Kaslin came forward. He did not look at her; he looked at the lieutenant, and then, once, at his chief. "Behind their camp, two miles up the side canyon, there is a box with one mouth. The dozen were penned there with a rope gate, on the miners' grass, with the miners' grain in them. My chief sent me with the trader Mercer to track them. I cut the rope myself. We brought them down to the valley herd before dawn. They are there now — any man may count them, and read the brand."
"And you are?" Callum asked, though Wade knew he knew.
"Kaslin, son of Doza," Kaslin said. "I stand witness." He set his feet like a man who has decided the ground he stands on is his own. "What I said in this camp before, about other things, the camp knows. What I say now is what my eyes saw. The horses were never stolen by my people. They were stolen FOR a story about my people."
The silence that followed had weight, like water behind a dam. Callum wrote for a long time. Then he opened a clean page and said, "Call Mister Mercer."
Chapter 23 — The Statement Refused
Wade came forward with the hearing's whole attention on him like weather. What mattered was his coat. It had hung in Weshka's lodge through his fever and come back to him brushed and mended, and in the inside pocket, where he had put it on the fourteenth day and touched it every day since like a man touching a stove to be sure it is still hot, lay a folded paper. He had not signed it. He had not shown it. He had carried it past the chief's postponed question, past the night ride to the box canyon, and he had known from the first hour what it was for: it was for this.
"Mister Mercer." Callum's pencil was ready. "You have heard Mister Vane's report. He says his men held your horses in safekeeping and the band drove them off in an attack. What do you say to it?"
"I say the band found twenty-eight of my forty where the flood dropped them," Wade said, "and held them with their own herd, and fed them, and accounted them to me to the head. And the twelve in the box canyon were mine too, and they are accounted. Nothing of mine was ever taken by these people. They gave me back my life first and my property second, and I have the list of both."
"Then how did Mister Vane come to make his report?"
"That I can answer better than he liked." Wade put his hand inside his coat. "Lieutenant, on the day Mister Vane rode down to this camp with his story of an attack, he took me aside, alone, and made me an offer. The dozen horses returned to me — the same dozen he was holding in that box canyon. Cash for my trouble. A share in his claim. All of it for one thing only: my signature on a statement that the band fired first on his camp on the night of the fourteenth. He had the statement already written, Lieutenant. He wrote it before he ever made his offer. He left it with me to think on."
He laid the paper on the camp table, unfolded, and smoothed it flat with the side of his hand. The morning light fell on it. The writing was a clerkly hand, not Vane's own — a thing copied fair for signing — and it ran three quarters of a page: the attack, the firing, the hostiles, the date, all of it in order, all of it varnish, with a clean ruled space at the bottom where a name was meant to go.
"Read the bottom aloud," Wade said.
Callum read: "'Sworn and signed this — day of — , by Wade Mercer, trader, who was present at the camp of the said Arroyo band and witnessed the attack aforesaid.'" He looked up. "The signature line is empty."
"I never signed it," Wade said. "I never agreed to sign it. I kept it because a man keeps a snake he finds in his bedding until he can show it to the house. Mister Vane's report to your colonel is this paper, Lieutenant — the same attack, the same night, the same lies, with his own name signed instead of mine. He needed a witness who was not on his payroll. He tried to buy one with that man's own horses." Wade turned his head and looked at Vane at last. "He mispriced me."
Vane was on his feet before the words finished, talking fast — forgery, conspiracy, a trader in the Indians' keeping, a paper any clerk in Tucson could have written — and Callum let him talk for exactly as long as it took the troopers at the table's edge to come upright on their sergeant's look, and then cut him off with a voice like a gate shutting.
"Mister Vane. This hearing has heard the ground, a witness to your horse pen, and now your own draft, down to the nick in the shovel blade — which my sergeant will presently match to a shovel in your camp, along with your picketed mules that walked in a circle in the night." Callum stood. "You sent a sworn report of an attack that did not occur, to bring the Army down on people whose water you were cutting and whose land you had pre-dated a claim upon. That is a false report to the United States Army and attempted claim fraud, and I have heard enough to act on both. Sergeant."