The artesian draws made the difference. Three year-round water sources threading through the western quarter of the valley, feeding every farm and ranch within 12 miles. Whoever held the water rights for those three draws held a quiet authority over the whole basin. Not by law, exactly, but by geography. And geography in the dry country of New Mexico Territory was more powerful than any law ever written.
For 18 years, those rights had belonged to Silas Aldridge. Silas had come to the valley in 1864 with a wife, a wagon, and a water rights survey he had paid a proper land agent to record at the territorial office in Santa Fe. He was a methodical man, a sheep man, the kind who did not make enemies because he did not have enough vanity to be worth making enemies with. He ran a clean operation. He kept good records.
He turned his draw water into a hay crop in summer and a wool clip in spring, and he was fair with the other ranchers in the valley about seasonal water access, and the valley was fair back to him. And for nearly two decades that arrangement held. Silas's wife had died in 1870 one of fever, leaving him with a 6-year-old daughter named Nora. Nora Aldridge grew up on that hay ranch the way children do when there is work to be done and not enough people to do it. Early and capable.
And with opinions about things that other people's daughters weren't supposed to have opinions about. She could read a water rights survey as well as her father. She could shear a sheep in under 7 minutes by the time she was 14. She could also bake bread and mend a collar and run figures in her head faster than most men could on paper. And she was beautiful in the particular way of women who never quite figured out that they were because they were always too busy to stop and look.
She had her father's dark eyes and her mother's cheekbones. She was 22 years old in the autumn of 1882. And she was by the honest assessment of everyone who had watched her grow up a woman that was going to take a certain kind of man to keep up with. Caleb Doss arrived in the valley in August of 1880. He came from the north, which he confirmed from somewhere more specific that he declined to name with two horses a bedroll a carpenter's toolbox and a quiet manner so thorough and consistent that it stopped being noteworthy after about a week and simply became part of the texture of the place.
He bought a 20-acre holding on the valley's eastern edge a rough dried piece with a collapsed barn and thin soil. Not the kind of holding any serious rancher would choose but exactly the kind of holding a man with some savings and a desire to disappear into ordinary life might pick precisely because it asked nothing spectacular of him. He fixed the barn. He graded a small vegetable plot. He added a water trough and a second horse paddock, and a root cellar cut into the north-facing hillside.
He did these things carefully and without rushing and without asking for any particular attention. And in the way of frontier towns that watch new arrivals, the way the ground watches weather, Red Stone Crossing quietly concluded that Caleb Dawes was a fair carpenter, a willing neighbor, and a man with nothing particularly interesting going on. He met Nora Aldridge in October of 1880, two months after he arrived, at the Red Stone Crossing Mercantile and General Store. They were both reaching for the last bag of rolled oats on the third shelf, and their hands arrived at approximately the same moment, and they both stopped and looked at each other. She had gotten there first.