Chapter 2: THE WARNING ON THE RIDGE
By noon, Caldwell Ranch no longer sounded anything like Caldwell Ranch.
For three years, silence had occupied the place as though it owned every inch.
Now there were human voices.
Low conversation.
Footsteps.
Buckets scraping against wood.
At one point a short burst of laughter came from near the barn, and Eli stopped beside the corral as if someone had struck him.
He had forgotten what laughter sounded like when it came from somewhere other than his memories.
The women began repairing things without being told.
One repaired a damaged hinge.
Two others patched openings in the barn roof.
Several gathered mesquite for firewood.
Others prepared food from the small amount of provisions they had brought with them.
Twice Eli attempted to explain that they did not have to work.
Eventually Naiche looked directly at him.
“We know.”
That ended the argument.
They were not trying to repay him.
They were helping everyone survive.
There was a difference.
Late that afternoon, Naiche found Eli beside the well, examining the water level.
It had fallen.
Not enough to be dangerous.
Not yet.
But seventy-three people would change the situation quickly.
“Your people,” Eli said.
Naiche understood what he was asking.
“Tomorrow.”
Eli turned toward the southwest.
“They’re coming here?”
“Yes.”
He rubbed a hand across his jaw.
His well could probably keep that many people alive temporarily.
It could not support them forever.
Something would have to change.
“Who took your water?”
Naiche’s face became cold.
She crouched and scratched a word into the dirt.
WHITLOCK.
Eli stared.
He knew the name.
Everybody in that part of Arizona knew it.
Silas Whitlock.
Owner of the Bar W.
Eight thousand acres.
Fourteen hired gunmen.
A cattle operation that somehow seemed to double in size every year despite rainfall too poor to keep much more than cactus alive.
Whitlock had spent years buying land west of Dry Hollow.
Or taking it, depending on whose version of the story you believed.
Eli had always stayed away from him.
Apparently Whitlock had finally found a way into Eli’s life anyway.
Naiche drew the stream again.
Then she drew a fence across it.
Then cattle.
Eli’s face darkened.
“He fenced your spring?”
She nodded.
“He can’t fence water your people have been using.”
Naiche looked at him with the expression of someone who regarded the law as a private joke invented by white men.
Perhaps she was right.
Then a sound cracked from the ridge.
A rifle shot.
Every woman stopped moving.
Eli spun toward the sound.
A second shot followed.
Nothing struck the ranch.
It was a signal.
Eli ran toward the barn.
When he came back into the yard carrying his rifle, Naiche was already beside him.
Three mounted men appeared along the distant ridge.
They made no attempt to ride closer.
They simply sat there watching.
Eli recognized the brand carried by the horse beneath the first rider.
Bar W.
Whitlock.
The lead rider raised something white.
A piece of cloth.
Then he let it fall.
He turned his horse around.
The other two did the same.
All three vanished over the ridge.
Eli walked out to where the cloth had dropped.
A stone was wrapped inside it along with a folded piece of paper.
He opened the message.
Four short sentences.
CALDWELL,
THE APACHES ARE TRESPASSING.
SEND THEM AWAY BEFORE SUNDOWN TOMORROW.
THIS DOESN’T CONCERN YOU.
— S. WHITLOCK
Eli read the message a second time.
Naiche came to stand beside him.
She could not read every word.
She did not need to.
She recognized the name written at the bottom.
Her jaw tightened.
Eli folded the paper.
For three years, he had deliberately chosen isolation because isolation meant there was nobody left for the world to take from him.
No wife he could lose.
No child he might have to bury.
No neighbor who could betray him.
No friend whose grave he would eventually be forced to stand beside.
Now twenty-five women stood behind him.
Forty-eight more people were somewhere out in the desert.
And Silas Whitlock had just given Eli until sundown the following day to decide exactly what kind of man he was going to be.
Naiche pointed toward the east.
“You want… we go?”
Eli looked at her.
Then at the well.
Then at the bracelet circling his wrist.
And suddenly he remembered Sarah lying weak with fever in a wagon three years earlier.
He remembered going to a ranch house and begging another man for water.
He remembered that man standing on his porch and saying there was none he could spare.
Behind the house had been barrels.
Full barrels.
More than enough.
Eli had never managed to forget that sight.
Sarah died two days afterward.
Their little boy died before sunrise the next morning.
For three years, Eli had blamed God.
He had blamed the desert.
He had blamed himself.
But beneath all those other things lived the memory of a man who had possessed enough water to show mercy and had simply chosen not to.
Eli stared toward the ridge where Whitlock’s riders had disappeared.
Then he ripped the warning in two.
“No.”
Naiche watched him closely.
He tore the pieces again.
“They stay.”
He pointed southwest.
“Everybody.”
Then he pointed toward the ranch.
“Bring them here.”
Naiche’s eyes opened wider.
“Everybody?”
“Everybody.”
The wind caught the torn pieces of Whitlock’s message and scattered them across the desert.
Neither of them understood it yet, but that decision would bring blood to Caldwell Ranch.
And it would also give Eli something he had believed had been buried forever.
A family.
Comments (0)