On the road, Elias and Ayasha rode without hurrying, because hurrying would have looked like fear, and because the morning itself deserved to be ridden through slowly. The trail wound down from the canyon through grass that brushed the horses' bellies, and Sage and Night moved together as if they had agreed on the pace between themselves. Elias found himself telling Ayasha, in a low voice, about his father — not the grand story he had told at fires before, but the small, plain memories: the way Thomas had held a compass, the way he had kissed the top of Elias's head on the porch in Missouri, the way he had said he would send for his son once the cabin was up. Ayasha listened without interrupting, the way she listened to everything that mattered, and when he had finished, she said simply that a man who leaves and never sends word leaves a wound that does not close by itself, and that Elias had carried his wound well, and that she was glad he had come to the canyon, whatever the road that brought him. Elias did not answer at once, because the words had gone straight to a place in him that rarely let words in, and he rode on with his eyes on the trail, grateful for her plainness.
At the edge of town, the two riders Iron Elk had sent fell back, and Elias and Ayasha rode in alone, which was as it should be. The street was already crowded, and the crowd parted for them in a ragged, unwilling way, men stepping aside, women pausing with baskets in their hands, children staring openly at Ayasha's horse and at the set of her shoulders. A trader Elias did not know muttered the cruel word again, low, behind his hand, and this time Elias turned his head and looked at the man until the man dropped his gaze and found sudden business with his own horse's bridle. Ayasha rode on without turning, and Elias, watching her, felt a surge of something that was not anger and not pride alone, but a fierce, protective respect — the feeling of a man who has finally understood that the woman beside him does not need his protection from stares, only his refusal to join in them.
Deputy Wilkes took the notebook, opened it, and read aloud, slowly, so that the crowded room could hear every word. The hand was plain and upright, a surveyor's hand, and the entries described the canyon beside the red peaks in careful, respectful detail — the tall grass, the black dirt, the cold creek, the spring — and then, in an entry dated twenty years earlier, the surveyor had written that the water belonged to the people living there, that it was not empty land waiting for a stake, and that he would not file a claim on it, because a claim would be a lie about who lived there first. Wilkes paused, and read a second entry, shorter, in which Thomas had written that he had shared a meal with the people of the canyon, that they had shown him the spring and the dry-season pools, and that a man who is shown water in a dry country owes something in return, and the least he owes is honesty. Wilkes read a third passage, in which Thomas had noted the compass bearing of the creek's course for his own memory, not for a filing, and had written beside it that the land was already home to others, and that his own son, if he ever came west, should learn that before he learned anything else about surveying. The room, which had been restless, went still.
Wilkes read the name signed at the bottom of the page, and the room went very quiet. Thomas Whitlock. Elias's father. Elias stood with his hand on the counter, his father's brass compass heavy in his pocket, and his throat closed so tightly he could not speak. Twenty years he had carried a watch stopped at twenty minutes past four, believing his father had simply vanished and left him nothing. Now he learned that his father had stood in this same canyon, had seen the same water, and had chosen, as Elias himself had chosen, not to stake it. Otis, standing behind his counter, wiped his hands on his apron and said, quietly, that Thomas had left the notebook with him on a morning much like this one, saying he would come back for it when his cabin was up, and that Otis had kept it in the tin box ever since, through dust and drought and war, because a man's papers are his own until he claims them, and because he had always believed someone would come asking. Elias turned to Otis, and for a moment the old storekeeper's gruff face softened, and Elias thanked him, not with grand words, but with a nod and a hand laid briefly on the counter, which Otis understood. Crowe, at the back of the room, sat pale and silent, his claim suddenly a thin thing beside a dead surveyor's honest hand, and Wilkes adjourned the hearing with the claim in doubt and the notebook entered as evidence, to be kept safe in his office. The hearing adjourned with Crowe's claim in doubt, and Elias walked out into the sunlight with Ayasha beside him, feeling as if a door he had thought locked forever had opened a crack, and through it came not an answer, but a kind of peace.