The Spring Between Us

Chapter 24: Land for Sale

I went down the trail after her.

Cal came behind me and we went down the switchbacks at a trot, and the sun was fully up now and the canyon was hot and the dust came off the rocks in little puffs under our boots. I did not go by the road. There is a path along the top of the quarry wall that the miners cut for the powder wagon, and it comes out above the pump house, and from there you can look down into the yard without being seen.

We lay flat on the rim and looked over.

Ruth was in the yard. She had two warriors with her, the broad quiet man Berik and a taller one named Sten, and they were standing by the company office with their jackets on and their hands at their sides. Owen was there with his clipboard. And there was a third man who was not a miner, in a dark coat and a hat, and he was standing by the office door with a roll of papers under his arm.

"Who is that?" I whispered.

Cal squinted. "I do not know him. He is not from the pack. He came up the road yesterday with the ore wagons, I think."

The man in the dark coat unrolled one of his papers and held it out to Ruth, and Ruth took it and looked at it and then nodded and gave it back. Then Owen said something and Ruth shook her head and Owen said something else and Ruth turned and looked up at the quarry wall, and for a moment I thought she was looking straight at me.

Then she laughed. I heard it, faint and thin, over the crusher. She laughed and put her hand on Owen's arm and said something that made the man in the dark coat laugh too, and then she turned and walked back toward the road with Berik and Sten behind her.

"Cal," I said. "Get down to the yard. Not the front. The back, behind the pump shed. Find Owen and tell him the Luna wants to see the papers the man in the dark coat showed Ruth. Tell him now, before the man leaves."

Cal went. I stayed on the rim and watched Ruth come up the road with her warriors and go out of sight around the bend, and then I got up and went down the powder path and around the back of the sheds, and Owen was there with Cal, holding a roll of papers and looking sick.

"She signed a lease," Owen said.

"What lease?"

"The prospecting lease. The company has been trying to buy the south section for four years and your mother would never sell it, and this morning your Beta signed it in front of a company man and two witnesses." He handed me the papers. "It is the land above the old shaft. It is the land your father kept his books under."

I unrolled the papers. There were three sheets. The first was a lease of the south section to the Kızıltaş Mining Company for a term of twenty five years, with the right to prospect and extract all minerals and water on the land. The second was a schedule of payments, and the payments were large. The third was a page of signatures, and at the bottom of it there was a signature in a neat firm hand that said Ruth, Beta, on behalf of the Luna and the Kızıltaş pack.

"On behalf of the Luna," I said.

"She told me you knew. She told me the Luna had approved it and that you were too ill to sign and that she had your authority in writing." Owen wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. "Luna, I did not know. I have been trying to buy that section for four years and when she came in with the papers and your name on them I thought the pack had finally changed its mind."

"Where are the other copies?"

"One goes to the company office in Denver. One goes to the Council. She took the third."

I stood in the shadow of the pump shed with the lease in my hand. The crusher ground on. The dust went up.

"Owen," I said. "The second pump. The one you do not know about. Where is it?"

"Under the pump house. There is a hatch in the floor."

"Open it."

He looked at me. Then he nodded and walked to the pump house and I followed him with Cal behind me, and the pump house was a long low shed full of pipes and a great iron pump with a wheel on it and a smell of oil and wet stone. In the corner of the floor there was a hatch with an iron ring in it. Owen pulled it up. There was a ladder going down into the dark and a sound coming up out of it, a steady thump that was not the crusher and not the pump.

"That is the second pump," Owen said. "It has been running since the spring thaw and I have never seen a man go down there to service it."

I put my foot on the ladder.

"Luna," Cal said. "Not alone."

"Then come with me."

We went down. The ladder was new and the rungs were clean and the shaft was wide and it went down farther than the old ore shaft had. At the bottom there was a chamber cut in the rock with a concrete floor and a pump bolted to it, and the pump was running and the pipe went out of it and into the wall and away.

There was a table in the chamber. There was a ledger on the table and a lamp beside it and a chair, and on the wall there was a map. I took the lamp and held it up to the map, and it was the canyon, and on the canyon there were two lines drawn in red ink. One came from the Kızıltaş spring and went under the quarry and out to the eastern edge of the map. The other came from the Çöl spring and went down and joined it.

