Call it four days total before I'm back with anyone who can do something official. For days, Dawn said, "Can you hold for four days? " The question sat between them, not a challenge, a real question, the kind that required a real answer. "Yes," Dawn said, and the word was exactly, "As long as it needed to be, and no longer. " Seth nodded. He started to stand. "Seth. " Her voice stopped him.
It was the first time she had used his name. He realized he had used hers once. She had not used his until this moment. When you get back, I want to know about Ruth. He was quiet.
Not now, she said quickly. Not as a condition, just a pause smaller and less certain than her usual pauses. I think she must have been someone worth knowing. And you're not going to tell me about her easily, but you might tell me eventually, and I'd like you to come back so that eventually has a chance to happen. He stood looking at her in the late afternoon light of the canyon, with the bracelet on his wrist and the camp moving behind her and the north ridge invisible beyond the rock walls, but present in every decision that had been made that day.
I'll come back, Seth said. I know, Dawn said. I already decided to believe that. He left at dusk after the herd had been moved. The move itself was a thing worth watching, and he watched it from the east passage entrance, while Creek stood behind him, already saddled and loaded with two days of provisions.
Dawn managed the herd movement from the corral gate with River's Edge and four younger handlers, and she did it the way Seth had seen it done only twice in his life by people who truly understood horses in groups, which was to say she barely appeared to do anything at all. Small sounds, precise positioning, no pressure, no hurry. The herd moved south through the narrow access like water finding its own level, and Flint, the black stallion, went through last, and Dawn stood at the gate until the last horse was through, and the gate was closed. She didn't look at Seth before he left. But she put her hand briefly on Creek's nose, which was how she said goodbye to the horse, and by extension to the horse's rider.
And Seth understood this and respected it. He rode north through the east passage and then turned west and then south on a route Dawn had drawn from memory on a folded piece of paper that he had already memorized and burned in the camp's cook fire because paper was information and he was going to be writing through open territory. The desert at night was a different entity than the desert by day. Cooler, more dimensional, the shadows in the moonlit rock creating a landscape that had nothing to do with the flat bleached surface that the sun showed. Creek moved through it without concern, her feet finding purchase on the rocky descents with the confidence of a horse that knew her footing.
Seth rode and thought about breaks. He had been running the numbers since the council meeting. 20 men was significant. It was the kind of force you assembled when you expected resistance or when you wanted the resistance to be academic. When you wanted the people on the other side to look at what was coming and decide that resistance was not worth the cost.
It was a number calculated to intimidate as much as to fight, which meant Briggs was not certain of what he was walking into. Certain men brought enough to fight. Uncertain men brought enough to make fighting seem pointless to the other side. Briggs was bringing enough to make fighting seem pointless, which meant he could be played. Seth let this thought develop as he rode the way he let plans develop, not forcing the pieces into configuration, but letting them find their arrangement through the logic of the situation.
The horses is bait, the valley is safety, Dawn holding the camp for four days, and Seth coming back from Tucson with the one thing that made all of it final instead of temporary. Somewhere around midnight, when he was 3 hours out of camp and moving well on open ground, Creek slowed, not because she was tired, the same ear configuration as Reds, forward and then sideways, processing something Seth couldn't yet sense. He stopped her, sat still, listened. The desert at midnight had its own sounds. And among those sounds, Seth had learned to locate the specific silence that was produced by a human being trying to make no sound in a space where no human being should be.
There was a man sitting on a flat rock 10 yards to his right, lit by the moon, not hiding, with a lit cigar burning a small orange point in the dark. Evening, Holt Briggs said he was not what Seth had built in his imagination. He was a smaller man than the reputation, lean and weathered with the kind of stillness that either meant self-control or emptiness. And Seth could not yet tell which. He wore the hat with the black feather centered in the band, which looked in the moonlight less like an affectation and more like a flag.
