Later, at Wade's own request, the two of them counted the herd together a second time, horse by horse, brand by brand, while a band herder called the tally aloud and cut each mark into a counting stick. It was slow, dusty, unglamorous work, and Wade insisted on it for a reason he explained when Tali raised an eyebrow. "When the lieutenant asks how many horses I lost and how many I hold, I don't want a number I believe," he said. "I want a number I can swear to. Forty went into the flood. Twenty-eight stood here yesterday. Twelve came down last night. If my count and your herder's count agree to the horse, Vane can shout till he's hoarse and it won't move the arithmetic." Tali considered this, then nodded once, the nod of one exact person recognizing another. "White men and their paper," she said. "But this paper is a stick, and the stick is honest."
"You are thinking loud enough to hear," Tali said beside him.
"I am thinking Kaslin is a better man than the one I met at the water."
"Kaslin is the same man," she said. "He only stopped spending himself on a lie. It leaves a man richer. You would know, Wade Mercer. You have been rich that way since you refused another one, in a tent, with your horses held over you." And she walked on before he could find an answer, which he suspected was her intention all along.
Chapter 20 — The Patrol
The patrol came up the canyon in the middle of the morning, in good order, with the dust of a long ride on it and the guidon snapping in the canyon wind.
Wade watched them from the council ground with the whole camp around him, and counted them the way a man counts weather: a lieutenant, young and erect and trying not to look young; a sergeant of the old school, gray as a badger; nine troopers; a pack mule; and, riding at the side where a guest of honor rides and a prisoner does not, Marcus Vane, in a clean coat, with Hobbs at his stirrup like a dog that has been promised meat. Vane had plainly ridden out to meet the patrol on the trail and make his impression before the lieutenant's boots ever touched valley ground. It was good tactics. Wade had to grant him that, the way you grant a snake its knowledge of warm stones.
The band received them under law. There was no shouting, no flourishing of arms, no theater. The camp stood back in an order as deliberate as the patrol's own, the warriors unarmed by the chief's command, the women and children in the lodge doorways, and Tazlo himself walked out alone to the open ground with his hands empty and his head high, an old man meeting power the way his grandfather had taught him: as a host.
Lieutenant Reed Callum dismounted, returned the salute of the ground in his fashion, and did Wade the service, whether he knew it or not, of looking like a fair man. He was younger than his authority and knew it, and compensated with a careful courtesy that sat well on him. His eyes went once over the camp, the corrals, the full horse herd, and rested, very briefly, on Wade — the one white face among the band — with a question in them that he filed away for later.
Vane was not a man to let a fair man's attention wander. He presented his report with ceremony, on the spot, dismounting into the dust with the paper already in his hand, and he read its burden aloud before the lieutenant could sit: an unprovoked attack on his mining camp by hostiles of this band; shots fired; stock stolen; his own life preserved by God's mercy and a stout door; and now, as providence would have it, the lieutenant could see with his own eyes the stolen horses standing in this very herd — for Vane pointed, with a theatrical arm, at the valley herd where forty Bar M horses and the band's stock grazed together, and claimed the sight as proof of everything.
It was cleverly done, and it fell into a silence like a stone into deep water.
Because Tazlo, when the reading ended, did not protest, did not rage, did not even answer in kind. He received the lieutenant under the law of guests. Food was brought, and water from the lower spring itself — carried up in a clean gourd by Tali's own hands, so that the first thing the officer of the United States did in that valley was drink the water this whole quarrel was dug to steal. Callum drank, and thanked her, and something in his careful face registered the strangeness of being served spring water by the alleged desperado's daughter, in silence, with dignity, while the accuser stood by in a clean coat holding his paper upside down in his haste — a detail Wade noticed and treasured.
"The allegations are grave, chief," Callum said at last. "So is driving a band from its valley. I will not do either on one man's paper." He folded Vane's report once, precisely, and put it inside his tunic. "There will be a hearing. Here, where the thing is said to have happened — not at the fort, and not from saddles. Tomorrow at dawn, at the spring. Both parties will speak. Evidence will be shown on the ground where it lies. Until then, this camp is under my protection as much as the mining camp is. Sergeant, we'll bivouac at the canyon mouth. No man of mine enters a lodge, touches a horse, or takes a drink that isn't offered. Is that understood?"
It was. The patrol withdrew in order to the canyon mouth, Vane riding with it, wearing the expression of a man whose ceremony has been politely postponed at the very moment of triumph, and Hobbs trailing after, looking back once at the camp with something new in his face that might, in a better man, have been the beginning of doubt.