And the herd went on through Prairie Center in the falling snow, past the land office and the church and the school, with the town standing in the street to watch it pass, and nobody reached for a rifle at all.
Chapter 21 — The Reckoning at the Well
They held the reckoning at the well, because by then the well yard was the only ground in the valley where no man's gun had any business, and every man there knew it.
Erik had set it out the way he set out everything, plainly. Two benches from the sod house. The pump trough between. Kramer in the middle of the yard on a stool Nils had carried out, his hands bound before him with a strip of harness leather, not tight enough to shame him and not loose enough to forget. Captain Alcott stood to one side with his hat in his hands. Chief Gray Elk stood to the other, straight as a fence post, his blanket folded over one arm, and behind him Mato and a dozen of the band's men, on foot, unarmed past the well as the truce required. The town's men filled the yard's edge — farmers in their Sunday coats though it was no Sunday, storekeeper Paine, the blacksmith, men who had ridden out at noon three days before to make a war and had come back herding stolen horses instead.
Erik spoke first, because it was his ground and his well and, in some way he had not chosen, his reckoning.
"The horses that were found in the band's camp," he said, "were stolen from our own farms. I have looked at their brands beside Captain Alcott. The work on them is fresh. It is running-iron work, and it is bad work — the letters blotted and the hide not healed. No man brands his own horse so, and no man of the Red Willow band would need to. Their own herd, when we found it in Hay Coulee, wore the band's brand clean and old, untouched." He looked at Alcott. "Tell them if I say it wrong."
"You say it right," Alcott said, in a voice that carried. "I have seen it with my own eyes. Any man here may look, after. The horses are in the corral. The brands speak plainer than I can."
Old Soren Pederson pushed forward then, a farmer from the creek's far side, his cap twisted in his hands. "Two of those horses are mine," he said. "Taken from my own corral the same night. I have looked at them this morning. No thief that meant to keep a horse would burn him so. That work was done to be seen — done for us to find, and to be angry at." He looked at the ground. "I rode out with the militia to be angry at the right people. They were the wrong people, and I am ashamed how near it came."
"Near is not over the line, Soren," Alcott said. "It is why we stand in a farmyard, not somewhere worse."
Gray Elk spoke then, briefly, as he did everything. "These horses were driven into my camp in the night by men who hoped we would be blamed for them. We fed them. We brought them here to be named by the men they belong to. That is the band's whole part in them. Let any man say more of it if he can."
No man did.
"The herd was in Hay Coulee," Erik went on, "on the land Mr. Flint claims, in the coulee where I cut hay in August and know the two mouths of it. It was held there by armed men, with a camp, to be worked over after the first snow. The men are taken. Their foreman sits here."
He did not point. He did not need to. Every eye in the yard went to the stool.
Kramer had the look of a man who had spent two days deciding which of his remaining roads was shortest. The scar through his left eyebrow stood white in his weathered face. He had been offered a rope by both sides — Erik had heard it in the coulee, and again on the ride in, militia men and band men saying the same words in two languages — and he knew, as every man there knew, that the only thing presently keeping the rope off him was the use he might still be.
"Kramer," Alcott said. "You were found in arms on another man's horses, in a coulee on claimed land, with a guard camp and a cook fire. The territorial court will hang a foreman for that and ask after the men who paid him when it is done. It is the custom of such courts to listen kindly to a man who names the hand that paid."
Kramer looked at the ground a long while. Then he looked up, and past Alcott, and past Erik, to where the yard ended and the town road began, as if the man he was about to name might be standing there.
"Flint," he said. "Obadiah Flint paid. Paid me and Sikes and the others, money down and money promised when the townsite was filed. The settlers' horses — that was his notion. Drive them into the Injuns' camp the same night we took the herd out, so when the militia come they'd find the proof ready-made. His words. 'Proof ready-made.'" He spat, careful, to the side. "He said there'd be no shooting that mattered. He said the band would run for the agency and leave the bottom, and the railroad would do the rest."
No one spoke. The windmill turned once, slow, and stopped, and in the quiet Erik heard the trough water settle.
"You will say it in court," Alcott said.
"I'll say it anywhere you like," Kramer said. "I've said it now." Something in his face settled, the way a man's does when a load shifts from one shoulder to the other. "He'll deny it. He's got paper. Men like him always got paper."