That night the camp was quiet in the way of a held breath. Wade stood his turn at the spring watch under a hard scatter of stars, looking at the peeled wands and the witness stones standing in their rows, and at the thin bright thread of the water running below the wounded cut, and he thought about dawns. He had woken to one on a gravel bar with a woman's hand on his forehead. He would wake to another with an army officer waiting to hear the ground itself give evidence. And somewhere past that dawn, at a council fire, a question that had been held in ash was waiting to be asked again — whole, as the chief had promised.
He found he was not afraid of any of it. Whatever the dawn decided, it would decide in the open, and a man could stand upright in the open.
"Sleep, horse trader," Weshka said from the dark, making him start. "The ground will do the talking tomorrow. It has been practicing longer than any of you."
Chapter 21 — The Hearing at the Spring
They held it where the water came out of the ground, because water was what it was about, whatever else got said.
The lieutenant had his men set a camp table on the flat below the lower spring, where the grass was still green in a dry year and the cottonwoods threw shade in a long morning stripe. It was a good place for a hearing, Wade thought: nobody's ground, everybody's life. The soldiers sat their horses in a loose half-circle behind the table, carbines booted, hats squared, doing their best to look like furniture. The band stood on the other side in their own order — Tazlo in front with his councilors at his shoulder, the women and the old behind, the young men outermost with their hands empty and visible, which Wade understood was a courtesy and a discipline both.
Vane arrived dressed for it: clean shirt, string tie, and the wide pleasant face of a man bringing a public service to an officer's attention. Two of his miners stood behind him with hats in hand. Hobbs stood at his left, big and weathered and rehearsed — Wade could see the rehearsal in him the way you can see a halter mark on a horse that's been tied short too long.
"Lieutenant Callum." Vane made a small bow that managed to include the whole camp. "I want to thank you for coming out so prompt. A territory can't be built by men who wait."
"You sent a report of an attack, Mister Vane," Callum said. He was twenty-eight and looked younger, but he had the clerk's trick of writing while he listened, and his pencil never hurried. "Men killed, stock stolen, a camp burned. The colonel sent me to find the truth of it. Sit down and give it to me in order."
Vane gave it in order. He had clearly given it before, in his tent, to the mirror of his own face. The flood had stranded his party in the upper canyon — true. They had prospected peaceably under a claim duly filed — filed, he said, with the dates ready on his tongue like coins. On the second night after the water fell, hostiles had come down on his camp in the dark, fired on his men, cut out his mules, and driven off a string of horses belonging to a trader named Mercer, held in safekeeping. One of his men had been grazed. He spread his hands. It was, he said, the plain story of every claim ever jumped in the territory.
"Which night?" Callum asked.
"The second night after the flood. The night of the fourteenth."
"And the horses driven off were Mister Mercer's."
"His brand. Bar M. A dozen head we had gathered off the flood for him, holding them at cost to ourselves, meaning to return them." Vane turned his pleasant face toward Wade, who stood with the band's people, apart from the table, where Tazlo had placed him — neither witness nor party yet, a man in the keeping of the morning. "Ask him. He knows his own brand."
"I'll come to Mister Mercer in his turn," Callum said, and wrote something. "Call your foreman."
Hobbs came forward, hat turning in his hands, and delivered the attack the way a man delivers a load he has carried up the same hill every day for a week. Shots from the rocks above the camp. A mule screaming. Hobbs himself grazed across the ribs — he pulled his shirt aside to show a scabbed red line, and Wade saw it was a real wound, and saw too that it was the kind a man takes falling off a tailgate onto a broken crate edge, long and shallow, however it had been got.
"How many rifles?" Callum asked.
"Couldn't say for certain. Twenty, maybe."
"Twenty rifles, and your camp took one graze and lost no man."
"Thick dark, Lieutenant."
"And the mules they cut out — did you track them at daylight?"
Hobbs's hat stopped turning. "We tracked them down-canyon a ways. Trail played out in the wash rock."
"In the wash rock," Callum repeated, and wrote it down, and Wade watched the lieutenant's face do nothing at all, which was the most damning thing it could have done. A trail that plays out in wash rock two days after a flood — a cavalryman does not have to call that a lie. He only has to write it down and let it sit in the sun with the rest of the evidence.
"Your men fired back?" Callum asked.
"Some. At muzzle flashes."
"What did you hit?"
"Couldn't say."
"Twenty rifles firing into a camp at night, your men firing back, and the whole of the blood is one graze on a foreman." Callum turned a page. "I am obliged to you, Mister Hobbs. Stand with your party."