can't take it back."
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Whitaker took out his own notebook, and wrote it down, in the front.
The hearing room at the land office in Hays City had been a storeroom
before it was anything grander, and it still smelled faintly of the hemp sacks
and lamp oil that had lived in it, under the newer smells of paper, ink, and
men who had ridden a long way in June heat to sit in it. The register presided
from a desk that was not a bench and did not pretend to be one, but he had
arranged it like a man who understood the weight of a desk when a room is
watching: the entry files squared to its edge in two stacks, the contest docket
open, his spectacles set down and taken up and set down again in the rhythm
of a man who intended to be believed careful. Tall windows stood open on
the street side and gave back the sounds of Hays going about its morning —
a freight wagon's iron tires, a mule's opinion, the depot bell — and every so
often the whole room seemed to lean a little toward those sounds, the way
men in a serious place lean toward any reminder that the world outside is still
ordinary.
Mr. Delancey, counsel for the Harrow Land and Cattle Company, had come
down from Topeka in a black coat too good for the weather and a manner
arranged for hurry. Willa had been told the hurry was his own arranging: a
contest hearing noticed short, set early, meant to be over before the township
had fairly understood it had begun. She watched him discover, across the
first hour, what his hurry had seated him across from. There was the register,
yes, and the company's files, and the settlers in their Sunday shirts filling the
gallery benches to the wall. But at the government's table, in the chair that
should by rights have held some clerk borrowed for the morning, sat Orin
Whitaker — special agent of the General Land Office, gray at the temples,
still as a fence post — with the subpoenaed original entry files stacked before
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him in their jackets, tied and labeled, and his own slim memorandum book
lying on top like a hand resting on a Bible. And at the door, where a man
leaving in a temper would have to pass him, stood Marshal Henry Reinhardt,
hat in hand, unhurried, looking at nothing in particular with the whole room
inside his looking.
Delancey was a professional, and Willa granted him that in silence. She
watched the discovery move across his arrangements the way weather moves
across a field a man has already planted — nothing to be done about the crop
now but husband it. He conferred with his junior. He asked for a recess of ten
minutes and was given five. He asked whether the special agent's presence
was a party to the contest or an observation, and Whitaker answered, without
looking up from his book, that the United States was an interested party in
the disposition of its own land, and that Mr. Delancey would find the
noticing of it in the file he had been served, page four. In the gallery, on the
second bench, Edwin Harrow sat with his hat in his hands and his thumbs
turning it slowly by the brim, a big man made smaller by a wooden bench,
and Willa saw him understand the room a full hour before his lawyer
finished understanding it. Harrow had bought and sold land and men for
twenty years. He knew what a table looked like when it had been set against
him by somebody who had done the setting at leisure.
She was called before noon.
She had prepared the way her father had taught her to prepare for any ground
she would have to stand on in front of witnesses: by getting the facts into an
order that did not need her feelings to carry it. She took the notebook from its
oilcloth wrapping and laid it on the table before the register, and the room
made the sound rooms make when a thing they have only heard described is
set down in front of them in the flesh. It was not much to look at, and she
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said so, because that was where the truth of it started. A surveyor's field
book. Canvas over boards, the corners gone soft with years, her father's hand
in brown ink on every page, the figures ruled in columns small and exact as
stitches.
"You'll hear it said this book is a keepsake," she said, "a daughter's relic, and
I should tell you plainly it is not evidence because I love it. It's evidence
because it can be checked. That's the whole of my testimony, and the rest is
just me showing you how the checking is done."
The register asked her to proceed, and she proceeded, the way her father had
proceeded through a thousand section lines, one station at a time. She
showed them a corner table. At each corner of the government survey, she
explained, the surveyor sets his monument — a mound, a stone, a post —
and because monuments can be moved by frost, by cattle, by men, the survey
does not trust the monument alone. The surveyor records witness marks:
things placed or noted at measured bearings and distances from the true
corner, meant to outlast the mound. A bearing tree blazed and scribed. Pits
dug in a pattern. And at certain corners, where the ground gave him cause to
want a mark no weather could argue with, a thing buried at the corner itself,
under the monument, where only the man who dug for it in earnest would
find it. Her father, working this township in the first survey's wake, had
distrusted the sandy soil along the creek bottoms, where a mound could walk
in a wet spring. At corners he judged vulnerable he had buried, at the true
point, a bottle, or the charred ends of the original bearing stakes, and had
written each one into this book with its bearing and its distance, so that any