Meanwhile Crowe's office grew busy in the way a spider's corner grows busy before a fly arrives. Clerks copied the map onto cleaner paper, a messenger rode to the county seat with a letter, and Crowe himself practised the story he would tell Wilkes and anyone else who asked: that Whitlock, as Iron Elk's son-in-law, had willingly granted survey rights, that the camp welcomed the company, that the thirty-day notice was a mere formality. He repeated it until it sounded true in his own ears, which is the danger of a lie told by a man who profits from it. Tanner, for his part, spent his evenings in the saloon, buying drinks for anyone who would repeat his version, correcting details that did not serve him, letting the story grow legs of its own. By the end of the week, men who had never seen the canyon were arguing about its acreage as if they owned shares in it, and the town's hunger for the water had a name and a paper to feed on.
Crowe did not wait. The next morning he walked to Deputy Sam Wilkes's small office, laid the forged sheet on the desk with the air of a man presenting a lawful document, and asked for it to be filed. Wilkes, forty, slow and honest, disliked paper tricks, but he also disliked refusing a filing without cause, and Crowe's paper wore the right shape: a name, a map, a claim to creek-side ground. Wilkes read it twice, slowly, his finger tracing the lines of the map, and he asked Crowe, plainly, whether Whitlock himself had signed it in his presence. Crowe answered smoothly that the signature had come by Tanner's hand from the canyon, which was true in the narrowest sense and false in every sense that mattered, and Wilkes, having no proof of forgery in front of him, frowned and filed it. He set the machinery in motion that Crowe had wanted: a thirty-day notice, posted and recorded, giving any contesting party thirty days to answer the claim in Lark Spur Flat or lose it by default. It was a quiet, bureaucratic weapon, more dangerous than a rifle because it did not need to be fired to do its work. It only needed no one to answer it in time. Wilkes copied the notice himself, in his plain hand, and posted it on the office door, where the wind lifted one corner and worried at it all afternoon, as if even the paper knew it did not belong there.
As Crowe walked back through the dusty street, satisfied, Tanner rode out again toward the canyon, already planning his next move. The paper was filed. The clock was running. And in the canyon, Elias Whitlock, who had promised to stake for no outsider, did not yet know that his name had been staked for him.
Tanner returned to the camp a week later, riding in as if he were an old friend, with salt and coffee tied in neat parcels behind his saddle, gifts chosen to look generous and cost him little. He smiled at the guards, nodded to Elder Hakan, and asked after Elias by name, as a man asks after a friend he has missed. The camp let him in, because a man bringing salt and coffee is not turned away without cause, and because Iron Elk's law was hospitality before suspicion. Elias watched him come up the trail from the corral, and his stomach tightened in a way it had not since the day Nash's patrol had surrounded him. He knew that smile. He had seen it in Lark Spur Flat, on the porch of Otis's store, when Tanner had offered to guide him for thirty dollars, half now, and talked too easily about another man's land.
Tanner found Elias that afternoon beside the irrigation ditch, where Elias was clearing silt from the channel with a shovel. He clapped him on the shoulder as if they were partners, praised the ditch work with exaggerated warmth, and then, when they were alone enough that his words would not carry to the lodges, he lowered his voice and made his pitch. Before that, he had spent the morning making himself welcome in the way a travelling trader does: complimenting the horses, admiring the garden beds, asking after Iron Elk's health with false concern, and leaving the salt and coffee where the women cooking would find them and remember his generosity. Nash watched him from the corral with narrowed eyes and said nothing, but Elias saw the way Nash's hand rested near his rope, ready, and he understood that Nash, too, knew a performance when he saw one. Ayasha, passing with a water jar, gave Tanner a polite nod and no more, and Tanner's smile flickered for a fraction of a second at that coolness before he recovered it, as a man recovers his footing on loose ground. Elias noted all of it, and stored it away, because a man who wants you to trust him will often show you, in his small reactions to being denied warmth, exactly how much that trust would cost you.