"They have been taking from both," Cal said.

"They have been taking from both for years." I put the lamp down and opened the ledger. It was in a different hand, small and square, and it went back nineteen years, and every month there was a number and a buyer and a signature. The buyers were the mining company. The signatures were the same name on every page.

Silas.

"Cal," I said. "Go up and tell Owen to keep his men out of the pump house until sundown and then to leave the hatch unlocked. And then go home and tell Mira what we found and tell her to keep it quiet." I closed the ledger. "I am going to find Ruth."

I went up the ladder and out of the pump house and up the road to the pack house, and I did not stop at the gate. I went through the yard and up the steps and into the hall, and the hall was full because it was the middle of the morning and the warriors were in and the women were mending and old Tomas was by the fire, and Ruth was standing at the near end of the table with her jacket off and a cup in her hand, and she turned when I came in.

"Luna," she said. "You are up early."

I put the lease on the table.

"What is this?" I said.

Ruth looked at the paper. She did not pick it up. She looked at it the way a woman looks at a bill she has already paid.

"That is the south section lease," she said. "I signed it this morning at the quarry."

"You signed it in my name."

"I signed it on behalf of the Luna, which is what a Beta does when the Luna is not able to sign." Ruth set her cup down. "The pack needs the money, Derya. The cistern is dry and the ore is not moving and we have forty wolves to feed and the Council has been asking about our taxes since your mother died. The company has been after that section for four years and your mother would never sell because it was your father's land, and that was sentiment and not sense. So I signed it."

"On my mother's dying wish?"

Ruth's face did not change. "Your mother told me, four days before she died, that if the pack was ever in trouble I should do what was needed and not trouble her daughter with it. She said those words to me in this hall. You may believe it or not."

"I do not believe it."

"Then take it to the Council." Ruth picked up her cup. "But you will find that a lease signed by a Beta on behalf of a Luna who is not able to sign is a legal lease, and that the company will hold it, and that the Council will not overturn it without a hearing that will take six months. And by the time the hearing is over, the south section will have been prospected and the old shaft will be company ground and the books under it will be company property." She drank. "I told you, Derya. I told you I would not let this pack die while a Council man wrote a report. I meant it."

The hall was silent. I stood at the table with the lease under my hand and the whole pack looking at me, and I thought about the ledger in the pump house chamber with Silas's name on every page, and the second pump, and the hatch in the floor.

"Ruth," I said. "Did you know there is a second pump under the pump house?"

Ruth's cup stopped halfway to her mouth.

"A second pump," she said.

"There is a chamber under the quarry with a pump and a ledger and a map on the wall. The ledger goes back nineteen years and it has Silas's name on every page." I looked at her. "You signed the south section over to the company this morning. Tonight I am going to take that ledger out of the chamber and put it in front of the second envoy at the inquiry. And when the Council asks how the company came to own the land above the shaft, I will tell them that the Beta of the Kızıltaş pack signed it away in my name the same week the Council envoy arrived." I picked up the lease. "So. Are you going to tell me what else is down there, or am I going to find out at sundown in front of everyone?"

Ruth set her cup down very carefully. Then she said, "I do not know anything about a second pump." She said it slowly. "But there is a thing I have been afraid of since the Council man came, and if there is a chamber under that pump house with his name in it, then I have been afraid of the right thing and I have been going about it the wrong way."

She put her hand on the table. Her fingers were steady.

"Derya," she said. "At the quarry this morning there was a man in a dark coat with the lease papers. He is not a company man. He rode up with the ore wagons yesterday and he has been asking Owen questions about the south section and about your father's books. I signed the lease because he told me the Council had already approved it and that if I did not sign it the Council would take the section anyway and leave the pack with nothing." She looked at me. "Who is he?"

I did not answer. Because at the back of the hall the door opened, and Cal came in with his jacket on and his face white, and behind him there was a Çöl warrior in a Council coat with dust on his boots.

"Luna," Cal said. "This is Ryland. He is the Beta of the Çöl pack and he has come to speak to you. He says he has been selling the Çöl pack's coordinates to Owen and to the Council and that he wants to confess it in front of the pack."