hand quietly gathering cards.
Silas met them at the gate. He did not invite them to dismount, and Doyle, understanding the
omission perfectly, swung down anyway and tied his horse, because a sheriff who stays mounted in a
man's yard is making a claim, and Doyle was not there — Silas credited him with this much before a
word was spoken — to make claims. Slade remained in the buggy, elevated, a position he clearly
regarded as a bench in a courtroom of his own convening.
"Mr. Wren," Slade said. He had a leather portfolio on his knees. "I come on a matter of correction.
Regrettable. Entirely clerical. You will recall the bill of sale transferred to you in Red Hollow square,
before witnesses."
"I recall the day," Silas said.
"The paper," Slade said, opening the portfolio with a snap, "contains an error, discovered when
Sergeant Cole reviewed his copies at the post. The woman sold was described from the patrol's list —
but the patrol's list, Mr. Wren, contained two women. One taken at Salt Wash, sold to you. And one —"
he withdrew a document as if it were a communion wafer — "one taken in an earlier action, held under
a separate federal instruction for transfer to the agency at San Carlos, as a person of interest to the Army
respecting the Pritchard burnings." His smile was sorrowful and immaculate. "The woman in your
corral, sir, is the second woman. The Army's woman. The sale to you was of the first — who regrettably
died on the road, a fact Cole's clerk recorded and then misfiled, clerks being the curse of this Republic.
Your purchase, through no one's fraud, mind, no one's —" he spread his hands — "is void. The United
States requires its prisoner. I am instructed to return your hundred and thirty dollars in full — every cent,
with an additional ten for your trouble — and to take custody of the woman for transport."
From the corral, Sol stamped once, in the enormous quiet.
It was beautifully done. Silas stood in his own yard in the sun and admired it the way you admire a
snake's engineering. It had everything: a clerk, a file, a dead woman with no name to contradict it, a
refund with interest to make honesty visible, and above all the Army — the great unanswageable noun
— behind which any errand could march. And it had a second design under the first, which Silas could
see as clearly as the first, because Slade had already tried the front door of law and this was the side
door: if Silas refused, Slade did not need to win. He needed only the refusal, witnessed by the sheriff, to
convert a quiet ranch into a harborer of a federal prisoner. Paper was all the town respected — Silas had
said it himself, on the platform, in front of everyone — and Slade had come to collect on the sentence.
"Amos," Silas said.
Doyle took off his hat. He was sweating, and not only from the ride. "I've seen the sergeant's letter,"
he said. "It's got the post stamp. I've seen the instruction paper. It's got a signature looks like the
adjutant's." He looked, not at Slade, but at Silas, with the whole apology of his office in his face. "I
haven't seen the Army. No troop's come. No order's been served on me. What's been served on me is a
request from a trader to lend my presence to a transfer. I told him my presence is what he gets — my
eyes. To witness it's done peaceful and lawful. Or that it isn't done. I'm witnessing, Silas. That's the room
I've got. It's small. I know its dimensions better than anybody."
"Naya," Silas called, without turning. "Will you come here, please?"
She came out of the corral with the curry comb still in her hand, walking unhurried, and took her
place — not behind Silas, he noted, and was quietly proud of her for it in the middle of everything —
beside him, a full step to the side, where she could see the buggy and be seen. She looked at Slade the
way she had looked at the mountains: as at a distance she intended to cross or die on.
"Tell her," Silas said to Slade. "Not me. Her. It's her name on your papers, in whatever spelling. She
reads English. She'll want to hear the Army's interest in her from the man who carries it."
Something in Slade's face tightened, very slightly, at the loss of the script's proper audience. But he
was a professional. He addressed her — Miss, he called her, with a courtesy greased for the witness —
and recited it again, more briefly, with the dates. The action in March. The instruction signed in
February. The transfer to San Carlos. And Naya listened with her head slightly tilted, like a person
hearing a song in the wrong key, and when he finished she asked one question.
"When was I taken?" she said.
"At Salt Wash, as I said. Last week."
"And the woman your paper wants was taken in March, and the instruction was signed in February
— before she was taken, the Army ordered her moved. That is possible. Armies dream ahead; I have
heard this." Her voice was mild as water. "But I was not taken in March. I was taken at the river — in
April, when the cottonwoods were —" she sought the word — "the leaves were new, this big." She held
up fingers, two inches apart. "Slade knows. Slade was there. Slade paid the patrol boys at the river, not
at Salt Wash. Salt Wash is where he told the town, because Salt Wash has the Pritchard name on it, and a
Pritchard Apache is worth more money than a river Apache with no story." She turned her head and
looked at Doyle, full and calm. "Sheriff. Your prisoner paper has the wrong river, the wrong month, and
the wrong woman — and I am the wrong woman, so I know."
Doyle's face did a complicated thing. He looked at Slade. Slade's smile had not moved, but it had
somehow become an object he was holding up rather than an expression he was wearing.
"Sergeant Cole's clerk," Slade said smoothly, "has made errors — I said so at the outset; the whole
matter is a correction — dates among them, plainly —"
"The date on the bill of sale," Silas said. He had taken the folded paper — not the original; the
original lived where its owner kept it, inside her shirt, against her skin — he had taken, the night before,
at her kitchen-table insistence, a careful copy she had watched him make; no. He corrected himself even
in thought: he was holding nothing. It was Naya who stepped forward, one step, and withdrew the paper
from her shirt, and unfolded it, and held it out — not to Slade. To Doyle. At arm's length. Her paper, her
choice of hands.
"Read the date," she said.
Doyle read it. He read it twice. His mustache moved. "February thirtieth," he said slowly. "This bill is
dated February the thirtieth."
"February has no thirty," Naya said. "Even I know. Even the Army knows. Even clerks."
"A slip of the pen," Slade said, and for the first time the pulpit voice had gravel in it. "A three for a
two. February twentieth. My God, are we to hang commerce on —"
"Then the sergeant's letter," Doyle said. He was not a quick man, but Silas had seen him work a crime
scene like a man shelling peas: one pod at a time, and nothing dropped. "Slade, you showed me a letter
at the hotel. Dated at the post, last week, ordering this correction. If the pen slips thirtieth for twentieth
in February — it can't slip last week into February, and your letter described the sale as past and
completed, and the sale was nine days ago on a Tuesday in April. Your letter is dated—" he took it from
his own pocket, because Amos Doyle, it turned out, had borrowed it with a deputy's smile and kept it, a
thing Slade had not expected and liked very visibly not at all — "April the second. The sale was April
the eleventh." Doyle looked up. "Your correction of the sale, Mr. Slade, is dated nine days before the
sale. That's not a slip. In my small room, we call that a manufacture."
The yard was very quiet. Even the chickens had suspended operations. From the porch Rosa's voice
said, in Spanish, something succinct and unforgiving, and Eddie, beside her, translated happily for the
record: "She says you should have brought a bigger lie and a smaller man to carry it."
"Amos," Slade said, and he stood up in the buggy, which ruined the bench effect entirely, "you are
exceeding — I have principals in this territory whose names —"
"Names," Doyle said, with sudden, tired force, "are what this whole business runs on, and mine's the
one on the door of the jail, so I'll thank you to let me finish putting it where I choose. Here's my
witnessing, and it will be in my report in the same words: a trader presented contradictory papers
respecting a woman lawfully residing, by her own election and under wage, at Wren Creek. The papers