The Spring Between Us

Chapter 23: The Foreman's Offer

The quarry was already working when I got there.

I heard it before I saw it. The crusher was running somewhere down in the pit, a low grinding noise that carried up the canyon walls, and there was a line of dust going up from the haul road. The sun was not over the eastern rim yet and the whole place was in shadow and the men were moving around the sheds with lanterns.

I came down the old pack trail with my jacket buttoned and my hair tied back and the mark under my sleeve, and at the gate of the company yard a man in a work shirt stopped me.

"You are on company ground," he said.

"I am on my own ground." I looked him up and down. He was young, with a flat face and a pencil behind his ear. "I am the Luna of the Kızıltaş pack and this claim is under my protection. Go and find Owen."

He went. He was gone a while. I stood in the yard with the crusher grinding and the dust settling on my boots and the men looking at me sideways, and then the door of the big shed opened and a man came out pulling on his work jacket.

Owen was forty or thereabouts, with grey eyes and stubble and a face that had been out in the weather for a long time. He had a pencil in his hand too and a clipboard under his arm, and he stopped four paces from me and said, "Luna. This is unexpected."

"Good morning, Owen."

"It is not a good morning. The crusher has been throwing a bearing since Tuesday and the company will not send a new one until the ore cars are up to grade." He looked at me. "What do you want?"

"To talk. Somewhere the men cannot hear us."

He looked at me for a moment. Then he turned and walked toward the far end of the yard, and I followed him, and we stopped between two sheds where the noise of the crusher was muffled and the dust was not so bad.

"You know why I am here," I said.

"I can guess." Owen put his clipboard down on a barrel. "Your Beta came to see me four days ago and told me you had been going down the old shaft and finding things. She wanted to know what your father had told me." He looked at me. "I told her nothing."

"Why not?"

"Because your father was the only wolf in this canyon who ever treated me like a man instead of a hired hand." Owen pulled a tin of tobacco from his pocket and then thought better of it and put it back. "And because your Beta did not ask in a way I liked. She offered me money. Then she offered me a job on the Council's books. Then she told me that if I did not tell her what your father had said I might find my contract was not renewed at the end of the year."

"That is Ruth."

"It is." Owen looked at the sheds. "Luna, I have been the foreman here for eleven years and before that I ran the ore cart when I was a boy. I have been paid by this company and I have been paid by the Council and I have signed papers I did not read. I am not a good man. But your father was good to me and I have been carrying a thing of his around in my head for eighteen years and I am tired of it."

"What thing?"

"Your father gave me a letter to carry to the Council in the winter before he died." Owen's grey eyes came back to me. "It was sealed and it was heavy and he gave me a silver dollar to take it down and another to swear I would never say who gave it to me. I took it down the canyon on the ore cart and I gave it to the Council clerk at the door and I came home and I did not think about it again until the spring, when the mine came down and your father was dead."

I stood very still. "Do you know what was in it?"

"No." He shook his head. "But I know what the clerk did with it. He read it standing at the door and then he went inside and came back out with another man, a young man with silver hair, and the young man took the letter and read it himself and then he put it in his coat and he said something to the clerk that made the clerk laugh." Owen's jaw worked. "I was fifteen. I did not understand what I was seeing. But I remember the silver hair."

"Silas."

"That is the man who has been coming to this canyon three times a year for nine years and who has been staying in your guest hut for a week." Owen picked up his clipboard. "Luna, I am going to tell you the rest of it and then I am going to ask you for something, and I want you to hear both before you say anything."

"Go on."

"The water under this quarry has been pumped out and sold to the company for twenty years. I know that because I sign the pump logs. The Council takes its cut and the company takes its cut and the wolves of this canyon get what is left, which for the last three months has been nothing." He looked at me. "I can give you the pump logs. Every month, every acre foot, every signature, going back twenty years. I keep a duplicate in the shed because the company lost the originals in a fire in sixty eight and I did not trust them after that."

I took a breath. "And what do you want for them?"

"I want the pump house closed and I want my men moved onto the Kızıltaş water line." Owen said it without any ceremony. "Twenty two men work in this pit and every one of them lives in the town at the bottom of the canyon and every one of them drinks from the Council's pipe. If this comes out and the pump house goes dark, they lose their jobs and their water both. I want your word that the pack will let them draw from your spring and that you will speak for them to the Council."

"The spring is not mine to give."

"It is if you are Luna." Owen looked at me steadily. "And there is another thing. I have seen the Çöl Alpha on the old quarry road at night. Twice. Once three weeks ago and once last night, coming down from the rock overhang with his horse and your boy." He raised an eyebrow. "I do not care who you are keeping company with, Luna. But the men have seen him too, and men talk, and by tomorrow the whole canyon will know the Alpha of the Çöl pack has been on Kızıltaş land at night."

My face did not change. "The Çöl Alpha and I have been discussing water."

"I am sure you have." Owen almost smiled. "Then discuss it faster. Because your Beta came to me four days ago and the Council man came to me yesterday, and the Council man did not offer me money. He told me that the company has a lease on this claim that runs another four years and that if I want it renewed I will keep my mouth shut about the pumps and the logs and everything else." He put his clipboard under his arm. "I have been thinking about it all night. I am going to give you the logs, Luna, and I am going to do it tonight, and after tonight I am going to have to leave this canyon, because Silas will know it was me."

"Where will you go?"

"I have a brother in Colorado." Owen picked up his tin of tobacco and this time he did open it. "Tonight, after the shift. Behind the pump shed there is a rock with a white mark on it. The logs will be under it. You bring your boy and you take them and you do not tell anyone where they came from, and if the Council asks me I will say I never saw you." He looked at me. "And Luna. There is one more thing you should know before you go up that road. The pump house is not just pumping water. There is a second pump down there and a tank the company did not put in, and it has been running since the spring thaw, and I do not know what it is for."

The crusher ground on down in the pit. The dust went up from the haul road. I stood between two sheds with my jacket buttoned and my hands at my sides and my mark warm under my sleeve, and I looked at Owen and said, "A second pump. Where does it go?"

"I do not know. It is not on the company plans and it is not in the logs." Owen put his tobacco away. "It goes down and it does not come back up. That is all I know."

I turned and started up the trail, and Owen called after me, "Luna. What do I tell your Beta if she comes back?"

"Tell her nothing." I stopped. "And Owen. If anyone asks you whether you have spoken to me today, you tell them that the Kızıltaş Luna came to the quarry to complain about dust on her land and that you sent her away."

He nodded and went back toward the sheds, and I climbed the trail with the sun coming over the rim and the shadow sliding back across the pit, and I had gone half a mile when I heard the boots on the rock behind me and turned.

It was Cal. He was out of breath and dusty and he had his jacket on over his nightshirt.

"Luna," he said. "Mira sent me. Elias is awake. He cannot speak above a whisper but he is awake and he is asking for you." He wiped his forehead. "And there is something else. Ruth has gone down the mesa road with two warriors. She left before dawn and she told the gate that she was going to the Council hall at the quarry to see the envoy about the inquiry."

I looked back down the trail. The sheds were below us and the pump house was beside them and the crusher was still grinding and the men were working in the dust.

"The Council hall at the quarry," I said. "Silas is staying in my guest hut. He is not at the quarry."

Cal looked at me. "Then what is Ruth doing down there?"