Rearen's lawyers answered. Vain answered back. The judge in Prescott turned out to be a man with a reputation for reading documents carefully before he ruled on them, which was not as universal equality in frontier judges as one might hope, but which in this case proved to be exactly what was needed. The ruling came back. The eastern water rights, including the creek that ran through the valley, were not included in Rearen's land grant.
They had never been included. Someone in Rearen's chain of title had been reading the grant the way people sometimes read things, seeing what they expected to see rather than what was actually there. Rearen left the territory the following spring. This was not quite the dramatic departure it might sound like in a shorter story. He simply calculated, as he was apparently capable of doing when the calculation was unavoidable, that the valley was no longer worth the investment of time and money and legal effort it would require, and he moved his attention to a different piece of country where the math was more in his favor.
This was in its way its own kind of justice. Not the satisfying declarative kind that stories like to provide, but the quieter kind that comes from making something not worth a powerful man's effort, which tends to last longer. What lasted in the valley was something harder to name precisely. Boon stayed through that winter and into the following spring doing the work that needed doing and sleeping in the space near the horses that had become without any formal announcement his space. Cheese extended her remit from August to include Boon himself, appearing most mornings with observations about the weather and the horses and the activities of various adults in the camp that she delivered with the authority of a very small person who has decided that authority is a matter of confidence and not size.
Eventually becoming the person who brought him questions when the adults immediately around her were not going to answer satisfactorily. Gray elk and boon developed over those months. The kind of friendship that does not announce itself as friendship, but simply accumulates in the time spent sitting near each other without needing to fill the silence. In the gradual expansion of what each of them was willing to say, in the specific ease that comes from two people deciding without a formal agreement that the other one is trustworthy. Grey Elk told him things about the land around the valley that Boon had been looking at for months without fully understanding.
What the grass patterns meant, how to read the creek's behavior in different seasons, where the weather came from, and what it looked like when it was on its way. Boon told Grey Elk about the places he had been, and the things he had learned and lost and learned again. Yuma listened to most of these conversations and occasionally corrected errors in both directions, which she did with a precision that suggested she had been doing this for a long time, and found it more interesting than tiresome. There is something that happens to a man who spends long enough in country this wide and this old, who spends enough mornings in a valley where the grass comes in sparse but reliable and the creek runs clear, and the people around him know how to live in a place rather than just occupy it. Something settles.