The silence stretched. On the ridge, nothing moved. In the yard, the horses stamped and blew.
Gray swung down from the saddle. He was taller than Caleb had expected, and younger, and there was dust on his boots like any other man's.
"Mr. Sutter, you will remain here with the detachment," he said. "Sergeant, post two men at this gate. Mr. Rourke — show me your table."
Chapter 22 — The Proof
They brought Asto out on the door laid flat, the way they'd carried him the first night, because his left side would not bear him standing yet. Sihas walked at the head of the door with her chin high and her eyes straight ahead, past the soldiers, past Sutter's grin, as if none of them were worth the turning of her head. Sadie and Tomás carried the foot of it. They set him down in the shade of the porch, propped on blankets, with his bandaged right forearm resting across his chest like something broken that he was guarding.
Gray stood at the kitchen table and looked down at what Caleb had laid there in a row, the way a man lays out tools before work: the paymaster's ledger, its leather swollen with canyon damp; the brass seal on its chain, green at the edges; and beside them, small and bright against the wood, a silver concho on a strip of torn hatband leather.
"Where did you get these?" Gray asked.
"Box Canyon," Caleb said. "Dug up from under a cairn of three flat stones at the canyon mouth, two nights ago, by lantern light, while Mr. Sutter's friends were on their way to move them. The cash is still in the ground out there, Lieutenant, in the strongbox, where we left it. We took the book and the seal because paper's what proves a thing. Money just spends."
Gray opened the ledger with the care of a man handling a loaded weapon. He turned pages. Caleb watched the young officer's face change as he read — pay entries, names, amounts, the paymaster's cramped official hand, stopping three days back like a sentence cut in half.
"This book was reported stolen," Gray said slowly. "Stolen by the Kahlin, who were said to have taken the chest for its money."
"And here it sits on my table," Caleb said, "with its seal, dug out of a hole dug by white hands. If the Kahlin had taken that chest, Lieutenant, they'd have had to bury their own plunder in the canyon where they supposedly stole it, and leave it there guarded by nobody, and then ride sixty miles to sit on my ridge and wait for you. That's a strange kind of thieving."
"This — " Gray picked up the concho, turned it in the light. "What is this?"
"That," said a voice from the porch, thin but clear, "is his."
Asto had raised himself on one elbow, and the effort had put a sheen of sweat across his face. Sihas made a sound and moved toward him, but he shook his head once, and she stopped, and let him spend what strength he had.
"Tell it," Caleb said quietly. "All of it, the way you told me."
So Asto told it, in the yard, with the column listening and the ridge listening and the windmill turning its slow circles over them all. He told of scouting above Box Canyon; of the escort coming down the canyon road behind its covered wagon; of the shooting that began not from the rocks where an ambush should be, but from the escort's own rear, close and knowing; of white men doing the work, unhurried, like butchers. Of one man standing over the fallen paymaster giving orders in a voice Asto knew — the voice of the guide who had ridden that road with the escort and knew its hour. Of the silver conchos shining on the man's hatband in the sun. Of running, and the bullet that grazed his ribs, and the knife that opened his forearm when he fell among them, and tearing the hatband loose as he tore himself free — and how it must have caught and hung in the brush by the cairn where they buried the chest, under three flat stones, to dig up again when the Army had finished chasing Indians.
"You are describing murder by the escort's own guide," Gray said. His voice was very even. "That is an extraordinary accusation."
"Bring the white one," Asto said, and closed his eyes. "He dug the hole. Ask his hands."
They brought Delgado out of the barn with his hat crushed in his fingers, blinking in the sun like a man dug up himself. He saw Sutter first — everyone saw him see Sutter — and the color went out of his face so completely that Gray stepped half a pace sideways, half expecting him to fall.
"State your name," Gray said.
"Rufe Delgado." It came out a whisper. He cleared his throat and tried again. "Rufe Delgado, sir. I was — I drove team for Mr. Sutter's freight outfit, sir."
"Did you bury a strongbox in Box Canyon?"
Delgado's eyes went to Sutter and stuck there, the way a rabbit's eyes stick on the dog. Sutter smiled at him — that warm, encouraging smile — and Delgado made a small sound in his throat.
"Son," Caleb said, not unkindly. "He can't help you from where he's standing, and he can't reach you neither. The lieutenant's the law here. Tell the law."
Delgado told it. All of it. The cairn, the three flat stones, the orders to move the box on the second night, the names of the men, the paymaster's route sold by the man who'd guided it. His voice shook and steadied and shook again, but he did not stop, and when he finished he stood with his ruined hat in both hands and wept without any shame at all, the way a man weeps when a great weight shifts off a bone that has carried it too long.