"You had an answer," she said. It was not a question.
"I did."
"Keep it," she said. "Answers spoil if they are picked green. My father knows that better than any man in this canyon." She swung up onto her mare in one motion and looked down at him with something that, in another valley and another hour, might have been the beginning of a smile. "Now come and count your horses, Wade Mercer. If the soldiers are to be told this band stole nothing, it would be good to know exactly what nothing is."
He went. And all that day, while he worked, the held answer sat in him like the coal the chief had named it — banked, alive, and waiting on the wind.
Chapter 17 — Preparing the Spring
They began at the lower spring, because the spring was the heart of the lie.
Vane's report, as the camp now understood it from his own loud telling, said the band had attacked his camp to seize the water and the mining ground. The truth of the water stood in the canyon for any man to read who was willing to climb: a sluice channel, newly cut, bleeding the lower spring away toward Vane's claim. But truth standing in a canyon is only good if it stands unchanged when the soldiers arrive, and Tazlo was too old a chief to trust a white officer's goodwill against another white man's altered evidence.
So the spring was placed under guard, and the ground around it placed under law.
"No boot crosses the cut," Tali said, standing above the sluice with her arms folded while Wade and two of the band's young men looked up at her. "Not ours, not theirs, not a child's. The lieutenant must see this ground exactly as the flood left it and Vane's tools left it. If our own feet muddy it, his eyes will blame our feet."
She worked the way she did everything, without hurry and without waste. Above the sluice, where the channel bent toward the claim, she set a row of small stones — not a wall, a testimony. Each stone marked a fact: here the cut began, here a pick had slipped and scarred the rock, here the shovels had thrown the spoil downhill where no flood would throw it. She drove a peeled willow wand at the head of the channel and another where the stolen water died in the gravel below the spring, so that a man standing at one wand could sight along the other and see the whole theft laid out in a single straight look.
"The stakes," she said to Wade, walking him up to the claim line, "tell it too. Read them."
He read them. The stakes were sound pine, sharpened clean, and the dates cut into them claimed the spring month of the year — weeks before the flood that had supposedly stranded Vane in this canyon in the first place. A man cannot be stranded by a flood he has already surveyed ahead of. Wade ran his thumb over the carved figures and felt the cold satisfaction of a lie with its boots on the wrong feet.
"And the trail of the great attack?" he asked.
That she walked him through last, in the late light, below the miners' camp where the ground was soft. There the famous ambush trail wound in its foolish circle — hoofprints coming down off the bench, milling, crossing themselves, going back up. "Mules," Tali said, with the contempt of a surgeon for a quack. "Vane's mules, shod at the fort, all four. His men rode them down in the dark to make sign, and the mules did what mules do when they are bored — they walked in a circle looking for the way home. There is no blood. There is no cartridge brass. There is no place where a man fell or a horse bolted. An attack leaves a country, Wade Mercer. This leaves a doodle."
She marked that ground too, stones at the circle's edge, and then she did the thing Wade would remember longest: she sat down on a rock above the spring with her mending in her hands and took the first watch herself, as calm as a woman at her own door. The watch was kept in turns after that, two riders always, day and night, and nothing at the spring was touched, moved, cleaned, or improved. When one of the band's boys, meaning kindness, started to clear flood drift from the spring's mouth, Tali stopped him with a word and made him lay every stick back where the water had left it.
"It is ugly," she said, "and it is evidence. Let it be ugly in the right direction."
Wade worked wherever hands were wanted — mending the corral the flood had racked, helping the herders bring the valley herd down to the sheltered ground, standing his turn in the cold above the spring with a rifle he was never once tempted to use. And working, he watched the camp change its mind about him in the small ways that matter more than council speeches. Old men began to ask his judgment about a horse's wind. Women stopped moving their children out of his path. Weshka, passing with a basket, observed to no one in particular that the white man had calluses in the right places, which from Weshka was a decoration for bravery.
On the second evening Tazlo walked the spring ground himself, sighting along Tali's wands in the last light, and grunted once, deep in his chest.
"When the soldier comes," he said, "the ground will speak first. Then my daughter. Then, if words are still needed, the rest of us." He looked at Wade. "You are learning to be still at the right time, horse trader. It is rarer than courage."