Come to talk. I have nothing to say. I'll do it. Wade slid down, walked across the baked earth, stopped a few feet away, and looked at the man for a long time. Not with hatred.
He was surprised to find that out. Hatred needed fuel. And somewhere between the well and the dam, his had run out. My father said something to you. The night he died.
My boy will give water a fool. So did I. And I think he meant exactly this. He unscrewed the canteen, knelt, held it out. Voss stared, his cracked lips parted.
Something crossed his face that could not read. Fear. Wonder. A flicker that looked terribly like shame. Why?
He whispered. Because you're thirsty. I killed your father. Yes, I would kill you. I know.
Then why? Wade did not answer. He only held out the canteen. Steady, patient. A man doing the one thing his father had ever truly taught him.
Voss drank. It ran down his chin and over the stained collar. He drank like a man who had never in his life been told no. and when he finished he lay there gasping and began very quietly to weep. They buried Dakaya that same evening. Guan would not wait for a hearing or a wagon or a priest.
The soldiers carried him down from the ridge on a blanket and Wade and Nalen dug beneath a cottonwood above the creek in the last red light. Guan laid the first stone. Wade laid the second. Nalin stood at the head and hummed a low tune in a language Wade did not know. Then Wade, without noticing, was humming it too.
At the end, Puit sling and all set a crust of rhubarb pie on the grave. Nobody understood the way did. He laughed until he cried and cried until he laughed. But that is how you bury a good man. With both.
The hearing at Santa Rosa lasted 11 days. Seals examined under glass. A federal agent who stared at a 25-year-old signature like a man seeing a ghost. Puit wept in the witness box and confessed every coin. The RD said the words he had held in his mouth for a quarter century. and took 5 years in a territorial prison, which he said was too few.
Private Weller told a courtroom what he saw at Hollis Bridge, and Captain Pike, who had owed Garrett Voss more than he could ever repay, was stripped of his commission and tried for the murder of Corporal Davies. A letter went to the corporal's sister in Ohio. It said he had died doing a kindness. It was the first true thing anyone had written about him in a week. Callaway, who had killed Deputy Hale to start the whole business, said nothing and hanged the following spring.
And Garrett Voss, whose name had been painted on every fence post between the mountains and the river, spent the rest of his life behind a different kind of fence. They tore down the dam on the third day of the hearing. Every family came. Apache settler, the colonel's men with picks, Guan with a sledge, non on the tallest boulder, swinging his legs, shouting instructions no one had asked for. And when the last stone fell, the lake shuddered, rolled over the broken wall.
Then Cedar Wash ran again, brown and loud and glorious, past the camp over the stones where children ran out, shrieking to stand in it. By order of the commissioner, every acre went back to the families. Wade, too. He tried to refuse. Guan told him it was not his to refuse.
The elders have decided, she said. A man who gave up his father's name to save 61 strangers should not sleep under a wagon. There is a well. There is a place beside it. A stay.
Keep the water free. That's a duty, not a gift. Yes, you are terrible at duties. I'm improving. She smiled.
A real one. The first in six days. And it lit up her face like the first morning on a long, dry creek. In the spring, Wade built a cabin where the old one had stood. The two rooms, a stone chimney, the porch, a new well 40 ft from the old stones, dug with non and a dozen hands from the camp.
And over the well, he nailed a pine board handlettered. Nothing fancy. The well is open. Drink first. Tell me your name after if you want to.
Travelers came. Drifters. The riders on lame horses. A woman with three children on a dry wagon. A prospector with a gray beard and a mule that bit.
Wade handed every one of them the dipper. He never asked where they were from. Some knew the story. Most did not. And he never told it unless someone asked.
When they did, he always said the same thing. I had a canteen once. It was almost empty, and that was all. Years later, a woman rode up the trail with a rifle across her saddle and a tall, loud, joking man beside her with an old man's eyes and an old man's patient hum. They drank at the well, sat on the porch, talked until the stars came out.
But before they left, Guan laid something on the porch rail. A small scratched dull half circle of bronze. The other half is with Nalin, we thought, for when one of us is lonely. I'm not lonely. I know.
She mounted, looked down at him. Her face was older now, softer, lined with laughter and with grief. And she said in the voice of someone who had waited a long time to say it, "Thank you for the water. " Wade stood on the porch, a gray man now, a little stiff in the knees. He lifted a hand.
It was only a canteen. She smiled. No, Wade. It was never only a canteen. And she rode away into the long gold evening, and he watched until the dust settled, until the light changed, until the whole wide land lay quiet around him.
Then he walked to the well, lowered the bucket, drew it up cold and full, and left the dipper hanging on its hook for whoever came next.