void, the survey confirmed, the valley to remain the band's, no cession to be
sought — and the commissioners signed it in turn, in ink, while the clerk
sanded each signature. And it was in the yard afterward, while the paper was
still drying in its folder, that the troopers brought Hasek out of the agency
guard room to the wagon that would carry him to the fort to await his trial.
He passed within six feet of Micah with his wrists chained to a waist belt and
his hat in a trooper's hand, and he stopped — not struggling, just stopped, the
way a horse stops at ground it remembers — and looked at Micah with the
flat, considering eyes of a man doing sums in a currency nobody else uses
anymore.
"I kept the letter," Hasek said. "Four years, in the bottom of the bag, under
everything. Some nights I needed the proof I hadn't dreamed whose hand
held the pen." His mouth did something that was not a smile. "If I'd burned it,
I'd still be a rich man's dog. Now I'm a poor man's evidence. It isn't much of
an improvement, Thorne, but it's an honest one."
The trooper at his elbow moved him on, not ungently, and the wagon took
him out of the yard in the direction of the fort, and Micah stood watching the
dust of it settle and thought that the law, for all its half-laced boots, had at
least learned to carry its paper in daylight.
The twelve horses came home on the morning of the second day.
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They had been found in the gulch camp's remuda, kept fat and shod as the
occupiers' remounts — the theft wearing, as thefts by practical men do, a
useful face — and now they came down the agency road in a string with the
dust rising gold around their legs. Pahket rode the lead mare bareback with a
rope halter, sitting her like a boy who had been appointed to something and
knew it, and at the drag rode the herder boy's older brother, keeping the
string bunched with a willow switch and a voice like a metronome. The
whole valley turned out along the road to watch them pass — women at the
lodge doors with their shawls around them, old men standing very straight,
children running alongside in the grass until their wind gave out — and at the
agency fence the herder boy himself stood with his arm still in its sling from
the collarbone the raid had broken, and waved with the good arm as his own
pony went by in the string, and did not stop waving until the whole twelve
had passed into the valley grass.
Victor Ames asked to speak to Micah privately, and was refused the privacy,
and came anyway.
He came in the late afternoon, in a good coat with the dust brushed off it, and
he stood in the agency yard with the clerks at their tables within plain earshot
and a trooper currying a horse at the rail and Pahket shelling corn into a bowl
not ten paces off, and he conducted his temptation in the open because the
open was all that was left to him. He was courteous. He was even, in his way,
kind. He spoke of Micah's difficulties with the Army as a thing a man of
influence could smooth away with two letters. He named a figure — a draft
on a Denver bank, a sum that Micah, before he could stop himself, translated
into three years of a sergeant's pay — and he laid beside it a scout's contract
with the syndicate, Denver rooms, a stove, a future: every road in the offer
paved smooth and running one way, away from the valley, away from the
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council fires and the record books and the cold arithmetic of what Micah had
done and been. It was shaped exactly like his old life. That was the
craftsmanship of it. Run toward money. Run away from consequence. Run.
Micah let him finish. A man owed even Victor Ames the courtesy of
finishing.
"I have a winter's work, Mr. Ames," he said, "and a name to be worthy of by
spring. You'd be amazed how little of either is portable."
Ames studied him for a moment the way a man studies a claim that has failed
to assay — not with anger, but with the genuine bewilderment of a
prospector who cannot understand ground that will not pay — and then he
put his hat on and went out of the yard and, within two days, out of the
territory, on the eastbound stage that Micah did not trouble himself to watch
leave.
Commissioner Grey signed the commission's recommendation that same
week, and the paper was carried down into the valley, and Chief Tavio
received it standing. He did not sit for paper that concerned the river. The
interpreter read it in the tongue of the valley — the claims voided, the survey
confirmed, the valley to remain the band's, no cession to be sought by the
United States — and Micah, standing at the edge of the fire with his hat in
his hands, heard it in both languages and understood it in both, which was its
own kind of record being made.
Tavio listened to the end. Then he said the smallest true thing Micah had
ever heard a chief say, and the interpreter, after a moment, said it in English.
"Then the river keeps its name another year."
Doyle sent for him at noon, three days after the signing, and Micah
understood the arrangement of the yard before the captain had spoken a
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word.
The yard had arranged itself almost by accident into ceremony, the way
parade ground habits arrange men even when nobody has ordered them to.
The clerks had come out of the agency office with their pens still in their
hands and their work forgotten on the desks behind them. The troopers off
duty stood along the rail in a loose line that kept becoming a straight one.
The agency blacksmith had come out of his forge with his apron on. Old men
and agency hands and a pair of traders' wives stood at the edges, and Pahket