"We're running out of valley, Micah," she said that night.
"Then we're running toward the end of his patience," Stanton said. "Which is where we need him. A man squeezing pliers is a man whose hands are busy. Tomorrow we ride to the Cerros and see what he's been building up there while he squeezes. I'd like to know the size of the thing he's protecting before I telegraph Prescott about it."
Chapter 17
Water Struck
They rode into the Cerros at first light by the old game trail, the one that switchbacked past the ravine, and Maren made herself ride the hairpin without looking at the cut pine or the flat stone at the bottom, because the day had other work in it. The hills in the morning were the color of lion hide, and the air at altitude had a thinness that made the whole drought valley below them look like something under glass.
Thomas had marked the place on his map with a small, careful x and the words shelf seep, runs Aug., and they found the green ribbon of grass exactly where memory and paper agreed it would be. But Thomas's seep was not what they had come to see, and a half-mile beyond it, in a bowl of rock hidden from every trail, they found what Sloan's riders had been crossing her land in the dark to reach.
It was a drilling rig β a proper steam-driven rig, dismantled into loads and hauled up piece by piece by mule, reassembled in the bowl like a secret. The well it had bored was capped with an iron plate bolted down under a tarp weighted with stones, and around the bowl, on ground belonging to the Hendricks family on the east and to the Rocking E survey on the west β on land, that is, that Garrett Sloan did not own by any deed in any book β stood a surveyor's fresh stakes, strung with new wire in a neat claim line, marching over the hill in both directions like the border of a country that existed only in one man's intentions.
Stanton worked the cap's bolts with a wrench from the rig's tool chest, and Maren stood watch with the rifle, and neither of them spoke while the iron plate came up. The sound reached them before the sight did: a deep, cold breathing, like the earth sighing in its sleep, and then the water itself, black and gleaming a man's height below the cap, moving β moving, underground, in August, in the worst drought in living memory, a river going about its business in the dark as it had for ten thousand years while the valley above it died of thirst.
Maren knelt at the iron mouth of it and put her hand down into the dark and felt the cold rise against her wrist, and she laughed out loud β startled herself with it β a laugh with tears standing in it, because Thomas had been right, and had known he was right, and had died for being right in a ravine a half-mile from this spot while men measured his discovery in the dark.
"Shut it," she said, standing, wiping her hand on her skirt like a girl caught at a creek. "Shut it exactly as it was. Stakes, tarp, stones, all of it. If one bolt is wrong he'll know we've been here."
"One bolt is the least of it," Stanton said, and he was looking not at the well but at the bowl's rim, and his voice had gone into the register she had heard at her fence the first day. "Rifle on the rim, Maren. Two of them. They've been watching us since the seep β maybe they only watch the well on a schedule, maybe they were waiting. Either way, we are now the most interesting thing in their whole summer."
What followed was not a gunfight. Stanton called it afterward a negotiation at distance: two shots from the rim, deliberate misses that kicked rock dust ten feet in front of them, meant to herd; his answer, one shot that took the hat off the nearer rifleman and sent both of them backward into the rocks with a new theology about the range of a man with a Winchester who had been a deputy marshal. They went down off the bowl by the draw the mules had used, walking the horses, rifles across their arms, unhurried as parishioners, because running under guns is how a warning becomes a killing. No second shot came. The watchers, Stanton judged, had orders about the well, not about bodies β not yet β and a dead widow and a dead drifter beside Sloan's secret rig would ask questions even Judge Webb couldn't fold flat.
Riding home, with the sun standing on its hammer, Maren said: "He's struck water, capped it, staked it, and guarded it. On other men's land. That's not a scheme anymore, Micah. That's a country being founded. Flags and all."