concho up out of the coffee pot and held it out to her on his open palm — her
brother's concho, Loche's, that she had left once on his table like a price set
down and refused. She looked at it. She looked at him.
"Today you wear it into court yourself," he said.
Enola took it, and threaded it onto a strip of the same cloth it had slept in,
and tied it at her throat where it caught the morning and threw it back, bright
as a struck match. Then the two of them went down the draw together toward
the road to San Tomas — the horse-breaker with nothing, and the woman the
whole town had turned against him for, walking into the courthouse side by
side in the full light of day, with the truth riding ahead of them in a sheriff's
saddlebag and forty horses wearing their true names behind them in the
grass.
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The courtroom at the county seat was too small for the number of people
who had come to see how the thing ended, and the windows stood open to
the spring wind because the room had heated up by nine o'clock with bodies
and wool and held breath. Wade sat where the prosecutor had put him, on the
second bench behind the rail, in a shirt Dr. Hart had lent him off her own
brother's back, because the shirt he owned had gone up with his shack two
nights before the hearing and he had not yet replaced it. His hands would not
stay still in his lap. He kept setting them flat on his knees the way you settle a
green horse, and they kept wanting to rise.
Enola testified first, because the prosecutor said the jury of men ought to hear
the beginning from the person it had happened to. She came up the aisle in
the dress Dr. Hart had sewn down for her out of a bolt of brown calico, her
hair braided, her back straight as a fence post driven true, and she put her
hand on the Bible and swore in English, clear as well water, and if there was
a man in that room who had come prepared to discount her for what she was,
Wade watched him have to work at it from the first sentence. She told it in
order. The water party riding down from Ojo Caliente in the heat of the day.
The shots from the rocks where nobody had any business being, unless his
business was killing. Her cousin dead in the dust before he had time to turn
his horse. The horses scattered and gathered by men who rode like men who
had rehearsed it — because they had. She told about waking in Wade Sutter's
windmill shadow with her leg bound in strips of his only spare shirt and a
stranger's canteen at her lips, and she told about what she had seen from the
rocks above Barlow's box canyon three weeks later, when she was strong
enough to sit a horse: the herd, forty head, and the smoke of a branding fire,
and men working a running iron over marks that were not theirs to change.
The defense lawyer tried her on the one ground he had. She was an Apache.
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She had reason to lie. Her people wanted the valley and the water, and a
conviction would clear the white men out of her way. Enola listened to all of
it with her head a little on one side, the way she listened to a new language
deciding what it meant, and then she said, "My cousin is dead in the ground
at Ojo Caliente. I did not put him there to get a valley. The men who put him
there are sitting in this room, and one of them is wearing a coat I saw at the
branding fire." She did not raise her voice. She did not need to. Wade saw
two jurors look down at their hands, and he knew the way you know a horse
has decided: the fight had gone out of the question.
Jess Malone came next, and he came up the aisle like a man walking into
deep water on purpose. The confession was read aloud first by the clerk —
two pages, sworn and signed, in which Malone set down the whole
architecture of it: the money from Amos Barlow, the riders hired quiet, the
story planted before the blood was dry that Kaya's band had raided the
Barlow remuda and driven off forty head, when the truth ran exactly
backward — B-Bar riders had ambushed the Apache water party, killed a
man, and run the stolen horses into the box canyon to be re-branded and sold
north as Barlow stock. Then Malone stood where Enola had stood and said
the words were his and true, every one, and the judge asked him if he
understood that the statement would be used against him as well, and Malone
said, "Yes, sir. That's the idea of it." He did not look at Barlow. He did not
look at the gallery. He looked at the judge the whole time, like a man holding
a gate shut with his shoulder, and Wade — who had hated him in an orderly,
considered way for months — felt the hate go complicated on him, the way it
does when a man does the one hard thing right at cost to himself.
Sheriff Tom Reilly carried the iron to the front of the room in a flour sack, of
all things, because the county had no proper box for evidence, and he set the
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pieces out on the prosecutor's table one at a time the way a farrier lays out his
tools. The horseshoe first, pulled from the ambush rocks, its heel stamped
with the B-Bar brand clear as a signature. The cartridge cases, gathered from
the same ground, matched to the rifles taken when Deke Ransome was
arrested bleeding in Barlow's own yard. And last, the thing the whole trial
turned on like a gate on a hinge: the brand inspector, an old, soft-spoken man