Vane was smiling still, but it had become a smile he was holding rather than wearing. He began to speak of the claim, of capital, of the railroad that would come through the canyon within five years, and Callum let him run on a long rein. Wade found himself watching the lieutenant's pencil. It moved when facts came. It stopped when varnish did. By the time Vane talked himself out, the pencil had been still a long while.
"That is your report, then," Callum said at last. "Signed and sworn at the fort, and given again here."
"It is, Lieutenant."
"Then we will hear the other side of the ground." Callum lifted his head and looked across the table, past Vane, past the soldiers, to where the band stood patient as standing stones. "I am told the chief's daughter tracked this valley after the flood. I am told there is no better reader of sign in this canyon." His voice changed, not louder, only plainer. "I would hear the ground itself now, if the chief permits. The ground does not take wages from any man."
Tazlo stood a moment in the silence the request made. Then he said something in his own tongue, short and final, and Tali came forward out of the people's order the way she did everything, without hurry and without asking the path's permission.
Chapter 22 — Tali's Evidence
She had read the ground the way other women read a letter from far away — once fast for the news of it, once slow for the truth of it, and a third time with her fingers on the lines. Now she stood before the officer's table with her grandmother's shawl folded over one arm, because her hands must be free, and she began at the beginning, which was the water.
"You came two days, Lieutenant, because a paper told you there was a war here. I will show you what is here. It is shorter than a war."
She took them up the path above the lower spring, the whole hearing trailing after her like a school — the officer, the soldiers, the miners gone quiet, her father walking at the rear. Where the path bent, she stopped and pointed with her chin, the way trackers point, so as not to disturb the sign.
"Here. This is the first thing. Above the spring, where the bank falls to the seep, a channel is cut. Look at the edges, Lieutenant. Put your hand."
Callum knelt. The cut ran down from the upper bench in a ruled line no flood makes, aimed like a rifle at the spring's throat, meant to take the water off sideways before it ever reached the pool — a sluice not yet finished, a theft not yet completed. The earth at its edges was pale and raw.
"The flood cut this canyon for ten thousand years and never once used a spade," Tali said. "See the marks. A pick. A shovel with a nick in the left of the blade — every stroke signs it. And the earth is fresh. If this cut were older than the flood, the water would have rounded it, grown grass in it. It is younger than the flood, dug by men who came after the water fell, in a hurry, in the dark part of the mornings." She straightened. "They were cutting the band's water away from under the band. A spring dies from above, Lieutenant. A man does not dig another man's spring dry by accident, in a straight line, with a nicked shovel."
She led them to the stakes next, four standing in a surveyor's square at the bench's edge, and had the lieutenant read the paper tacked to the tallest.
"Read the date aloud," she said.
"June the second," Callum read.
"The flood was the night of the twelfth and thirteenth," Tali said. "Everyone in this canyon agrees it, even Mister Vane. A claim filed the second of June, on ground no white man had stood on before the miners were stranded by the water on the thirteenth." She turned and looked at Vane for the first time, and her voice did not rise at all. "Either the paper lies about the date, or Mister Vane can file a claim on land he has not reached. Which lie does he want? He may choose. The ground allows him only one."
Vane said something about clerks and dating errors, and the words fell down into the cut channel and sounded small there. Callum said nothing. His pencil was moving now, and it did not stop.
"Now the attack," Tali said, and led them down to the miners' flat, where Hobbs's story had happened, and squatted on her heels at the edge of the trampled ground. "Here the mules were picketed. Here they were loosed in the night — not cut, Lieutenant. See: the rope ends are whole and the knots are a man's knots, untied by fingers, not a knife. Here the mules went out — " her hand moved, line by line, across the flat " — and here they turned, and here they turned again. A mule that is stolen runs from the place it is stolen and does not stop. These mules walked. They walked in a great circle and came home to their own picket line by morning, because they were never driven anywhere. It is the trail of men making a trail. Nothing on this ground was ever afraid — except the men who made it, who were afraid of the daylight."
She rose. "And the shots. Look at the rocks where the firing is said to have come from. I found no brass there, no man's sign, no moccasin, no boot. Twenty rifles firing in the night leave something besides a story. There is nothing. The ground says: no attack. The ground does not know Mister Vane's name and it does not know mine. That is why my father keeps it for a witness."
Then she turned to where Kaslin stood among the young men, and the whole flat felt the turn, because everyone there knew what it cost him to stand where she was pointing.
"And the horses that were 'driven off,'" she said. "Twelve horses of the Bar M brand, which Mister Vane says his men gathered kindly off the flood and lost to my people. Speak, Kaslin. Tell the officer where those horses were, and whose rope you cut."