The column halted at Captain Doyle's raised hand a hundred yards from
where Micah stood, and in the stillness that came down over the ridge road
he could hear the small sounds of it settling: a horse shaking its head against
the bit, the creak of saddle leather, the guidon giving one snap in a puff of
wind and then hanging slack again. He had stopped walking where the road
bent to begin its descent toward the agency flat, because a man surrendering
himself ought to choose the ground of it if he can, and because he wanted the
arithmetic plain for everyone who would count it later. A hundred carbines in
their saddle boots. One man in the open with nothing in his hands. He kept
his hands where they had hung since he walked out of the cedars — open at
his sides, the fingers a little spread, the way you show a strange dog you are
not carrying a stone — and he did not move them while the dust of the
column's halting drifted down the slope and settled on his boots.
Behind him, though he did not turn to look, he knew the band's observers
were watching from the cedar edge: old men who had insisted on coming,
and Pahket among them, fifteen years old and set the task by his grandfather
of memorizing the whole of it to carry home. The boy would count the
carbines. The boy would note the empty hands. Let him, Micah thought. Let
it be described exactly as it was, in the lodges tonight, by a witness no one
could call bought.
Doyle rode forward alone. He left his lieutenant with the column and came
down the last of the slope at a walk, his own hands plain on the reins, and he
dismounted twenty paces off and walked the rest on foot, a folded paper in
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his left hand. He was a grey-mustached man, weathered to the color of his
uniform's dust, and he stopped an arm's length and a half from Micah and
unfolded the paper with the care of a man who disliked what was written on
it and intended to do it properly anyway.
"Micah Thorne," he read, "late a sergeant in the cavalry of the United States.
You are charged with desertion from your company in the autumn of 1871,
in this territory, and with remaining absent from your duty these three years
following." He folded the paper again. "The charge is a hanging charge, as
you know. Have you anything to say before I put you under arrest?"
"You have my word already, Captain, sent by the agency interpreter. I said I
would make a statement standing, and I will make it, and then I am yours. I
don't deny the desertion. I have come to explain it, which is a different thing,
and the last thing I will ask is that the explanation be written down beside the
charge and travel with it."
Doyle studied him a moment. "Make it, then."
Micah drew breath and set his voice at the level a man uses in a room, not the
level a man uses in the open, and trusted the still air to carry it to the column,
where the troopers sat their horses and listened with the particular attention
of soldiers who know a confession when they hear one being loaded.
"The camp on the Rio Puerco was a ration camp," he said. "I had stood in the
agency yard the month before we rode against it and interpreted while those
same people drew their beef and their flour — women, old men, children, a
band that had come in and put itself on the government's books. I held their
ration tickets in my own hand and read the agent's writing on them. The
column was told the camp was a renegade war camp living outside the
reservation by raiding. The man who told us so was Petr Hasek, riding as
54
guide. It was a lie, Captain. It was a lie when he said it at the evening council
and it was a lie when we struck at dawn, and I have had three years to
consider whether Hasek knew it for one, and I am done considering. He
knew. The ration books knew. Anyone who had troubled to read them
knew."
He heard, somewhere behind the column's stillness, a horse stamp once. He
went on.
"When it was done, a report was written that said what Hasek had said, and
not what the troopers had seen. I read it before it went east. I did not sign it,
but I did not stop it either, and that is on me. Within two months I was
ordered out again — interpreter and guide to a second column, against a
second camp of the same kind, with Hasek to lead it and the same lie oiled
and ready in his mouth. I was ordered to help do a second time the thing I
had failed to prevent the first. I would not. I walked out of the camp in the
night and I have been walking since. That is desertion, Captain, and I do not
dress it in any other word. But I will say this in the open, where my friends in
the cedars can hear it and your troopers can hear it: the man who lied that
camp into its graves is riding in this territory today, in the pay of Victor
Ames, and there is a dead prospector in the Animas valley with a factory
arrow in him and a framed crime laid on people who did not do it, and it is
the same hand at the same work. I came out of the brush to say so. I am
finished."
Doyle was silent a long while. He looked once at the paper in his hand, as if
the charge and the statement might be weighed against each other like
powder and ball.
"Merritt is dead," he said at last. "The captain who commanded at Rio
Puerco. Fever, two years gone. Whatever accounting you hoped to make with
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him has been made by a higher authority than mine."