Reilly sat his horse a while looking at the notch of the canyon. Then he took
off his hat again — not for the dead this time, Wade thought, but the way a
man does when he is letting something heavy settle in him.
"That's not proof of who held the reins, Wade," he said at last. "Shoe
could've been lost off any B-Bar horse any month this year, and I'll hear it
said. Cases could've been dropped by hunters. Tracks are tracks. It isn't
proof, and I'd be a liar in a star if I told the girl it was." He turned the bay's
head toward home, and his face, when the light caught it, was the face of a
man who had found the thing he went looking for and was not one bit
gladder for the finding. "But it's the first thing in this whole business that
isn't somebody's say-so. It's iron and it's sign, and iron and sign don't care
whose bank holds the mortgage on the courthouse. We go into that hearing
with her word laid over this ground like a pattern over cloth, and God help
Amos Barlow if the two of them match — because I'll have seen with my
own eyes that they do."
45
The courthouse in San Tomas had not held so many people since the territory
sent a hanging judge through in the dry year, and Wade, coming up the steps
behind the sheriff's buggy with his hat in his hand, understood that Barlow
had wanted it so. A hearing with an audience was a hearing half decided
before the first oath, and Barlow had filled this room with his own: B-Bar
riders along the back wall in their good shirts, ranch families in the benches,
the banker's wife in the front row, and Amos Barlow himself at the
petitioner's table, big and gray and sorrowful in a black coat, in the attitude
of a man grieving for a county that savages had wronged.
Enola rode in sitting very straight beside Dr. Hart, in a dress of Abigail's
taken in at the waist and a shawl of deep red over her shoulders, her face —
Wade saw it as the buggy stopped, and his heart went traitorously loud —
entirely calm. Reilly himself handed her down, the way he would have
handed down the judge's own wife, and two hundred people watched him do
it, and Wade saw the first of the day's small calculations move across the
benches: whatever else the girl was, the sheriff of the county was not treating
her as a prisoner.
Judge Penniman took his seat — a thin man with a kind mouth and
frightened eyes, exactly as billed — and opened the proceedings: an inquest,
by petition, into the raid upon a trading party on the Fort Stanton road, the
loss of stock, the danger to the county. Witnesses would be sworn. The
gentleman from Fort Stanton, Lieutenant Osborn, sat at the judge's left with a
notebook closed on his knee — a young officer, Wade saw, with the polished
stillness of a man whose orders have already been written elsewhere, and
who is only waiting for the room to give him a reason to read them aloud.
Barlow's lawyer was a Santa Fe man named Cottrell, soft-spoken and
expensive, with a voice like warm oil, and he laid out the petitioner's case
46
like a table for guests he expected to feed well: the county's peril; the trading
party — armed, perhaps, and not trading at all, but scouting; the raid that had
fallen on honest B-Bar riders moving stock; the regrettable deaths; the forty
horses driven off toward the reservation by raiders unknown; and the fear in
which the whole county now kept its doors. He said the word raiders the way
other men said the word weather — a thing that happened to people, attached
to no man's name. He said it eleven times before he sat down. Wade counted.
Then Reilly rose, and the room made the small noise rooms make when a
thing turns. The sheriff did not make a speech. He said the county had a
witness to the events on the Stanton road, a survivor of the trading party,
present and willing to be sworn: Enola, daughter of Kaya, headman of the
Mescalero at Ojo Caliente. The county would hear her now.
The sound that went through the courthouse was not one sound. Wade heard
it come apart into its pieces as she walked down the center aisle on Dr. Hart's
arm: the hiss of the riders at the back; a woman's single sharp breath; a man
saying Jesus God as if the words had been knocked out of him; and under it
all a silence growing in the front benches, because the girl walking past them
was not the thing out of their fireside tellings. She was twenty-two and
slender and walking wounded, with her chin up and her brother eleven days
dead — buried now, Wade thought, buried properly, with a name said over
him — and she did not look at the floor, and she did not look at Barlow. She
looked at the witness chair, and she climbed into it like a woman mounting
the one horse left to her.
The clerk swore her on the Bible, and there was a stir at that — Cottrell
half-rising, the question of the oath's worth plain on his face — and Judge
Penniman ruled it flatly: "The witness will be sworn as any witness. The
court will weigh what the court will weigh. Proceed." And Enola put her
47
hand on the book and swore in a clear voice to tell the truth, and then she told
it.
She told it the way she had told Wade in the cellar — in order, without
decoration, with the times of day placed like stones: her father's decision to
trade — forty horses, good ones, and trade goods, and a party of nine under
her brother Loche, bound for the fort by the Stanton road. The file in the
Pinch. The firing from the shelf of rock above the trail — not from the sides,
not from the open, from above, in volleys, the way men fire who have chosen