The storm had almost erased her from the prairie

the field book behind it. If Johann files, the company's patent on his quarter

cannot pass in June, and every other affidavit we gather stands behind his

like fence posts behind a gate. If he is frightened off, or bought off, or buried

first—" She stopped.

"Then we remind him what the land says," Rube said. "You've got a talent

for the short version, Miss Cade. It'll preach." He stood and shook the

crumbs off for the birds with an exactness that told her the plan had settled in

him like a load settling — squared, roped, ready to haul. "Weiss place by

four if the grass don't lie to us. And Miss Cade — when we get there, let me

be the one to tell him about the chain. A man ought to hear that part from the

hands that did it."

"You shall," she said. "It is your sentence to carry into his house. I would not

steal a man's errand from him, even that one."

30

She wrapped the notebook again in its oilskin while he saddled up, working

the ties with the care of long practice, and thought — not for the first time,

and not with any less anger for the practice — of the other book sealed in her

schoolhouse wall in Alder Creek, behind the wainscot her father had fitted

with his own hands the winter he taught her what it was for. Coulter's riders

would be watching that schoolhouse now, the way a cat watches a gopher

hole. Getting the fair copy out before Hays would be its own campaign, and a

dangerous one. For today the field book rode against her heart, and one book,

she told herself, was enough to hang a resurvey — provided the woman

carrying it arrived.

They rode the last miles in a silence that was not idleness. The land itself had

begun to testify, in the way Willa had promised it would if a person learned

to read it. Twice before the Weiss section lines they passed the leavings of it:

a claim shanty standing roofless in good grass, its door gone for somebody's

firewood, a company fence run straight through what had been the Tonn

brothers' garden patch, the furrows still visible under the grass like a scar

under hair. Farther on, the Berg place — sod house intact, smoke none, a

child's hoop still hanging on a nail by the door where the family had left in

April with two wagons and a milk cow and a silence that the whole township

had agreed, without ever discussing it, not to remark on. Willa found she was

keeping a tally in her head the way her father kept chainings: shanty, garden,

hoop, well. Every abandoned improvement was an affidavit that could not

sign its name. She spoke the tally aloud, once, so that Rube would hear it

counted by somebody besides himself, and he rode a long while afterward

looking at the country as if it had changed under him while he was busy not

looking at it — which, she supposed, was precisely what it had done, and

precisely what it had done to every man in the township who had taken the

company's wage in one hand and the company's story in the other and called

31

the exchange even.

The Weiss place announced itself the way all well-kept claims did, by order

imposed on a country that resisted it: first the woven-willow fence of the

garden, then furrows running straight as ruled lines down to the creek

bottom, then the house — half dugout, half sod, its back rooms cut into the

bank above Miller's Ford and its front wall built up in grass bricks thick as a

fortress, with a real glass window that Marta Weiss kept, Willa knew,

polished like a church plate. Smoke rose straight in the still afternoon. Below

the house the spring branch ran bright over flat stones where the ford

crossed, and cottonwoods stood over the water in the green shade that in

Kansas is worth more than money, because money cannot make it.

Johann came out to meet them with his hat in his hands, a big slow man with

forearms like rope and an English he handled the way he handled his plow —

carefully, in straight lines, apologizing to it when it swerved and never once

apologizing for himself. "Miss Cade. The school board says you are — they

come yesterday and say the school is closed, you are gone away." His eyes

went to Rube and stayed a measuring moment. "This is the freighter."

"This is Mr. Halloran, Johann, and he has come a long way to tell you a thing

to your face." She dismounted into the yard's dust. "And I am not gone away.

I am come to ask you to fight, and to show you the paper that makes the

fighting worth more than the fear. But first—" she smiled, because Marta had

appeared in the doorway wiping her hands on her apron, and some rituals

outrank even war, "—first I am come to tell your wife her bread is the reason

half the township sends its sons to my school, and that is a falsehood,

because the other half sends them for the letters."

Marta's welcome was in both her languages at once, bread still warm from

the bake kettle produced like evidence for the defense, coffee, the good cups.

32

She was a broad, bright woman who had crossed an ocean and a continent

and three winters of Kansas and had decided, visibly, to be beaten by none of

them. While the bread went round, she told — in the tone of a woman

reciting weather — of the dry August of their first year, when the branch

sank to a chain of green pools and the creek at the ford went to cracked mud,

and how for six weeks the wagons of half the township had come down their

lane at dusk, because Johann would not let a neighbor's stock go thirsty while

his spring ran, and the spring had run for all of them, cattle and children and