Pinch. The firing from the shelf of rock above the trail β not from the sides,
not from the open, from above, in volleys, the way men fire who have chosen
their ground and lain in it waiting. Loche going down at the first volley with
his hands up β and she paused there, the only pause, and said it again,
slower, for the clerk: "My brother had his hands up. He was shouting that
they were traders, that the horses were for the fort. I write it in your book that
his hands were up."
She told how the riders came down off the shelf when the shooting stopped
β not painted and not strangers, but men in ranch clothes, one with a red
neckerchief she had seen before at the agency store β and how they moved
among the fallen finishing what the volleys had begun. The courthouse made
a sound like a held breath let go all at once. She told how she had been
thrown from her horse at the file's tail and lain under a ledge with her face in
the dust and the wound opening in her side while they gathered the forty and
drove them away south and west, in a kept column, toward the box canyon
on Barlow range β "as men drive horses home," she said, "not as men drive
horses they are afraid of being followed with."
She told how she had come out from under the ledge at dark and walked and
crawled two nights toward the sound of a windmill, because a windmill
meant water and a white man's place, and how Wade Sutter had found her at
his draw and bound her wound and fed her from his own poor stores and
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hidden her β "which is the crime this town has punished him for," she said,
turning her face, for the first time, toward the benches, "with his credit and
his work and his haystack burned in the night. He has paid for my life every
day of it, in the coin this town uses. I am here to stop the paying."
The silence then was a different animal from the silences before it. Wade
looked along the rows and saw what Reilly had promised him the ground
would do β the pattern laid over the cloth, and matching β and men and
women who had come to watch a coronation sitting very still in the wreckage
of it. In the third row Mrs. Farrow, whose son rode for the B-Bar and ate at
her table Sundays, sat with her handkerchief twisted in both hands and tears
going down her face in a way she seemed not to know about, weeping
without knowing why.
Then Enola said the last of it, to the judge, to the clerk, to the book.
"You have been told the horses were stolen from Mr. Barlow," she said. "The
horses were ours. Everything stolen that day was ours β the horses, the men,
the truth. He is only renting them."
Cottrell was on his feet before the words had finished traveling the room, and
he was good, Wade had to grant him that. The witness was a savage,
grieving, coached β the word coached placed carefully, landing on Wade
like a brand β her account a construction, her English itself suspicious. And
then he played the card Barlow had kept against precisely this moment: a
written statement, sworn before a notary in Las Cruces, from a rider of the
B-Bar β a man wounded in the raid, too grievously hurt to travel, whose
name would be withheld for his protection β swearing that the trading party
had fired first upon honest riders lawfully moving stock, and that the B-Bar
men had defended themselves as any men would. The clerk took the
statement. It went into the book. Paper, Wade thought, watching it go. Paper
49
against a woman's voice, and Penniman's frightened eyes moved from the
statement to the girl and back like a man watching a river rise on both sides
of him at once.
"And in view of the statement," Cottrell said, into the judge's hesitation, "and
of this witness's own account placing her as a participant in a hostile action
against citizens of this county, the petitioner moves that the woman Enola be
remanded into federal custody, as a hostile and a prisoner of the Army,
pending the Army's own inquiry. She is, by her own telling, the last living
member of an armed party that fired on white men. The county has no
jurisdiction the Army is bound to respect, and no jail fit to hold what she
represents."
Reilly was standing. Wade had not seen him rise. "She's a witness under the
protection of this county, Your Honor, sworn in this proceeding, subpoenaed
by it β "
"And the Army," said Lieutenant David Osborn, in the quiet voice of a man
reading aloud a thing written elsewhere, "does not recognize a county's
protection against a federal interest." He had opened the notebook at last. He
stood, and he was courteous, and he was sorry β Wade could see the sorrow
was real, and that it changed nothing. "My orders, Judge Penniman, are to
take the woman into custody at Fort Stanton as a material witness and a
person of interest in a raid under federal investigation, and to remove her at
dawn tomorrow. For her own protection, among other reasons." He looked at
Enola, and then, once, at the grain sack that Reilly had set beside the sheriff's
chair at the hearing's start and never opened β and Wade watched the young
man's face do a small piece of arithmetic of its own. "Unless the county
produces cause by then to hold its own proceeding open against that interest.
I am required to state the position. I have stated it."
50
The uproar took the room like wind takes a fire. Riders shouting, women on
their feet, Cottrell demanding order in the voice of a man who has just gotten
everything he came for, Penniman's gavel going like a hammer on a coffin
lid and accomplishing nothing β and through it Reilly moving, not fast,