The crescent broke — not into flight, but into men looking sideways at each other, which on a morning like that amounts to the same fault line. And out of the house and the barn and the shadow of the new beams came the valley: twenty people with rifles, standing in the open where they could be counted.
Sloan counted them. She watched him do it. And Garrett Sloan, for the first time, looked like a man doing arithmetic he had not rehearsed.
Chapter 22
Fifty Thousand Dollars
What saved the morning from going straight to gunfire was Sloan's own nature: he was a man who believed, down to the marrow, that everything had a price and every pause was a negotiation. Faced with twenty rifles he had not budgeted for, he did not reach for his pistol. He reached, one final time, for his checkbook — and Maren, watching him, understood that this was the performance she and Stanton had waited all summer to stage.
"Twenty thousand," he said, loud enough for the yard. "Cash and the note burned. For the ranch, the rights, and the papers your husband left — all of them, every copy. Name the bank in any state you like."
"The papers aren't merchandise, Mr. Sloan."
"Thirty." A murmur went through his own riders now — these were men who killed, when they killed, for wages she could compute in her head, and they were hearing sums that could have bought their retirements several times over. "Thirty thousand dollars, Maren. Do you know what that is? That's a house in San Francisco. That's never working again, never watching a creek die again. That's a life. And all it costs you is a piece of dirt in a drought and a dead man's daydream."
"It's not mine to sell at that price either," she said. "That's the part you've never understood, and it's why you'll never be able to buy it. The water under those hills doesn't belong to the Ellison ranch. It runs under eleven other families too. What you're asking me to sell you is them — their wells, their children's wells, the whole valley's next hundred years — and I can't sign their names, Mr. Sloan. I can barely sign my own. It shakes, these days."
"Fifty," he said, and the word came out like a blow. "Fifty thousand dollars. Final. There is no woman in this territory—" his voice cracked, actually cracked, on the enormity of his own offer passing into refusal "—there is no man in this territory who would call that anything but generous—"
"And yet," Maren said, "here we stand."
Tomás had gone into the house at her nod — the nod they had rehearsed at the kitchen table among the copies — and he came out now carrying the iron box, and set it on the porch table beside her, and opened the lid. She took out the map first, and held it up so the blue shape caught the morning, and then the list, and then Thomas's note, and she read the heart of the note aloud, in a voice that did not shake, to fifteen hired guns and twenty neighbors and one rich man: The water is real. I have walked it. What is under the Cerros would run this valley a hundred years. Men are buying around it in the dark and I mean to have it in the light or know the reason why.
"This was written in March of 1881," she said, "by a man seven months from his murder. The map shows the river. The list shows the families — and eleven of them are gone, Mr. Sloan, gone through buyers who don't exist, into companies that are drawers in your desk. Copies of everything in this box are in the church safe, in Marshal Beckett's keeping, and in Prescott, where the United States Marshal has had my husband's name for a week — the name of a federal witness who was murdered for this, in case you'd forgotten which crime on your list comes first. And this—" she held up the last sheet, the surveyor's certificate "—is the filing Thomas meant to make, that would have put the water in the public record in 1881, where no one man could swallow it."
"You're lying," Sloan said, but the performance had gone out of him; he was saying it to the yard, to the record, to himself. "A dead man's romance. There is no filing, no river—"
"There's a capped well on the Hendricks line with your survey stakes around it," Maren said. "I put my hand in it, Mr. Sloan. It's cold. Would you like to ride up there with all these witnesses and show them your wine bottle? Or shall we let the federal surveyors do it, when Marshal Tolliver's men arrive?"