No gun in his hand. No visible signal for the men who were presumably with an earshot. I know where you've been sleeping, Briggs said. I know you rode in two days ago. I know you're headed somewhere, which means you figured something out that you need help to do.
He pulled on the cigar and let the smoke out slowly. I'm not going to stop you. I want you to know that you can go to Tucson. You can do whatever it is you're planning. A pause.
But when you come back, there won't be anything left to come back to. The threat had the quality of a statement of fact rather than a provocation, which made it worse. Seth held Creek still and looked at the man on the rock. "Why tell me this? " Seth said. "Because I want you to understand what you're choosing. " Briggs turned the cigar in his fingers, looking at its lit.
"Right on. Find your judge. Come back in a week to a camp that's been emptied. Walk away from the whole thing, and I won't come looking for you. " He looked up or go back and warn them, and they'll use up whatever they have left fighting something they can't win. Seth let the silence sit for 10 seconds.
"You're telling me this because you think it'll work," Seth said finally. "You've done this before and it's worked before. " "Briggs didn't answer," which was the answer. "The thing you don't know," Seth said, "is that I'm a rancher and ranchers don't walk away from their herd. " He touched his heel to creek and rode north. He did not look back at the orange point of the cigar. He didn't need to.
He had seen what he needed to see, which was a man who had done this enough times to be efficient about it, but not enough times to have learned the difference between people who could be warned off and people who couldn't. That difference was everything. Seth rode through the night. By the time the sky started graying in the east, he was well beyond Briggs's range and moving at a pace that creek found comfortable and that covered ground like the tide covered sand, steady and indifferent to the distance remaining. He touched the bracelet on his left wrist once, and then put his hand back on the rain.
Tucson was a day and a half away at this pace and Judge Warren Cole was in Tucson. And the window between what Seth was riding toward and what Dawn was holding together behind him was narrow enough that he could feel it in his chest like a second heartbeat, urgent and not quite in rhythm with the first. He did not stop except to water creek and rest her briefly and eat something that was functional rather than enjoyable and be back in the saddle while the sun was still low enough to make the riding bearable. The thought he kept returning to in the steady rhythm of the ride was not about Briggs or Cole or the logistics of what came next. It was the word Dawn had used when he asked if she could hold for four days.
Yes, flat. Certain. No performance. The word of someone who had already accounted for the possibility of failure and decided it was not one of the available options. He rode faster.
Tucson was louder than Seth remembered from the one time he had passed through it for years back on a cattle drive that had ended badly for reasons that were not his fault, but that he had spent 6 months blaming himself for anyway. The town had grown since then in the way that territorial capitals grew when they decided to take themselves seriously. Brick replacing Adobe in places, a courthouse with a flagpole, and the deliberate architectural confidence of an institution that intended permanence. Seth Rode Creek down the main street at 7 in the morning. Both of them carrying the pale dust of the southern Arizona basin and found the federal courthouse on the second cross street without asking directions because asking directions was something he did only after he had exhausted his own navigation and he had not exhausted it yet.
He had ridden 31 hours with four stops. Creek had been extraordinary. She had shifted gates without being asked when the terrain demanded it. Conserved herself on the climbs, opened up on the long flats, and arrived at the courthouse hitching post with her breathing already settling into the steady rhythm of an animal that had worked hard and knew it and was not distressed by the knowledge. Seth watered her first and found shade for her and checked her feet before he went up the courthouse steps because that was the order things went in and it was not negotiable regardless of urgency.
The clerk at the front desk had the look of a man managing more paper than the position had been described as containing. He assessed Seth in the way that clerks in official buildings assessed dusty arrivals quickly and not favorably. Judge Warren Cole. Seth said the judge is in session until noon. I have information about Holt Briggs.
He said the name the way you said a name that you knew would move things and it moved things. The clerk's expression reorganized itself. Tell him a rancher from New Mexico has a time problem. He'll know what that means or he won't, but I need an answer before 10 minutes passes. The clerk left, returned in four.