and he had been dead since February, and the road to Hays was the last place
left where he could still walk beside her. Anne Sibley's notarized statement
rode in the same oilskin, folded twice, its seal unbroken since the notary at
Ellis had pressed it, and she did not read that anymore. She knew what it
said. It said that a man three years in his grave had signed his relinquishment
in a hand that was not his, in an office he had never entered, on a day when
his widow had buried him. It said it in a widow's steady hand and a notary's
seal, and it was the kind of paper that changed the temperature of a room.
56
The way stations were the road's ears, and Rube drank at them the way other
men drank coffee — standing up, attentive, unhurried — and what he
brought back to the wagon each evening was intelligence dressed as gossip.
At the first station, the keeper's wife had heard from a teamster that two of
Coulter's riders had watered their horses at the Salina crossing and asked
whether a schoolteacher out of Alder Creek had passed through, a woman
traveling light. At the second, the keeper himself, a man with one ear gone to
frostbite in '73 and no curiosity left in him except the professional kind,
reported that the same question had been asked there a day ahead of them —
which meant Coulter's men were not following the road but running it, riding
its length in both directions like a net being drawn. They were looking for a
woman traveling light, and it pleased Willa in a grim way that she was
traveling, at that moment, at something like nine hundred pounds counting
the plowshares.
On the third day a telegram rider passed them going east at a gallop, and she
saw him from the slats of the wagon bed — a boy of perhaps seventeen on a
lathered roan, the leather dispatch case slung tight, its flap barely weighted,
nearly empty. He did not glance at the wagons. He rode like a man being
paid by the mile and not the hour, and the dust of his passing hung in the air
long after the sound of him had gone east into the heat shimmer.
"Light saddlebags," Oyler said at the night stop, the only remark he had
made in two days that was not addressed to an ox.
Rube nodded. "Going back east with an answer," he said. "Or going to fetch
one." He looked at the wagon, at the shadow where Willa sat with the lantern
hooded. "Harrow is being kept informed, is what that is. Somebody rides this
road with a wire at the end of it, and every night Edwin Harrow sits in Alder
Creek and knows where we aren't." He fed a stick into the fire with
57
unnecessary care. "It cuts two ways, mind. A man kept informed is a man
who thinks he's informed. He'll be watching the stage road and the rail stops.
He won't be watching his own clerk's calendar, because he thinks the
calendar is his." He did not say more. It was Rube's way to leave a thought
with its handle sticking out, for her to take hold of or not.
The third way station stood where the road crossed a cottonwood creek
bottom, a sod house and a log stable and a corral built of rails weathered
silver, and it was at the corral fence, in the last of the evening light, that Orin
Whitaker introduced himself without preamble, the way a man steps out of a
doorway he has been standing in for some time.
"Miss Cade," he said. "You are difficult to mislay. I have been attempting to
meet this wagon train for two days, and I find I have mostly met its dust."
He was a dry, unimpressive man of perhaps fifty, neither tall nor short, with
a clerk's stoop beginning in his shoulders and eyes that had the flat patience
of a ledger page. He wore a dark suit that had been good cloth once and a
carpetbag hung from one hand, its brass clasp bright from use, and he stood
at the fence rail as if he had every right to be standing there, which — this
was the unsettling part — he apparently believed, and so, somehow, did
everyone else. Rube came out of the stable door and stopped, and she
watched Rube take the man's measure the way he took the measure of a
loaded wagon before a grade: slowly, and with his whole attention.
"Orin Whitaker," the man said. "Special agent, General Land Office.
Washington." He said Washington the way a man names a tool he seldom
has to use. "I have been auditing the entry books of the Hays land office for
six weeks, at the direction of the Commissioner, who received certain
complaints and chose, for once, to read to the end of them. I will tell you
what I have found, Miss Cade, because I perceive that you and I are walking
58
toward the same fire from different sides of the prairie." He set the carpetbag
down in the dust with a care that told her its contents mattered more than its
owner. "What I have found is a smell. The entries are perfect in form. Every
affidavit in order, every proof witnessed, every fee accounted. And rotten in
sequence. Farms proved up by men who were buried the previous winter.
Relinquishments executed in March by hands that were under the sod in
January. A township being emptied, quarter-section by quarter-section, into
the names of persons who do not exist, through the agency of a clerk whose
salary is ninety dollars a month and whose new house, on the hill above
Hays, has a cupola." He paused. "A cupola, Miss Cade. On ninety dollars a
month, a man must want the view very badly indeed, or be paid to keep it."
He knew who she was. That became plain in the next breath, and it did not
frighten her as it should have, because he recited her like a file he had