horses and held it to the lamp, and at an angle, with the light raking low
across the hair, the jury saw what Wade had seen by firelight — the bold
B-Bar on the surface, and underneath it, rising out of the skin like something
coming up out of deep water, the older mark. Kaya's mark. The Apache
brand, burned in seasons before, ghosting through the fresh iron that was
supposed to have buried it. The inspector turned the panel slowly so every
man on the jury could see it from his own chair, and the room made a sound
that was not quite a word.
Amos Barlow's lawyer stood up then and gave the defense its one speech —
that his client was the victim of a conspiracy, a horse-breaker with a grudge
and a burned shack, an Apache girl with a valley to win, and a dying turncoat
buying his life with a story — and Wade watched the speech die as he said it,
because it had to be carried past a stamped horseshoe and forty horses
standing in a canyon with somebody else's brand showing through, and no
speech a man could make was strong enough to lift that much iron. The jury
was out an hour and twenty minutes. Wade counted it in heartbeats and in the
courthouse clock. When they came back, their faces had the flat look of men
who have done an arithmetic and are done arguing with it.
Barlow got twenty years in the territorial prison, and the B-Bar was ordered
broken up and sold to satisfy the judgments, and the judge said the words
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about the ambush and the stolen herd slowly, like a man reading names off a
monument. Deke Ransome, who had pled his part small and had the
surgeon's word that his wound would trouble him all his life, got twelve.
Then the judge took up Malone's paper last, and he looked at Jess Malone
over his glasses for a long moment before he spoke. "The court notes that
this defendant came forward of his own motion," he said, "and that without
his statement the Territory might have hanged its justice on a lie. Two years.
And let the record show why it is not more." Malone nodded once, like a
man who had been handed a weight he had already agreed to carry, and the
deputies took them out through the side door into the white spring light.
The courtroom emptied around Wade in the slow, shuffling way of a church
after a hard funeral, and he stayed in his seat a while because he did not
entirely trust his legs to have an opinion about standing. A juror he didn't
know — a stout man with a farrier's forearms — stopped at the end of the
bench and put out his hand and shook Wade's once, hard, without a word,
and went on out into the light as if the handshake had been a debt he'd come
to pay and now it was paid. The prosecutor gathered his papers and allowed
himself one thin smile across the rail. On the courthouse steps the spring
wind hit Wade's face like cold water, and Dr. Hart was waiting there with his
hat in her hands — she had kept it for him through three days of trial the way
she'd kept everything else of his the town had tried to mislay, and she set it
on his head herself with the brisk tenderness of a woman bandaging
something.
"You look like a man who has been holding his breath since October," she
said.
"I expect that's about the size of it."
"Then breathe, Wade Sutter. It's admissible now." She looked out over the
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square, where the crowd was breaking up into knots of talk that would carry
the verdict into every kitchen in the county by supper. "They'll all be your
friends by Sunday. Some of them will even mean it. You'll have to learn to
tell the difference slower than you learned the other thing." She patted his
arm once, the way you'd settle a horse that has come through a bad night
standing. ""Eat something. Doctor's orders, and I charge by the word for
those." Wade drew the breath she'd prescribed, all the way down, and the air
tasted of spring and woodsmoke and, faintly, of a life being handed back to
its owner."
Kaya had sat through all of it in the back row of the gallery, under safe
conduct, with two of his men beside him and his hat in his hands, and if he
had moved once in three days Wade had not seen it. Now the old man came
down the courthouse steps in the wash of people and stopped in front of
Wade on the boardwalk, and the crowd, without being asked, made a little
room around them the way water parts around a stone. Kaya looked at him
the way a man looks at a horse he has heard about and not yet seen — taking
the measure of the whole animal, not the reputation. Then he spoke, in
English, careful and unhurried, each word set down like a tool he had picked
up deliberately.
"My daughter told me," he said, "a poor man with nothing gave her
everything he had."
He paused, and Wade understood that the pause was not for want of the
language. It was the courtesy of a man letting a thing arrive at its own speed.
"Then he is not poor."
Kaya put out his hand, and Wade took it, and that was the whole of the treaty
as far as either of them was concerned — the rest, as it turned out, was
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paperwork, and the paperwork came three days later in Sheriff Reilly's
office, with Lieutenant Osborn up from Fort Stanton in a clean uniform and
his report under his arm. The report was read aloud because Reilly insisted
on it: the Army's investigation found no evidence that Kaya's band had
raided any white settlement or stock, found the raid story to be a fabrication
entire, and recommended — in Osborn's flat military prose, which Wade