They counted at dawn, in the herd ground below the spring, with the mist still on the water and the whole valley smelling of wet grass and horse. Tali walked beside him — not as a guide, he understood, but because the count was her work too: it was the band's young men who had done the gathering, riding the flooded side canyons for two days with their own herds to tend, and they had brought in what they found the way a man brings in a neighbor's stock in any country — because horses loose in flood country are everybody's business.
The band's herd stood in loose hundreds, and threaded through it, bunching together the way strangers bunch in any crowd, were his. Wade walked the herd's edge with his heart going hard, reading brands through mud and changed coats. The Bar M had been a plain, honest brand, big enough to read at a distance, and the flood had not taken that from them: he knew them, moreover, one by one, the way a man knows his own hand — the hammer-headed bay, the gray mare with the split ear, the tall roan that had cost him a winter's arguing in Abilene.
He counted twice, aloud, slowly, Tali marking beside him with notched sticks, and twice the count came to the same number, and neither of them pretended it might change on a third try.
"Twenty-eight," she said at last, and laid the sticks down in a row like a small, honest fence.
"Twenty-eight," Wade agreed. "Of forty."
Of his forty Bar M horses, the band's young men had found twenty-eight alive and held them with the valley herd — some cut, some gaunt, one gray foal dead of the cold water in its mother's lee, but alive the most of them, and more than a drowned man had any right to expect. It was the rest of the arithmetic that stood on the gravel between them. Twelve horses unaccounted for. Not seen dead. Not seen at all. Twelve horses — a third of everything he owned in the world, the whole of his margin, the difference between a man who delivered a contract and a man who explained one — somewhere up the flooded canyons, or down them, or standing in some pocket of high ground waiting out the water, or not standing anywhere.
"The river gives back what it takes in its own time," Tali said. "Some of it downstream. Some of it to whoever stands on the bank." She was watching the canyon throat above the valley, where the wash came down. "My riders went two days. They did not go up-canyon. The water was still high in the throat, and there is a white man's camp up there that was there before the flood — miners. My father said leave the upper canyon until the water fell."
"Miners," Wade said. "They'd have seen—" He stopped, because he was a horse trader, and he knew exactly what men camped above a flood might see, and catch, and call salvage. Twelve horses with his brand on them, in country where his papers lay at the bottom of a river. His bill of sale was gone. His contract was gone. All that proved those twelve horses his was the brand on their hips and the memory of men in Texas who had sold them to him.
"Your twenty-eight are yours," Tali said, reading him without hurry. "No one here says otherwise. The brand is read plainly, and my father holds them as he would his own until your talk is done. The twelve—" she shrugged, one shoulder, a tracker's shrug: the sign says what it says — "the twelve are a trail not yet walked. Trails keep."
He looked at the herd, at the twenty-eight gaunt survivors of his whole capital cropping valley grass among the band's horses like they'd been foaled there, and he did the rest of the arithmetic standing in the mist. In Texas he owed money against forty horses and a contract. In this valley he owned twenty-eight horses, one boot, a mended shirt, and a debt of his life to the woman standing beside him holding the counting sticks. The Army contract, the debts, the years — all of it now stood on four legs in a flooded canyon, and twelve of those legs were missing up a canyon where white miners waited with their own ideas about what flood water made free.
He made them show him the worst of them before he would believe the best. The gray mare with the split ear stood trembling fine-boned in the morning cold, a gash along her ribs crusted dark; the hammer-headed bay had lost a shoe's worth of hoof to the rocks and would limp a week. His big sorrel gelding — the horse he would have chosen to ride out of any trouble in Texas — was not among them, and Wade stood with his hand flat on the gray mare's neck and let that absence be exactly as large as it was. Twenty-eight horses was a fortune saved. It was also a fortune with twelve holes in it, and he had never been a man who could look at the saved half of anything without his eyes going to the holes.
"The foal," Tali said, behind him. "The young men buried it above the waterline, with its mother standing. My riders do a thing properly or they answer for it. Whatever else is said of this valley, Wade Mercer, your stock was gathered by men who know horses are not firewood."
"Tell them I know it," he said. "Tell them I'll say it where it counts."
"It will be remembered that you said it here first," she said, "where it counted least. That is how such things are weighed."
"Then we walk the trail," he said.
"After my father's talk," Tali said. "Everything in its order, Wade Mercer. That is the law of this valley, and you are in it." She gathered the sticks. "Come. He sends for you at the council fire tonight, and a man should not keep a chief waiting on an empty stomach — my grandmother has views about that, too, and hers is the only law my father fears."
Chapter 6 — The Chief's Word