and her boots stood by the fire pit stuffed with grass. Halloran was down at
the picket line, currying Preacher's gray hide, and the rest of the string stood
at ease in the sun like soldiers after a war. He saw her sit up and raised the
comb in salute. "You'll want to know about your mare," he said, "before
coffee, I'm guessing. She's yonder."
Button grazed not a quarter mile off, where the bench flattened, the saddle
still hanging under her belly, canted and ridiculous, cropping the wet grass
with the complete, insulting serenity of an animal that has survived its own
decision. Halloran had spotted her at first light from the wagon bed, he said,
standing hipshot in the new sun like she was waiting for somebody to come
and make apologies, which was a horse's general theory of any emergency.
He went down with a halter and a handful of oats and brought her back up
the draw at a walk, and Willa stood in the dead ashes of the fire pit with the
blanket around her shoulders and watched her horse come home, and felt
something unlock behind her ribs that had nothing to do with transportation.
The mare's knees were skinned and one shoe was sprung, but she was alive
and sound enough to travel, and the girth — Beck's twice-buckled girth —
had done what it was buckled to do long enough to drag a drowning woman
out of a wash. "We'll set that shoe proper before you ride," Halloran said,
running a hand down the mare's leg with a freight man's fluency. "There's a
loose nail waiting to lame her. Won't take twenty minutes." He said you ride
as if her traveling on were a thing already decided between them, and Willa
let it pass unchallenged because it was true.
Over coffee — the second pot, made in daylight with ceremony, grounds
settled with a splash of cold water — she gave him the rest of her name. She
had been composing the giving of it while he curried the mule, testing
16
versions the way her father had tested a new chain, link by link. A woman
alone in a man's camp, owing her life to his fire: there were rules about such
mornings. But the plain fact stood ahead of them: she could not walk into
Hays City alone with Coulter's riders between her and it, and she could not
judge this man at all without knowing what her name did to his face. So she
said it whole, and watched. "My name is Willa Cade. My father was Josiah
Cade, who surveyed this township for the government, and the Harrow
company's township north of it, before the company stopped inviting him."
Something crossed Halloran's face. It crossed it the way the shadow of a
hawk crosses a field — briefly, and changing everything under it — and then
it was gone, covered by the man's standing up with his coffee cup and going
two steps to where the mules were picketed, where he stood looking at them
with his back to her. He stayed there long enough that Willa's hand found,
inside the blanket, the strings of the oilskin bundle, and tied its knot tighter,
and her mind began measuring the distance to the mare. Then Halloran came
back and sat where he had sat, and said, in the same freight-yard evenness he
had used all night, "Josiah Cade. I knew of him. Never had the honor of the
man himself." He studied the fire's remains. "Miss Cade — I freight for a
living, which means I hear every camp and cook-fire version of the news
between here and the river, and I heard in February that Coulter had riders
asking up and down the Hays road about a book. A surveyor's book.
Yesterday I saw three riders pass on the bench yonder, spread out like men
combing grass for a dropped coin, in weather no sane man rides in for
pleasure. So I'll ask you level, since you told me your name level: what are
you carrying, that the Harrow Land and Cattle Company would search a
schoolhouse for it in the morning and ride a flood for it by dark?"
It was fairly put — precisely as fairly as her father would have put it — and
17
she decided, the way one decides to step into cold water, all at once, that she
would answer it as fairly. She brought the oilskin out of the blanket and
unwrapped it on the crate between them, fold by fold, and opened the field
book to the corner table, where Josiah Cade, in the last autumn of his life,
had set down in his cramped surveyor's figures the true corners of the
township and, beside them, the corners as the Harrow company's private
resurvey had since certified them — two columns of numbers that should
have married and did not. "My father's last survey," she said. "He went back
out over his own ground in the fall and checked his corners against the
company's filing. Some of them don't agree anymore, Mr. Halloran. Corners
don't walk by themselves. A spring that was on Miller land is in a company
pasture now, by the paper. The ford crossing moved half a section east, by
the paper. My father wrote down where everything truly is, and what's been
moved, and by how much, in rods and chains. That's what they searched the
schoolhouse for. There's another book — the full field notes — hidden where
they haven't found it. This one is the table. It's enough to hang the whole
resurvey, if it reaches the federal examiner at Hays City in hands that haven't
been bought."
Halloran had not touched the book. He looked at it the way a man looks at a
loaded weapon laid down between friends — with respect, and with the acute
wish to know which way it was pointing. "And your father," he said, slowly.
"The fall. At the ford."
"The official word was a fall."
"I heard that word too." He reached out at last and turned one page himself,
with a care that surprised her — the scarred knuckles hovering, the fingertip