Outside, a horse stamped in the corral, and somewhere beyond the creek the band's ponies answered. Mila picked her beadwork up again, and her fingers, after a moment, found their slow rhythm.
"My father says the militia comes at noon," she said. "He says you should eat, Erik Halvorsen, and put your house in order. Men who must talk all afternoon should not do it hungry."
"Your father is a wise man," Erik said, and went to put the kettle on.
Chapter 12 — The Speculator
In Prairie Center the wind came down the one street with dust in its teeth, and the men gathered early outside the land office, because Obadiah Flint had let it be known he would speak.
He kept them waiting ten minutes, which was his way, and then came out with the plat rolled under his arm like a general's map. He was a broad man with a broad face and a watch chain across a vest that had never seen a plow handle, and when he unrolled the plat on the hitching rail the wind tried to take it and three men held its corners, which put their hands, all together, on Flint City.
"There it is, gentlemen." His voice carried the length of the street without shouting. "Surveyed. Staked. A depot ground the railroad's own engineer paced off in July. Two hundred lots spoken for in St. Paul on the strength of this paper alone."
"Spoken for ain't paid for, Obadiah," said the flour merchant, Sorensen, who had a mortgage's worth of sacks in his warehouse and a skeptic's habit of counting other men's money.
"Paid enough to paper a wall with, come spring," Flint said, and did not miss a beat, and two or three men laughed the way men laugh when they are deciding to be persuaded. "A town is not built out of flour, Sorensen. It is built out of believing first and counting after."
He let his palm rest flat on the Red Willow bottom, square in the middle of the drawing. "One thing stands between this town and its future, and it is not money, and it is not the railroad. It is a band of horse thieves camped on the very ground, who in one night lifted a dozen of your horses — your horses, Lunde; yours, Parr; Widow Ostrander's, that she drives her milk to town with — and shot a guard doing it, or so near a thing that their own woman run off bleeding into the dark rather than face her own people's work."
"You don't know that last, Obadiah," Pastor Lindberg said mildly. He had come in an hour since with the Halvorsen boy, Nils, and the two of them stood at the edge of the crowd with the dust settling on their shoulders. "You know horses are gone. Whose hand moved them, no man in this street yet knows."
"I know tracks when they're shod with agency iron, Pastor."
"You know what you've been told by men paid to tell it," Nils Halvorsen said, and his nineteen years rang loud in the quiet. "My brother has the woman at our farm. She was with the guard. She saw white men do the work — our kind, Captain, with a lantern and a scarred foreman — and she can name him."
A murmur went through the men like wind through standing wheat. Captain Henry Alcott, who had his militia sash already over his coat though the muster was not till noon, turned a troubled face from the boy to Flint and back.
"Your brother shelters her, Nils. That's the plain of it. A man shelters a witness, maybe he's a Christian. A man shelters her and sends a boy to talk us out of marching, maybe there's more to it."
"There's a well to it," Nils said. "Any man here thirsty in a dry year knows Erik Halvorsen's well. He's bid both sides to it — yours and the band's — to talk before anybody shoots. He says look at the horses first. Look at the brands. He's got nothing in it but his farm and his name, and you're all set to call that nothing because a man with a map tells you to."
Flint smiled, the way a man smiles at weather he has already dressed for.
"The boy talks well for a foreigner's brother. But paper talks better, and tracks talk best of all, and both say the same word: Red Willow. Gentlemen, the band means to be gone to the agency with your horses inside their herd before the snow locks this country. March at noon, recover your property, and let the law sort the rest when the law gets here. Or stay home and watch Flint City get built somewhere else — because there are other bottoms, and other towns that know a thief when the tracks point at him."
He rolled the plat with care, corner to corner, a man putting away money.
"Captain Alcott. Your muster, I believe, is at noon."
Alcott pulled his watch out, though every man there knew the hour to the minute.
"Noon," he said heavily. "We ride at noon. But I'll hear the Norwegian at his well, Flint — hear him, mind — before any man's carbine comes off a shoulder. That's my word to the pastor, and it's given."
"Then hear him quick," Flint said, pleasant as Sunday. "Daylight's dear this time of year."
He went back into the land office and shut the door, and stood a moment in the cool of it looking at nothing. Through the window he could see the survey stakes' white tops far off on the bottom land, neat as teeth. His stakes. His streets. All of it worth exactly the price of the paper until the bottom stood empty and the railroad's letter came — and the letter, the railroad's man had told him plainly in July, would not come to a townsite with an Indian camp on it and a scandal brewing over stolen horses.