memorized for its usefulness and not its tragedy: the schoolteacher of Alder
Creek, daughter of Josiah Cade, deceased, late deputy surveyor for the
township; holder — "if the arithmetic of grief and persistence that I have
been reading in Mrs. Grange's newspaper is to be credited" — of her father's
field notebook, and of a notarized statement from a widow named Sibley. He
had read Nora's Clarion. A subscriber in Kansas — he did not say who, and
his not saying it had the smoothness of long practice — had been mailing the
issues east, folded into seed catalogues, where they had landed on a desk in
Washington and been read by a man whose business it was to recognize the
smell of an entry book gone wrong. "Your Mrs. Grange," Whitaker said,
"prints a small newspaper with a press held together, I am told, by hope and
harness leather. It is at present the most reliable publication in the
Department's western file."
Then he stated his terms, and they were plain in the way federal things are
59
plain — without comfort and without bluff. He could not protect her on the
road. Protection was the Marshal's work, not an auditor's, and at the word
Marshal a man detached himself from the shadow of the stable wall where he
had been standing long enough that Willa understood, with a small chill, that
he had been there the whole of the conversation and she had taken him for
part of the building. He was tall and quiet and weathered past guessing, with
a badge she did not need to see because his stillness was its own credential,
and he came forward and tipped his hat — to Johann first, who stood by his
horse with his hat already in his hands, because a German farmer who did
not know a marshal from a merchant knew a uniform of any kind when it
stepped out of a shadow. "Marshal Reinhardt," Whitaker said. "Deputy
Henry Reinhardt. The Marshal has been riding this road in his own fashion
for some days, Miss Cade, and I may say that Mr. Coulter's riders have asked
their questions at two way stations without learning that one of the idlers at
the bar was the United States. The road is less unwatched than it appears."
What Whitaker could do, if she reached Hays with her evidence intact, was
see that the hearing was honest. Not favorable — he was precise about the
word, and she respected him for it in the middle of her fear — honest. The
register would conduct it. But there would be a special agent seated in the
room with the township's entry files open on the table before him and a
subpoena power in his coat pocket, and a marshal in the corridor, and that
combination had a way of making perjury feel expensive. And then he told
her the thing about the date, and she felt the road tilt under her a second time.
She had known the hearing had been moved up. Rube had brought that word
from the second way station — ten days now instead of the month that had
been promised, the notice come down from the Hays office in a clerk's hand,
terse as a slap — and she had taken it as one more of Harrow's pressures, a
60
hurry meant to scatter them. Whitaker took it otherwise. The moved-up date,
he said, had not been authorized by the register, who was old and tired and
possibly only lazy rather than bought, which in Whitaker's taxonomy was a
distinction with a future in it. It had been set by the register's clerk — the
clerk of the cupola — on instructions Whitaker could smell but not yet prove.
And the date the clerk had chosen, hurrying to serve his paymaster, fell
squarely in the one week of the summer when the General Land Office's
special agent was resident in Hays with his files and his marshal. "Your
enemy has done you the kindness of hurrying, Miss Cade," Whitaker said.
"Men who hurry their fraud usually trip on the hem of it. Mr. Harrow wished
the contest heard before your friends could gather and your witnesses be
sworn. Instead he has scheduled it for the only week in which I can attend it
with the books of his own office under my arm." He looked toward the stable
shadow, where Reinhardt had resumed his stillness. "We will ride near you
the rest of the way, in our fashion. Not with you. A wagon train with a
marshal in it is a target wearing a badge. But near."
Johann had listened to all of this with his hat in his hands and his face
working the way a field works under weather, and now he spoke, in his
careful, block-set English: "Agent. If the hearing is honest, the paper will be
read? The paper that says my quarter is mine — it will be read by a man who
can read it?"
"It will be read by me," Whitaker said. "And I can read, Mr. Weiss."
It was the first time in four days that Willa had seen Johann's shoulders come
down from around his ears.
The federal men rode near them from that evening on, in their fashion, which
turned out to be a fashion of distances. Whitaker took the morning stage for a
stretch and then appeared at a noon halt on a hired mule of such profound
61
unwillingness that Rube, watching him negotiate it down from a rise,
remarked that the General Land Office had issued the agent everything but
horsemanship. Reinhardt was seen oftener and said less: a figure on a far
ridge at sunup, a rider watering a horse at a creek crossing half a mile behind
the wagons at dusk, once — at the fourth way station — a man asleep in a
chair on the porch with his hat over his eyes, who was not asleep, and whose
chair had been placed, whether by him or by providence, where it
commanded both the road and the stable door. The country stations took the
change without comment, the way they took all changes on the road. But the