She did not ride straight to her father's lodge. Not yet. A thing this size had to be carried in both hands and set down in council, where it would hold — and a thing half-carried, blurted at a cook-fire, would run through camp by dark and reach the diggings by morning, and the men with spades would move their lie where the flood hadn't cleaned.
"Wait," she told the valley, and the mare's ears flicked, "and be exact."
Then she rode down toward the lodges, with the whole of it held quiet and entire behind her teeth, like water behind a dam whose hour to open she alone would choose.
Chapter 11 — The Second Day
The second day of his three began before the light did. Wade woke in Weshka's lodge with the decision sitting on his chest like a stone he had agreed to carry, and he lay a while listening to the camp come alive around him — a dog shaking water off its back, a woman's low laugh, the knock of wood on wood — and tried to make the arithmetic come out some way it would not.
Marry her, or leave. Leave meant the horses, and the horses meant everything he had built since he was seventeen years old and too proud to take his father's money. Marry her meant — he did not let the thought finish. It kept trying to finish itself with the word stranger, and the word was a lie, and he knew it was a lie, because he had watched her work all of yesterday with his own eyes.
He rose and washed at the spring branch and was mending a torn rein by firelight when Kaslin came for him.
"The chief says you will ride with the scouts," Kaslin said. He did not add white man this time, which Wade counted as a kind of progress. "We count the valley herd. Your horses are in it. You will want your own count."
"I will," Wade said, and stood, and found the young man studying him the way a man studies weather he does not trust.
They rode out in the grey of first light, five of them: Kaslin, two older scouts whose names Wade had learned yesterday — Yona and Palo — and a boy of fifteen who rode like he had been born in the saddle and resented the horse for being slower than he was. Wade rode a borrowed mare with a rawhide hackamore and felt the whole arrangement like a borrowed coat: serviceable, and not his, and a reminder with every stride of everything the water had taken.
The valley herd grazed the lower meadow where the spring branch widened and lost itself in grass. In the flood week the band's young men had gathered every loose animal they could find — their own ponies, strays from God knew where, and Wade's scattered remuda — and brought them down to the one piece of ground the water could not reach twice. The herd moved in the morning mist like something half-remembered, horses blowing steam, foals staying close.
"Count," Kaslin said, without ceremony, and Wade understood that this was the test and the courtesy both: the band would not count his horses for him. He would count them himself, before witnesses, and whatever number he found would stand.
He rode the herd's edge slow, the way he'd count any remuda, letting his eye take them the way it had learned to take them in ten years of trading — by color first, then by face, then by the brand when a hip turned his way. Bar M on the left hip, his father's old iron, re-struck when Wade took the trade up himself. He had bought most of these horses one and two at a time across three territories, and he knew them the way a banker knows signatures.
The sorrel mare with the blazed face — his. The two blue roans, brothers, that he'd taken off a Mormon freighter in a trade everyone said he'd lost — his, and he'd won it. The black gelding with the scarred knee. The dun with the ewe neck nobody wanted at auction, who could walk thirty miles on a mouthful of grass and ask for more. His, his, his. The count built in him the way a debt builds, except this one ran the other way, and somewhere past twenty the stone on his chest moved, a little, because some of the arithmetic had an answer after all.
"Twenty-eight," he said at last, when the herd had all passed his eye twice. "Twenty-eight Bar M."
Yona nodded once, as if Wade had merely said aloud a thing the ground had already told them. "Twenty-eight," he agreed. "That is what we hold."
"Forty went into the water," Wade said. "Twenty-eight is not forty."
"No," Kaslin said. "It is not."
The missing dozen. Twelve horses were his margin, his profit, his next year — the difference between a trader and a man who had once been a trader. Dead in the flood, some of them must be; he'd seen what canyon water did to stock, the carcasses wedged in the cottonwood roots downstream. But not twelve. Not all twelve. Horses were better swimmers than men and luckier than either, and a dozen horses did not vanish off a valley floor without leaving a story on the ground for whoever could read it.
As if the thought had been spoken, Palo reined in at the meadow's upper edge and sat looking at the slope where the canyon narrowed toward the heights. He said something in his own tongue, low, and Kaslin translated without being asked.
"He says the trail is there," Kaslin said. "From the flood night and after. A dozen horses, maybe more, driven up-canyon on the second day, when the water was still too high for any honest man to be moving stock." He turned in the saddle and looked at Wade full in the face for the first time that morning. "Up-canyon is where the miners are."