touching only the margin — going down the columns with a freight man's
patience, his mouth moving slightly, the way some men read scripture and
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others read manifests. He turned another page. He stopped.
His thumb came down on a single entry and stayed there, pressing the page
flat. He stood looking at it a long time. Willa watched the side of his face do
work that no camp politeness could cover.
"I know this corner, Miss Cade," he said at last. "I know it better than your
father did, God rest him. He's got it wrote down as moved forty rods west
between his survey and theirs." His jaw worked. "He's right. It was moved. I
held the chain the night they moved it."
The freight camp woke the way camps do, in pieces — a mule stamping
somewhere in the draw, the smell of a fire being coaxed back from its ashes,
coffee thick enough to stand a spoon in. Willa sat with her back to the wagon
wheel and her father's notebook in its oilskin wrap across her knees like a
hymnal, and watched Rube Halloran build the morning with the unhurried
hands of a man who had built ten thousand of them, and she understood that
he was stalling. Not from cowardice. From arrangement. He had a thing to
tell and he was setting it in order the way he set a load — weight low,
nothing loose to shift on the grade.
"You said last night you held the chain," she said. "I have been awake since
four thinking about what that means, and I find I would rather know than
think. Tell it the way you would tell it to a judge, Mr. Halloran. Begin
wherever the truth begins."
"The truth begins with wages." He poured her coffee into a tin cup and
himself into the story, and there was no self-pity in him anywhere; she had
braced for it and found instead the flat, careful diction of a man reading out a
ledger he himself had kept. "Spring of seventy-five I hired to the Harrow
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Land and Cattle Company as a locator. Dollar and a half a day and found,
winter work when freighting was froze up and a man with a team eats his
profit standing still. Locating's honest work at the face of it. A fellow comes
west with a little money and less notion — he's read the pamphlets, he thinks
Kansas is a garden with fences already on it — and the company sells him
the finding of his claim. You ride out with him. You find his corners. You
run his lines, set his stakes, witness his mark on the filing, and you ride him
to the land office door like a midwife. I done that two seasons. I staked
entries up and down the Saline and every creek in this township, and most of
it was what it looked like."
"Most of it," Willa said.
"Most of it." He turned his cup in his hands. "There's papers a locator
witnesses. Entries. Proofs. And relinquishments — a man gives up his claim,
signs it back, the next man files over it. Those come through the office with
the mark already on them, half the time, and your job is to put your witness
name under the mark and not slow the wagon. I put my name under marks I
never saw made. I want that said plain before anything else, Miss Cade. I did
not read close, because reading close was not the job as the job was sold to
me, and because the wage was good and I had decided — deciding's the
word, I chose it — that a man gets paid for his hands and his eyes were his
own affair."
Willa thought of her father's handwriting, every figure squared like a fence
post, and said nothing, because she could feel the shape of the thing he was
carrying toward her and knew it needed its own road.
"The night work came in October of my first season." His voice did not
change, and that was worse than if it had. "Ward Coulter rode out to my
camp after dark with a hooded lantern and a company rider I never got a
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clean look at, and said there was a corner wanted correcting on the Miller's
Ford line. Corner fourteen. Your father's corner, set in seventy-four — stones
and a mound and charcoal under, the way he always set them; I knew his
work by then the way you know a man's handwriting. We dug that mound up
in the dark, the three of us, and we set it again forty rods west, by the lantern,
with me on the chain. Forty rods. Toward the spring branch. Toward the
water."
"Sixty paces," Willa said. She felt her own voice come out schoolroom-even.
"That is not a correction, Mr. Halloran. That is a theft with a shovel."
"You are the second person to say a version of that sentence to my face, and
the first was a mirror." He drank. "Coulter paid double for the night, coin out
of his own purse, and told me the story that was to go with it — the original
survey was a drunken survey, the old man had run the line with a jug on his
saddle, we were putting God's own corner back where God left it. I knew
whose survey it was. I knew Josiah Cade had never taken a drink on a line in
his life — the whole township knew it; men joked about it. I held the chain in
one hand and that knowledge in the other, and I will let you guess, Miss
Cade, which one weighed more that night. It was the chain. I am not going to
dress it."
The fire ticked. Somewhere below in the draw a mule blew out its breath and
a chain clinked, small ordinary music, and Willa sat with October of 1875
rearranged in her mind — her father alive then, setting corners in good faith,
while forty rods of his honesty were dug up by lantern light not ten miles
from his own table.
"Afterward," Rube said, "came the arithmetic. A man freighting thinks in