board. While the commission sat — while the band's witnesses were on the
record and their young men were at the agency and their herds were watched
by boys — Ames's men had gone into the gulch below Silver Sister with
tents, tools, a sluice box on a wagon, and a flag, and had set up a working
camp on the ground and posted discovery notices on the trees, and were
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calling it, in the filings they flourished, a mining location made by right of
discovery. The gulch, every man in the tent understood before Micah had
finished the sentence, lay inside the valley the treaty of 1868 had reserved —
inside the line Tavio had walked the commission down not two days before,
stone by stone.
Grey rose. Micah had not seen him rise for any testimony, however hard, and
the clerks rose with him out of pure reflex, pens still in their hands.
"Let the record show," Grey said, in a voice that had shed its tiredness the
way a snake sheds a skin, "that during the sitting of this commission, and
while the matter of this valley's title was under its examination, agents of the
claimant Ames have entered the reserved valley by force of occupancy and
undertaken to work it. Let it further show the commission's judgment of that
act. It is an attempt to present this commission, and the band, with a finished
theft — and to call the theft a fact." He looked at Ames for a long moment.
"The commission is adjourned until I have conferred with Captain Doyle.
Mr. Ames, you will remain available. I suggest your men in the gulch remain
available also — to be counted."
Ames was on his feet protesting with both hands spread, the picture of
wounded reasonableness — his employees were independent locators, he
could not answer for every prospector with a pan, the filings had been
prepared in proper form by his agent in the ordinary course — and it was
there, listening to the shape of the defense, that Micah heard the small fact
drop into place like a latch. The filings had been prepared, Ames said, by his
agent. The agent was Petr Hasek, who had been seated behind Ames at every
session, close as a shadow at his elbow, taking no notes and missing nothing.
Micah looked for him now, past Ames's shoulder, along the row of
hangers-on and agency idlers.
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Hasek was not there. He had not been there, Micah realized, since the
morning's session began — and Ames, following Micah's look without
meaning to, glanced once toward the empty place at his own elbow, and what
crossed his face was not surprise. It was the look of a man whose dog has
slipped its chain in the night and is somewhere in the dark, deciding things.
Kweo came into the band's camp by the agency in the deep of that night,
when the fires had burned down to their red hearts and the commission's
adjournment had left the whole ground wakeful. Micah knew his step before
he saw his face — or would have known it, in the old days, for Kweo had
always walked like a man arriving at a place that owed him a welcome. The
man who came between the lodges now was walking like the ground itself
was a debt collector. He came on foot, leading nothing, though he had ridden
out of the valley days before on a good horse with a string of his own behind
him. His face carried the record of his welcome in Ames's country: one eye
swollen nearly shut, his mouth cut at the corner, his shirt stiff where blood
had dried under it, and he held his left arm against his body the way men
hold things that are broken or expect to be.
He did not go to his mother's lodge. He did not go to Waneka. He went to the
council fire, where Tavio sat late with the old men over the day's wound, and
he stood in the firelight with his ruined face lifted, and he spoke in form, as a
man speaks who has rehearsed it walking.
He told what he had ridden out to do. Ames's agent — Hasek, with his soft
voice and his gifts — had tried to buy him before the commission ever sat: a
rifle, horses, a place in the new order of the valley, all for small services, for
news. Kweo had refused it then, and ridden out before dawn to confess the
offering to Waneka and be clean of it, and Micah knew that much already,
for he had been the stranger at the edge of that fire. But the confession Kweo
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made now had a second room in it, and the door had been shut until tonight.
After he had refused the buying, Hasek had come at him another way —
through the sore place. Had let him know the white officers thought him
bought already. Had let him drink. And in the drinking, in a moment of spite
he would carry to his grave, Kweo had spoken the thing that should never
have been given away for any price, let alone for whisky and wounded pride:
he had told Hasek where the band's winter camp lay, and when the people
would be gathered at the agency for the commission, and when the valley
would stand empty of its young men.
"That is how they knew the days," he said. "The gulch was not courage. The
gulch was my mouth, telling them when no one would be standing in it."
Ames had used the knowledge for timing and timing only — the prospector's
killing had been planned on colder paper than any Kweo kept — but the
occupation of the gulch, the finished theft Grey had named, had been hung
on Kweo's treason like a coat on a nail. And the payment for it, when Kweo
rode in expecting the promised horses and instead demanded them with a
loud voice in the wrong camp, had been administered by Hasek's men with
fists and a rifle barrel, after which they had taken his own string — six