in her hand like a lantern. She looked at the ruin a long time. Then she
looked at Willa.
"They can burn a school," Nora said. "It took them all night and a can of coal
oil, and it makes a smell the whole township will remember every time the
wind's from the south. A printing press is a different proposition. It makes
47
ten thousand copies and gives them away." She set the ink bottle in Willa's
hand and closed her fingers over it. "I have paper for two issues. I'll have
paper for ten if I have to print on flour sacks and the backs of Harrow's own
handbills."
Willa said, "Print everything, Nora. Twice. Paper burns. Print doesn't forget
fast enough — so we print it twice." And Nora, who had buried a husband
and a dozen libels and the entire territorial legislature's opinion of her,
laughed out loud in the road beside the ashes, and the sound did more for the
watching township than any speech could have: it told them the fire had
missed.
The sheriff came on a Tuesday, politely, which was the worst way for Sheriff
Frank Wilkes to come. He was a heavy, careful man who had kept his office
through three county administrations by the practice of never being the first
to know anything, and he arrived at the Weisses' — where Willa was
boarding while what remained of her household goods were picked out of the
ash — with his hat in his hand and a paper in his coat that he did not at first
produce.
It was not an arrest. He was at pains about that, standing in Marta's kitchen
with his boots wiped twice on the mat. It was a request. The Harrow
association, through its attorney, had lodged an inquiry: certain books and
papers, alleged to be association property — survey records, the late Josiah
Cade having done contract work in the company's employ in the territory
years, a fact dug out of some ledger like a bone out of a bank — had come
into the possession of a private party, and the association sought their
surrender as evidence in a theft inquiry before the county. Wilkes delivered
all of this in the tone of a man reading a weather report for a county he does
not live in, and then looked at the coffee Marta had poured him and wished,
48
visibly, to be somewhere else.
Willa heard him out with the notebook against her ribs, where it now lived at
all hours, and felt the shape of the thing clearly. Not theft of her — theft
reframed: her father's record made contraband, so that at the hearing in Hays
City she would arrive as a woman holding stolen goods, and the entries could
be argued out of evidence before they were ever argued about. She gave
Wilkes her answer standing, because Sarah Hennessey had taught her
something about standing to accuse, and some of it applied to declining.
"Tell the association, Sheriff, that the papers are my father's, written by his
hand, kept in his house, and come to me by his death, and that they are
evidence in a contest now pending before the register at Hays City, where
they will be produced in due course and in the open. If the county believes
otherwise, the county may take it up with the register. I will not surrender
them to a request." She said it in her schoolteacher's voice, the one that
carried to the back bench without rising, and Wilkes received it the way a
man receives weather he expected: with a nod that was almost relief. A
refusal, delivered in due form, was a paper he could carry back and file.
The letter that made it official was drafted that night at the Clarion office, on
Nora's good paper, in Willa's fair hand — for Nora's position was that a
refusal the register would one day read should look like a document and not a
dare. It cited the pending contest and the hearing date. It offered the originals
for inspection at Hays City under the register's own eye. It offered nothing
else, and it was signed, at Nora's insistence, with her full name in full:
Wilhelmina Cade, as her father had christened her and as she had never once
signed anything in her life. "If they're going to come," Nora said, blotting it,
"let them come for somebody with a whole name. Half-names hide. We're
done hiding."
49
Three days later a stranger with new boots tried to buy the notebook at the
livery.
He was a pleasant-spoken man with the soft hands of a drummer and a story
about collecting territorial survey material for a railroad's historical office
back east. He had asked, in the course of his questions about old Josiah
Cade's papers, whether the daughter might be approached, and whether a
sum — he had let it rise, in the hostler's telling, the way a man feeds a fire
one stick at a time, until it stood at two hundred dollars in gold — might not
persuade her to be rid of a burden. The hostler, who had a son in Willa's
schoolroom the winter before the fire, reported it to Rube within the hour,
and described the stranger's boots at length and his teeth hardly at all, being a
man who knew where truth lived in a description. By sundown the stranger
was gone from Alder Creek by the east road, his gold unspent, and Rube
doubled the night watch along the creek bottom without telling Willa why,
which told her everything.
The attempt on the Weisses' dugout came two nights after that, and it came
the way Rube had said such things come in Coulter's discipline — measured
first, and cut only where the measuring said the cloth was thin. Johann had
the spring and the best dugout in the township, deep in the bank above the
ford, and the man who held the first affidavit and the hinge claim of the
whole contest. Willa heard of it in the morning from Marta, who told it with