The boy looked back at him with those dark assessing eyes and said nothing at all. You hurt? Reed asked. The boy shook his head slowly. You know where your people are?
A pause. Then a careful nod in the direction of the northern ridgeline. Reed stepped down from his horse. His knees felt older than usual. He walked over to his saddle bag, pulled out a cloth-wrapped piece of dried venison and a half-full canteen, and held them both out without making a production of it.
The boy watched his hands the whole time, the way a young animal watches something new, deciding whether to bolt or stay. Then he reached out and took the canteen, drank from it without taking his eyes off Reed, and handed it back. Go on then. Reed said stepping aside. Get back to your people before those men decide to come back with more. " The boy stood there for another moment, then he reached into the small leather pouch at his side and held something out.
It was a carved piece of turquoise, small, shaped roughly like a running deer. Reed looked at it for a moment, then took it. When he looked up, the boy was already moving up the canyon wall with the quick, sure-footed ease of someone who had grown up learning every stone of that country by heart. Reed stood in the canyon with the carved turquoise in his palm and the fading sound of the boy's footsteps above him and tried to figure out what had just happened to his afternoon. He did not find out what it truly meant for another 3 weeks.
Reed's land sat in a shallow valley where the grass came in sparse and yellow most of the year, where the creek that crossed his eastern fence ran strong in spring and went to nothing by August. He had 500 head of cattle, give or take, and a hand named Virgil who was 60 years old, slow-moving, and the most reliable person Reed had ever known. Virgil had been there when Reed's wife was alive and he had stayed after and they had an arrangement that involved very little conversation and considerable mutual respect. The trouble with the land acquisition company did not start because of what happened in the canyon. Reed knew enough about how these things worked to understand that he had been on their list for some time before that afternoon.
His land sat squarely between two parcels they had already absorbed and the survey lines that the railroad needed to file with the territorial government ran straight through his property. He had received two letters. He had not responded to either. The third communication, when it came, was not a letter. It arrived on a Monday in the form of six men on horseback who rode up to his gate and told him he had 30 days to vacate.
Their paperwork looked official in the way that things look official when someone has spent money to make them look that way. Reed read it twice, handed it back, and told him he would be consulting with the only lawyer in Alameda who he trusted, a man named Fletcher who had represented him in the bank disputes years earlier. What Greer's men did next Reed did not see coming, which was his first real mistake. He had underestimated the timetable. While he rode to Alameda to see Fletcher, someone hit his property.
They did not burn it. They were smarter than that. They moved his herd, all 500 head, 3 miles east into a neighboring canyon under cover of dark and rebranded them with a crude but adequate mark before driving them south. By the time Reed returned the next afternoon, Virgil was standing in the middle of an empty pasture with his hat in his hands and the particular look of a man who cannot quite believe what his own eyes are telling him. The cattle were gone.
His livelihood, his collateral on the land note, everything he had to his name beyond the fence posts and the cabin walls, gone. And when the county sheriff rode out, the men Greer worked for had a bill of sale dated two days prior for 500 head matching the description purchased from a seller who did not exist but whose signature was convincing enough that the sheriff, a man who owed his position to the same interests, called it a matter for the courts and rode away. Reed sat on his porch that night and looked at the dark pasture and understood clearly and completely what was happening. This was how it was done. Not with violence in the open, not with anything so direct as putting a gun to a man's head and demanding he sign.
This was the clean version. The version with paperwork. The version where a man simply found himself unable to meet his land note, unable to prove his cattle were his cattle, unable to fight a legal machine that had been specifically constructed to grind him down until he gave up or went broke or both. Fletcher told him honestly, when Reed rode back the following morning, that the legal path would take 18 months and cost more than Reed had. That even if they won, the judgment could be appealed.
That the same thing had happened to four other landowners in the territory in the past two years and that none of them had kept their land. Reed rode home through the late afternoon heat with the particular hollowness of a man who has fought hard his whole life and is beginning to wonder if it was for anything. The sky over the canyon country was a deep, relentless blue. The kind of blue that does not care about any particular man's problems. He had saved a boy from four hired men in a canyon and it had cost him everything.
He came up over the last rise before his property and he stopped his horse. There were people at his fence line. A great many people. He counted them as he came down the slope and he stopped counting at 40. They were Apache.