof-churned earth the plain marks of unshod horses, five or six, keeping to the flanks of the herd as raiders keep. Broken brush. A dropped feather. Even the choice of the hour, the dead middle of a moonless night, belonged to the story the trail was telling, and Josiah, who had scouted for the Union in country where reading sign wrong got men killed by breakfast, felt the old professional coldness settle in him and distrusted the trail precisely because it was so easy to read.
He knelt, as Aiyana had said a man must, and read it close.
The unshod prints were real, but they were shallow in their work. They pressed the edges of the drive and rarely crossed into its center; they did not cut and turn the way working riders cut and turn, darting in where a cow breaks from the bunch. And among them, where the ground softened near the old trough, Josiah found the print of a shod horse โ iron-shod, the nail heads clean in the impression, a hind shoe with a worn toe โ and then another, set down squarely in the middle of the trail where the maker had not thought the soft ground would reach. A raiding party that came unshod did not bring one shod horse and keep it in the heart of the work. A man leading other men's horses, though โ horses ridden light to leave the right marks while his own mount did the real driving โ might forget his own horse's feet at the one patch of soft earth on the route.
He found the fence then, on the north line where the pasture met the arroyo, and it finished what the prints had begun. A section of wire had gone down and the cattle had been pushed through it, if the story was to be believed, in a panic of escaping. But the wire had not been torn. Josiah ran the strand through his hands and found the cut: clean, bright still under the dust, made by nippers in two snips. And afterward someone had worried the cut ends back together, twisting them loosely so the fence would hold a casual glance and fail a close one, the way a lie is mended to pass the telling but not the touching. Torn wire frays and sings a different note under the hand. Cut wire confesses.
He stood up slowly in the heat, with his hat in his hand, and looked east the way Ben had gone, following a trail built for him like scenery, built to be believed by an angry man with a sick wife and no water โ built to send him riding in one direction only: toward the camps beyond the second ridge, toward Nahlin's old men and Itza's young ones, toward the war Aiyana's council feared, assembled out of a feather, a fence, and a set of prints, one of which was iron-shod.
Josiah walked back to the house, unhurried now, because running with this news would do what the trail had failed to do and stampede it. Delgado came out on the porch, a child asleep against his shoulder, and read Josiah's face and went still.
"Well?" Delgado said.