township were restored and confirmed to the settlers who had entered them,
Johann Weiss's spring quarter-section named among the first, his patent to
proceed. And the findings did the thing that Willa, in the privacy of her own
satisfaction, had not expected to be grateful for and was: they confirmed to
the Harrow company the two sections it had entered honestly — properly
surveyed, properly filed, properly paid — because the law, having finished
separating the stolen from the earned, handed back the earned with the same
indifference it had used to reclaim the stolen. She stood in the crowd and
listened to a settler beside her curse the paragraph, and she thought of her
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father's hand in the notebook, impartial as weather, writing down the corners
that hurt his friends with the same care as the corners that helped them. The
record is the record. That had been the whole of the argument, and it was not
permitted to stop being the argument on the days it cut against her own side.
The rest of it unwound with the speed of machinery that has finally been
pointed downhill. The federal grand jury, sitting at Wichita, indicted Edwin
Harrow for land fraud, for conspiracy, and for suborning perjury — the last
for the witness marks he had never held a chain to write — and Marshal
Reinhardt brought him in from the company's ranch headquarters without
incident, Harrow riding in his own buggy ahead of the marshal's horse like a
man still trying to arrive at the event as its host. Otto Lindgren, the
land-office clerk whose stamps had walked so many false papers through the
door, was removed from his office and charged with falsifying the records of
the United States, and the desk he had sat at for six years was given to a
young man from Abilene who was seen, his first week, to read every paper
twice and stamp nothing after four o'clock. Sheriff Frank Wilkes resigned his
office ahead of its removal from him, in a letter to the county commissioners
citing his health, which no one in Alder Creek who had watched him ride
escort for company wagons believed to be his reason, or, by then, much
cared about the difference. Ward Coulter was bound over for trial at the
district court for the attack at the river crossing — held, this time, in a cell
with a door that locked from the outside, on a bond his employer did not
post.
Whitaker kept Rube Halloran for the last of it, in a short meeting in the
land-office back room with the door open, because the agent conducted even
his mercies in view of the record. The cooperation was accepted. The United
States Attorney would not prosecute the chain work — the holding of it, the
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night of it — in light of testimony given freely, fully, and first. In exchange,
and it was stated as an exchange and not a favor, Rube would make the
whole of it again as a full sworn record, signed, to be kept with the file,
including the parts no indictment would ever need: the pay, the lantern, the
road-watch, the order of the stones. The agent told him, with a plainness
Willa recognized as the only kindness the man's office dealt in, that his name
would stand in the file beside his confession permanently, that there was no
procedure known to the government for taking it out again, and that he
should sign understanding that.
Rube signed it with a laboring hand, in letters that leaned like fence posts
after a wet spring, and pushed the page back across the desk. "Mr. Whitaker,"
he said, "that's the first place my name's ever been that I put it there myself.
I'll leave it."
The township rebuilt its schoolhouse in a week, because that is the arithmetic
of a raising when every family in a settlement sends hands: the frame up by
Wednesday on the old stone footing, Marta Weiss's bread coming out to the
site on a plank at noon in quantities that made the work pause whether the
work wished to or not, the roof boards going on Friday to the sound of forty
hammers finding a rhythm and losing it and finding it again. Children
claimed desks in a building with no roof yet, carving the claims with initials
and absolute conviction, and the schoolmistress walked the stud walls with
her list and did not have the heart, or the standing, to unclaim a single one.
Willa worked the raising with her sleeves up, driving nails beside women she
had ridden past all winter as a cautionary tale — the surveyor's daughter with
her dead father's book, whom the company had made briefly famous as a liar
— and found that vindication, in practice, mostly resembled being handed a
hammer and a place in the line and no speech at all, and that she preferred it
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so.
Nora Grange printed the whole of the hearing record in the Clarion across
four issues, the testimony entire, Rube's confession and Willa's figures and
the register's findings standing in column after column of her small
uncompromising type, and was still setting type at midnight the week the last
installment ran. The record, twice, in ink, Willa thought, riding home with
the first issue folded in her pocket: once in the government's hand in a
government book in Hays, and once in Nora's, in every kitchen in the
township. The fire had taken the schoolhouse and very nearly taken the paper
truth of the township with it, in a single night, in a single place. It would
have to work harder now. It would have to burn down the whole county's
worth of kitchen tables.
Rube filed his homestead entry at the Hays land office on a Tuesday morning
in high summer, standing at the window in his good shirt with the papers
filled out in his leaning hand: a quarter-section along the creek, above the
spring branch, good grass and better water, in his own name, for himself. The
Abilene clerk read the filing twice, because that was his way now, and