Ansel stepped to the door and opened it before the man could knock, because a teacher who keeps his visitors waiting on the porch has already lost something he cannot afford to lose.
"Mr. Grey?" the man said. He was perhaps forty, with a clerk's neat beard and eyes that took in the room the way a surveyor takes in ground: quickly, and all at once, and without sentiment. "My name is Charles Moore. County school inspector. I have come to look at this school."
Ansel felt the floor shift under him, slightly, the way ground shifts when a man steps onto ice he thought was thicker. He had known, in the back of his mind, that this day would come. A school that stood on a widow's ranch land, taught by a man with no certificate, funded by nothing but goodwill and a valley's stubbornness, could not go unexamined forever. He had simply hoped it would come later, when the school was stronger, when the roll was longer, when Tess could read a whole page without her finger and Ben could survey a field without asking twice.
"Mr. Moore," Ansel said, and he was proud of how steady his voice sounded. "You are welcome. The children are at their lessons. You may sit wherever you like, and ask whatever you like, and I will answer whatever I can."
Moore nodded, once, and took the bench by the door, the one where the mothers sometimes sat when they came to fetch a child early. He opened his ledger on his knee and uncapped his pen, and Ansel, turning back to the room, understood with a clarity that made his throat tight that this was not a visit. This was a trial, and the school was the accused, and the only defense he had was the room itself.
He went on with the lesson. That was the first decision, and it was the right one. He did not stop the arithmetic to make speeches. He did not gather the children to perform. He taught, the way he taught every morning, because if the school was real, it would prove itself by being itself, and if it was not, no speech of his would save it.
But his hands, as he wrote the next sum on the board, were not quite steady, and he saw Ben notice, and he saw Ben sit up a little straighter, as if the boy had decided, without being asked, to hold himself up for both of them.
Moore watched for an hour. He watched the arithmetic, and the reading, and the geography, and he wrote in his ledger without looking up, and Ansel could not tell from his face whether the writing was praise or condemnation. At noon, when the children filed out for their dinner pails on the porch, Moore stayed on his bench and beckoned Ansel over with two fingers, the way a man beckons a witness.
"Mr. Grey," Moore said, "I will be plain with you. I did not come here on my own initiative. A complaint was laid before the county board, in writing, alleging that this school is a private fancy, taught by a man with no teaching credentials, on land whose title is disputed, and that it ought not to stand, let alone receive county funds."
Ansel did not need to ask who had written the complaint. The words "disputed title" had Julius Thorne's handwriting all over them, the way a brand has a ranch's mark. Thorne had lost at the community meeting in the autumn, when the valley had voted for the school and Louisa had produced his own letter of abandonment, and he had gone quiet all winter, the way a man goes quiet when he is reloading. Now, with spring, he had found a new weapon: not the bank, not the law, but the county itself, and a stranger with a ledger.
"I understand," Ansel said. "May I ask what you have seen so far?"
"I have seen children who can read, and children who can cipher," Moore said, and his voice gave nothing away. "I have also seen a teacher who is, by his own admission, a surveyor by trade. The county requires credentials, Mr. Grey. A school is not a barn raising. Good intentions do not make a teacher."