The sheriff of Crockett County was a lean man named Raymond Ortega, sixty one years old, with a gray mustache and a hat that had seen forty summers. He held up the paper in the cold wind on the low water bridge, and the pages rattled like a flock of small birds. “Margaret,” he said, “the oil company called my office at seven this morning. A contract for the water rights on Turkey Creek, four point one million dollars, was signed on the third of September. It carries your signature, and a notary stamp from Sonora. The company thought you might like to know. Because the money already left.”
Wade stood by his tanker and said nothing. I took the paper out of the hand of the sheriff and read it with my glasses on the end of my nose. The signature looked a great deal like mine. It was a decent forgery, with the proper loops. But the date made my blood run cold. On the third of September I was at the stone yard in Ozona, picking out a marker for Dub. I had signed nothing for weeks except a sympathy card. The notary in Sonora, the sheriff said, had passed eight years before.
“The company wired a deposit of three hundred thousand dollars,” the sheriff said. “To an account at a casino in Ruidoso, New Mexico. It was in the name of Wade Dalton. Another half million was to follow on closing.” He tipped his hat back. “Wade, you want to tell the lady where the money went?” Wade stared at the water running under the bridge. After a long moment, he said, in a hollow voice, “It is gone, Margaret. It is all gone. Two hundred eighty thousand at the blackjack table, and the rest in tips and rooms.”
A sorrel horse saddled in a barn gave one widow the morning to bring her daughter back to the family in Ozona.
I gave my terms astride Pepper, holding the reins in one hand. “Wade, I am not going to cry over water I still own. I am going to see that you answer for what you did, in a court of law, and I will not lift a hand for you. Crystal can have whatever she needs from me. But the rights to Turkey Creek belong to Dub and to me and to the sheep of this ranch, and a gambler with a tanker truck will never have them. Sheriff, you may proceed.” The sheriff nodded gravely, and two deputies stepped forward.
Wade ran. He leaped into the cab of the tanker and started the engine, and the big diesel roared. He threw it into gear, aimed the truck at the sheriff trucks on the far end of the bridge, and floored it. The tanker lurched forward. Hector Villarreal, who had been sitting in his pickup at the end, pulled his old Ford crossways on the bridge in front of him. And in front of the Ford, calm as a post, stood Pepper, twenty two years old, with me in the saddle. The tanker brakes screamed. It stopped six feet from the nose of a horse.
Pepper did not flinch. He stood there, ears forward, as if a truck were a leaf. I said, in a low voice, “Easy, boy.” Wade climbed down from the cab with his hands up, shaking. The deputies cuffed him on the bridge, gently, and put him in the back of a truck. He looked at me over the rail and tried to speak, and nothing came. I looked back at him for a long time, and then I turned Pepper toward the ranch and rode home across the old crossing, the water cold on my boots.
Crystal arrived at noon, white as flour, in the Buick of her mother. She had not known. She had been in San Angelo at the house of her sister, helping with a new baby. She walked into my kitchen and fell into a chair, and I made her a cup of coffee, and we sat across from each other for an hour. She said she suspected he gambled, but never the amount. She said she would leave him. I said that was her decision. I told her my door was open, and so was the barn. She cried again, and I let her, and the sheep bleated in the pen outside the window as if they understood every word.
The money consequences came in the weeks that followed. The oil company withdrew its deposit and pursued Wade through the courts. A federal judge sentenced him to six years for wire fraud and forgery. The notary stamp turned out to have been bought from a bankruptcy sale. The water rights remained with the ranch, in a trust that Hector and my lawyer in San Angelo drew up. No one can sell the rights without my signature, and after me, my daughter and grandchildren. The oil company made a fair offer later, and I said no again, politely.
In the name of Dub, who passed in April, I started the Dub Coker Fund. It pays for wells, stock tanks and fencing for small sheep and goat ranches in Crockett, Sutton and Schleicher counties. In the first year we drilled six wells, and repaired eleven windmills. A young couple near Eldorado, starting with forty ewes, watched their first cold water flow into a trough at dawn. The wife wrote me a letter in pencil. She said the sound was the loveliest music she had ever heard.
Last Sunday, Crystal and her little girl rode out with me to the old crossing on Pepper and a borrowed mare. We sat in the saddles and watched the water, high and clear, running over the stones where Dub and I used to cross with the sheep. The child asked me why the creek made so much noise. I told her it was the sound of a family that has held on to what is hers. Then I let her take the reins of Pepper, who let her.
