He walked back toward Weshka's lodge in the white heat of the afternoon with the council's words settling in him like silt in slowing water. Wait, the chief had said. And Wade's own clock was running under the chief's: the second day nearly spent, the third day coming, and at the end of it a question he had to answer with a whole life. Marry her or leave. Only now the leaving had a shape it hadn't had at dawn, because leaving meant riding out of a valley where a thief was digging a grave for a spring, with twenty-eight horses and a lie waiting up-canyon to be told to soldiers — and he had never yet in his life walked away from a thing that smelled that wrong.
That night the spring watch doubled: two young men at the lower spring, two at the narrows, fires kept small. Wade took no watch — it was not offered, and he understood why — but he lay awake in the lodge doorway long after Weshka's breathing slowed, listening to the spring run and the canyon hold its breath, and thinking that wait might be the hardest word a proud people had ever been asked to obey.
Chapter 13 — The Miners' Story
Vane came down the canyon on the third morning of Wade's count — no. Wade corrected himself as he watched the riders pick their way down the narrows trail: his second day was not even cold yet, whatever his nerves said. The Army of his three days still had its third to run. What came down the canyon now was something else, something that did not care about his clock at all.
Two riders. The first sat his horse like a man sitting a chair in his own office — upright, prosperous, a broadcloth coat despite the heat, a hat that had cost money, and a face arranged in advance into the expression of a man bringing important news. The second rode a half-length behind on a mule, big-handed, sun-ruined, with the look of a man whose whole education had been other men's orders. Hobbs, Wade guessed, before anyone said the name. The foreman. The one whose spade had done the digging while his employer kept his own hands and boots clean.
Wade stood in the shade by the council lodge with Palo and the council's older men and watched them come, and noted — because ten years of horse trading had taught him to note it — that Vane's horse was fresh and rested and had not been anywhere in a hurry. Whatever emergency he was bringing down the canyon, it had waited politely for him to shave.
"Chief Tazlo!" Vane called out when he was still forty yards off, loud enough for the lodges, loud enough for the women at the spring branch to hear every word, and Wade understood the volume was the point. This was not a visit. It was a performance, and the whole camp was its audience, and the real audience — soldiers, land office men, men with paper — would hear the echo of it later. "I come to you in grief and in friendship, with grave news, grave news!"
The chief came out of the council lodge unhurried, with the whole dignity of the band in his bare feet and his unhurried hands, and stood, and waited. He did not answer the greeting. He let the silence do what silence does to a man who has rehearsed a speech: it made the speech louder.
"My camp was attacked!" Vane announced, dismounting with care for his coat. "Two nights past — the night of the flood's second day, when honest men were fighting for their lives — my camp was rushed by hostiles. Shots fired into our tent. Our stores plundered. My foreman here — Mr. Hobbs, a truthful man, a churchgoing man — my foreman was struck down and left for dead, and only God's mercy and a stout constitution—"
Wade looked at Hobbs. Hobbs looked at the ground. There was a scrape on the side of his head, Wade allowed, the kind a falling branch gives, or a tent pole, or a man's own carelessness in the dark. It was wearing its third day well. It had not bled much, whenever it had happened.
"—and I am come, in grief and friendship, to ask whether these hostiles are of your band, Chief, and if they are not — as I pray they are not — to warn you that the Army will have this account from me direct. A patrol will ride from the fort. These canyons will be made safe for honest industry, or they will be emptied. I say it as a friend: emptied."
The camp made no sound at all. Somewhere up the valley a horse stamped. Wade could feel the older men beside him holding their stillness the way men hold a drawn bow — and he thought about the chief's word, wait, and about what it cost these people to stand in their own valley and be threatened in the hearing of their own women by a man whose spadework was still wet above their spring.
"I have buried no raiders," the chief said at last, quietly, and the quiet carried farther than Vane's shouting had. "I have buried one old woman the flood took, and the water took my people's horses and scattered them like leaves. If your camp was struck, it was not by the Arroyo. We do not make war in the dark, and we do not make it on drowning men." He paused. "When the soldiers come, let them come. I will feed them and show them the valley, and the valley will tell its own story, as it tells all stories, to any man who can read. Can you read, Mr. Vane?"
The promoter's arranged face rearranged itself. For a moment the grief and friendship slipped and something underneath showed — quick, appraising, a little surprised to be answered by a man he had priced as an obstacle. Then the smile was back, smoother than before, and Vane mounted up with his dignity brushed down like his coat.