Survey maps were restored.
Families regained access to water.
The worst cattle raids stopped almost immediately once nobody was paying men to create them.
And Torne Ranch became something nobody would have imagined.
A place where anyone traveling peacefully could water a horse.
Ranchers.
Apache families.
Soldiers.
Freighters.
Mexican traders.
Hunters.
Nobody paid.
Nobody asked permission.
Corvin hung a wooden sign beside the well.
It contained only four words.
WATER BELONGS TO THE THIRSTY.
Sela came often.
Sometimes with her father.
Sometimes alone.
She laughed at Corvin’s cooking.
Corvin complained that she frightened his horses.
She reminded him that his horses liked her better.
He denied it.
The horses proved her right.
One evening nearly a year after the morning of the three hundred riders, Sela sat on Corvin’s porch while the desert turned gold.
Corvin brought two tin cups.
He handed one to her.
She sniffed it.
“Coffee?”
“Yes.”
“You know I hate coffee.”
“So do I.”
“Then why make it?”
Corvin sat beside her.
“Tradition.”
For a while they watched the sun fall behind the hills.
A small group of riders approached the well.
Two ranchers.
An Apache family.
A freight driver.
Nobody argued over who drank first.
Sela watched them quietly.
“Talia would have liked this.”
Corvin’s fingers tightened around the cup.
“I wish I’d known her.”
Sela looked at him.
“You did.”
He frowned.
“You carry things from people even when you forget where they came from.”
She nodded toward the well.
“She gave water to anyone who asked.”
Corvin looked down.
Suddenly a childhood memory surfaced.
Not a face.
Barely even an image.
Warm hands.
Sunlight.
A woman’s voice singing somewhere above him.
And water dripping from a wooden cup onto his tiny fingers.
He closed his eyes.
For thirty-four years, he had believed the memory belonged to a dream.
Now he knew better.
“Corvin?”
He opened his eyes.
“Nothing.”
But it wasn’t nothing.
Far across the desert, thunder rolled.
Rain clouds were gathering above the mountains.
Sela stood.
“You should bring the horses in.”
“In a minute.”
She walked toward her horse.
Then stopped.
“Oh.”
“What?”
“I never told you the last thing Mother said about you.”
Corvin smiled.
“I thought she died asking whether you’d found me.”
“No.”
Sela’s expression changed.
“She already knew we would.”
“How?”
“She said Josiah had left enough clues.”
Corvin shook his head.
“That sounds like him.”
Sela mounted.
“What she actually said was strange.”
Corvin waited.
“She said, ‘When you find my son, don’t tell him I sent you until after he gives you water.’”
Corvin’s smile disappeared.
A chill moved across his skin.
“What?”
Sela nodded.
“Those were her words.”
“But she died four years before you came here.”
“Yes.”
“She knew you’d come to my ranch?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
Sela looked toward the old stone well.
“I wondered the same thing.”
She reached into her saddlebag.
Then removed one last object.
An envelope.
Yellowed.
Unopened.
Corvin’s name was written across the front.
In Josiah Torne’s handwriting.
His heart began pounding.
“Where did you get that?”
“Mother gave it to me before she died.”
