What she had of him now, she inventoried, because inventory was how her
grief had learned to breathe. His compass, with the needle that stuck at
north-northeast until you tapped the glass the way he'd taught her, two
fingers, patient. His notebooks — the field book in the oilskin at her breast
and the fair copy in the wall of her schoolhouse, every figure in a hand so
regular the columns stood like a fence line a man could lean on. His rule,
which he'd given her the year she turned twelve and took to chaining with
him in the summers: a corner is a promise made to men not yet born, and a
surveyor is just the fellow hired to keep the promise honest. She had his
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handwriting where other daughters had a voice in the next room. She had his
unfinished business where other daughters had a grave to tend. The grave she
tended anyway, in the churchyard at Alder Creek, under a stone that said
nothing false and nothing sufficient.
"The notebooks reach Hays," she said, at last, and her voice surprised her
with its plainness, the way a voice does when it stops performing grief and
starts doing arithmetic. "They reach Hays if I have to carry them in my teeth
the whole way and spit them onto the register's desk. I have thought about
the roads drying for five months, Mr. Halloran. The roads are dry. Whatever
else yesterday was about — whoever decided a schoolteacher carrying a
surveyor's book was a thing worth sending riders after — it means the
company has started doing its own arithmetic, and its sum says the same as
mine. That book is the whole case. So we ride like it."
They watered the horses at noon where a creek crossed the freight road in a
sheet of bright shallows, and ate cold bread and salt pork sitting on a
sandstone outcrop with the notebook — closed, in its oilskin — lying
between them like a third party to the conversation. It was there, with the
reins looped loose and the whole township spread out under a white sky, that
Willa laid out the rest of it the way she would lay out a lesson for the older
pupils: in order, in plain words, with the hard parts not hidden.
"You have been thinking of this as a crime," she said. "It is one. But the land
does not go to court, Mr. Halloran. The land goes to the land office, and the
land office runs on paper and deadlines, so attend to me, because this is the
machinery and I have had five months to learn it the way other girls learn
piano. The company's entries on the stolen corners are filings — not patents.
A patent is the government's deed, and it issues in June unless somebody
objects in time and in form. The objection is called a contest. Any man may
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file one who swears the claim under it was taken by fraud, and when a
contest is filed, the register at Hays must hold a hearing before the patent can
pass. The hearing on the township's contested entries is set three weeks from
Thursday. Three weeks. That is the whole of the clock we are riding against
— not Coulter's riders, not Wilkes's jury. A date on a calendar in Hays City."
"And what wins a hearing, Miss Cade? Because if the answer is indignation,
I've seen the company's lawyers at theirs, and they keep theirs in a bottle."
"Paper wins a hearing, and one living witness. The paper is this." She
touched the oilskin once, the way you'd touch a sleeping child's forehead.
"My father's field book. True corners, true chainings, his hand. And because
paper can burn, Mr. Halloran, or drown, or be lifted off a schoolteacher in a
storm, there is a second book — the fair copy he made each winter, page for
page — sealed in the wall of my schoolhouse behind the wainscot, where it
has sat for two years because Father thought like a surveyor even about
disaster. If this one is taken, the wall keeps the other. Then affidavits: the
Bergs, the Tonn brothers, Abigail Hart's brother-in-law in Leavenworth —
every family the corrections leaned on, swearing to what was done to them,
in their own names. Paper says what." She looked at him squarely across the
salt pork. "And then the witness to the who and the how. A man who held the
chain the night corner fourteen was moved, standing up in a room with a flag
in it, saying so."
The wind worked in the grass below them; a meadowlark tried a phrase twice
and amended it.
"I told you last night I'd say it," Rube said. "I'm saying it again in daylight so
it counts double. I'll swear to it, Miss Cade. On the record, my name spelled
right, the whole of it — the lantern, the double pay, the widow's paper with
my name practiced onto it. I've been practicing that sentence for two years, in
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wagon yards and saloons and one confessional I don't expect did either of us
much good. Turns out it just needed a room with a flag in it." He said it
lightly, but his hand had gone still on his knee, and Willa understood the
lightness for what it cost. "One condition, and it ain't modesty. My name
stays off every paper until Hays. Not out of the affidavits — out of the air. A
witness announced early in this township is a witness Ward Coulter gets
three weeks to arrange an accident for. I've seen the man's work at arranging.
You keep me in your hand like a held card, and you play me in that room,
and not before."
"Agreed." She said it as a contract, and they both heard it as one. "Then the
order of things is this. Today, the Weiss place. Johann Weiss is sitting on the
claim that corner fourteen bounds — the best spring in the township, which
is precisely why the line was moved to drink from it. His contest is the
keystone: a contest from the man on the land, filed before the hearing, with