"The report he signed is not dead, sir."
"No." Doyle's mouth moved, not quite into a smile. "No, reports outlive their
signers. That is the whole of my difficulty, and I suspect you know it." He
stepped closer then, close enough that the wind off the ridge took the next
words under itself and kept them between the two of them, and he spoke the
way men speak at gravesides. "You are either the most honest man in this
territory, Sergeant, or the best liar I have ever failed to hang. My report will
say the first. God help us both if it's the second."
He stepped back and raised his voice to its carrying pitch. "Sergeant Thorne.
You will ride to the agency with this column, under my personal charge.
There will be no irons. Corporal — bring up the spare horse." And then,
lower, as the horse was led down the slope: "I won't give the cedars a picture
of you in chains to carry home. What I give them instead, they may make of
what they can."
Micah mounted a cavalry horse for the first time in three years and found his
seat the way a man finds his own name in a register, and he rode down
toward the agency flat beside the captain of the column sent to arrest him,
with a corporal at his other elbow and his hands free on the reins — a guard
arranged in the shape of an honor guard, and both of them knew it, and
neither of them said so. Behind them, in the cedars, a boy was memorizing it
all: the hundred carbines, the empty hands, the captain walking out alone, the
deserter riding unbound at his side.
"Why now, Thorne?" Doyle asked, when the column had fallen in behind
them and the road's dust gave them a kind of privacy. "Three years you ran.
Men don't stop running from a rope without a reason that outweighs the
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rope."
"A man was killed in that valley with an arrow no man in it fletched," Micah
said, "and the next thing to be killed is the valley itself, and everyone in it
who can't read English paper. I found I was tired of my life being the only
one I was saving."
Doyle rode a while without answering. "Then we had better get your
statement into ink," he said, "before this territory finds a way to make a liar
of one of us."
The agency ground had been laid out for the commission like a small,
temporary capital: a pavilion of canvas and planed lumber, a long table for
the clerks with their inkstands and their ruled books, rows of benches for the
band's delegation, and beyond the ropes the whole mixed population of the
agency — traders, teamsters, agency employees, soldiers off duty — come to
watch the United States decide what a valley was worth. The band sat in their
delegation's place with the patience of people who had been decided about
before and expected to be decided about again. Chief Tavio sat at their head.
Grandmother Seeka sat beside him, small and straight as a fence post, her
hands folded over a bundle of cloth in her lap that no one had thought to ask
about. Waneka sat at her father's other side, and it was she, Micah saw, who
held the second bundle, longer, wrapped in a strip of trade cloth and tied with
sinew.
The terms of his own arrangement were settled first, before the commission's
other business, because Doyle insisted on it and because the captain, as he
said flatly to the clerks, had buried one report already in his career and would
not bury another. The statement Micah had made on the ridge road was read
back to him from a clerk's fair copy, and he corrected it in two places where
the clerk's pen had softened a name into an initial, and then he signed it, and
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Doyle signed beneath him, and the second paper was drawn: the terms.
Micah would serve the commission as guide and interpreter for as long as it
sat. He would testify, when called, concerning Petr Hasek and Victor Ames
and all that he knew of their work. Captain Doyle would carry Micah's
statement, together with his own written recommendation — that the
desertion be answered by this service — to the department commander. And
the judgment on the charge of desertion would not be rendered, either way,
until the commission had concluded its business and risen.
"It is a postponement, Thorne, not a pardon," Doyle said, while the clerk
sanded the ink. "I want that understood in this tent if it is understood
nowhere else. The sword stays where it hangs. At the end of this, the
department may take my recommendation or may take you, and I cannot
promise you which, and I will not lie to you that I can."
"I have had three years of men lying to me kindly, Captain," Micah said. "A
hanging postponed honest is more than I came expecting. I accept it with my
eyes open."
He signed the third copy as well — Doyle had ordered the terms in triplicate,
one for the department, one for the commission's record, one for Micah's
own coat — and folded his into the breast of his shirt, where it crackled when
he breathed, like a second, paper heart.
The chairman of the commission was a man named Aldous Grey, sent out
from Washington with a mandate Micah had not expected to hear read aloud
in that place: to hear the band — truly hear them, on the record — before any
recommendation of cession was made to the Secretary. Grey was perhaps
fifty, grey at the temples in a way that made his name seem a prophecy, with
the tired, exact manner of a man who has read too many fraudulent
documents to be hurried by any of them. He opened the proceedings by
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having the treaty of 1868 read into the record entire, all of it, the boundary
clauses aloud and slow, while the clerks wrote and Tavio listened with his