Before they left the spring ground, Tali walked the whole preparation once more, end to end, the way a tracker walks a trail she means to swear by. She checked each stone with the side of her foot, sighted along the wands, and stood a moment at the claim stakes with her hand resting on the nearest one, not in anger, but as a woman might touch a fence post she intends to describe exactly. "When he asks how I know the dates were cut before the flood," she said, "I will tell him the flood polished every stone in this canyon and left these cuts raw and pale. Wood remembers water, Wade Mercer. So does a lie, when a man knows where to put his thumb." Then she sent the watch up to its posts and walked down toward the lodges, unhurried, and Wade followed with the sense that the spring had been made ready the way a witness is readied — not rehearsed, only kept honest and untouched.
Wade looked at the water, running clear and thin below the wounded cut, and said nothing at all, which was, he suspected, exactly the answer required.
Chapter 18 — The Dozen Horses
The chief sent them out together in the last dark before dawn, and he did it in front of witnesses, which Wade understood too late was the whole design.
"Kaslin," Tazlo said, at the edge of the horse herd, where the mist stood in the low ground. "You know the upper canyon better than any man breathing. The white man's twelve horses are in it somewhere, behind the miners' camp, in a place a boy could hold and an army could miss. You will track them. He will go with you, because the brands are his and the law of the soldiers will ask his mouth, not yours." He let the words settle. "Bring back the horses or bring back the truth of them. I ask it of both of you with one voice."
Kaslin stood very straight, and Wade saw the young man's jaw work once before he mastered it. To be sent was an honor. To be sent with Wade, in the open, before the camp, was a chain of another kind. There was no refusal that would not shame him worse than obedience, and both of them knew it, and Tazlo, who had made the arrangement, turned and walked away into the mist as if he had asked them to fetch water.
They rode without speaking for the first hour, up the narrowing canyon, Kaslin ahead, reading the ground the way a clerk reads a ledger, and Wade behind, keeping his horse quiet and his mouth quieter. The trail of the missing dozen was two weeks old and crossed by flood, wind, and the band's own hunting, but Kaslin unraveled it yard by yard: a Bar M gelding's cracked shoe printing deep under load; a place where the driven horses had bunched and milled at a crossing; droppings seeded with the crushed corn that no grass-fed valley horse produced, corn that came out of a sack, out of a camp, out of white men's stores.
"Corn," Kaslin said at last, without looking back. "Your horses are fed like prisoners. They are near."
Near was a box canyon behind and above Vane's sleeping camp, a pocket of stone with one narrow mouth, and in the mouth a rope pen strung between boulders, and in the pen, by the gray first light, twelve Bar M horses stood hipshot and dull-coated and very much alive. Wade counted them twice through the willows and felt the count go through him like water finding its level. Twelve. Twenty-eight in the valley and twelve here, and his forty stood whole again on paper. All that remained was the small matter of walking them out from under the rifles of the men who had stolen them.
Two of Vane's men kept the pen in turns, one sleeping in a lean-to, one riding the mouth at intervals with the unhurried rhythm of men who fear nothing. Wade and Kaslin lay in the rocks through the long morning, learning that rhythm, and it was there, in the heat and the patience, that Kaslin finally spoke to him — not warmly, but truly, which was more.
"My family broke the match," he said, staring down at the pen. "The words about Tali were spoken in my father's lodge, to the chief's messenger, by men — not by her. I was nineteen and I let them be spoken because it was easier than carrying a wife the camp pitied me for. Then I learned to be scornful in public so no man would guess I was ashamed in private." He was silent a moment. "It is a poor kind of armor. It makes a noise when a man walks."
Wade said nothing. There was nothing of his that belonged in that confession, and he knew better than to step into it.
The taking, when it came in the deep of the following night, was undramatic in the way of all well-laid work. The rider at the mouth made his round and turned back. The man in the lean-to slept the sleep of the unjust and unbothered. Wade eased down to the pen rope with his knife out and waited, flat in the shadow, for the signal they had agreed — not a word, not a whistle. Kaslin's stone clicked once against the boulder above the mouth: the rider was at the far end of his round.
All through that long wait, Wade had time to consider what kind of errand the chief had truly sent them on. The horses mattered — twelve Bar M horses were a fortune on four legs, and their recovery would strip Vane's story of its loudest claim. But a dozen men in the valley could have tracked that pen, and Tazlo had not sent a dozen men. He had sent the one young warrior whose standing hung on this valley's judgment, yoked to the one white man whose horses made the errand lawful in white men's eyes. If the work failed, Kaslin would carry the failure. If it succeeded, he would carry that too, and everyone would know whose hands had done it. Wade lay in the rocks with his knife loose in its sheath and understood that he was not the tracker on this journey, whatever the chief had said aloud. He was the witness. The chief had arranged for Kaslin's choice — whatever it turned out to be — to happen in front of a man whose word even the soldiers would have to weigh.