Flint had no answer that fit in the yard, and Erik saw him know it.
"That man's word," Flint said, and now he did look at Kramer, with open contempt, as if contempt were a currency that still spent. "A rustler. A confessed horse thief."
"A foreman," said Kramer, from the stool, almost gently. "Your foreman. Ask Sikes, when you find him, who held the running iron. Oh — that's right." He smiled without any pleasure in it. "Sikes run off. Wonder why he'd run, if all this is my invention."
Chapter 23 — The Arrest
Alcott made the arrests the way he had begun to do everything since the day at the corral brands: slowly, aloud, and where everyone could hear him.
"Sikes was taken an hour ago," he told the yard, "at the livery, saddling a horse that is not his, with a story that fits nothing that has happened since Tuesday." Two militia men brought him in at that — Sikes, dusty from his run and his capture, his face working with the effort of finding a story that would still stand up. When he saw Kramer on the stool and Flint standing with his deeds, whatever story he had been building fell down inside him, and Erik saw it fall. "Obadiah Flint," Alcott said. "Dutch Kramer has named you, in the hearing of forty men, as the man who paid for the taking of the Red Willow herd and the planting of stolen horses in the band's camp to make raiders of them. You will answer it in the territorial court. You are under arrest for rustling by proxy and for inciting to violence, and you, Sikes, with him."
"On the word of—" Flint began.
"On the word of a captured foreman, a captured subordinate, a letter from the United States agent, and a herd of horses standing in Erik Halvorsen's corral wearing your scheme on their hips in fresh iron," Alcott said. "It is enough for an arrest, Mr. Flint. It is a judge's portion to decide if it is enough for a rope or a prison. Take his arm, Thomas. Not roughly. He is a prisoner, not a side of beef."
They took his arm — not roughly, as ordered — and that, Erik thought, was the moment it finished for Flint: not the letter, not the name spoken aloud, but the hand on his sleeve in front of the town he had meant to name for himself. He had built his whole standing out of being the man other men were escorted to. Now he was the escorted. He straightened his good coat with his free hand, twice, as if the coat were a flag that must not be seen to fall, and he looked once down the yard toward the road and the bottom land beyond it, where his stakes stood in somebody else's grass with the snow coming.
"Flint City," he said, to no one, quietly, as they led him past the well. "It would have been a city."
Sikes, for his part, tried one last time to be the man the story needed. "I never run a brand in my life," he said, loud, to the yard at large, as they brought him to the wagon. "Ask anybody. I was hired to ride herd, that's all, herd and watch, I never—"
"You held the horses at the coulee mouth while Kramer worked the iron," said one of the militia men who had ridden the east mouth — a quiet farmer named Aasness, who had not spoken above a murmur in three days of crisis. "I saw your face by your own fire, close as I am now. I will say it in the court with my hand on whatever book they give me." He said it without heat, the way a man reads a fence line, and Sikes stopped talking, because there is nothing to say to a fence line.
Storekeeper Paine, who had extended Flint credit and defended him longest in town, stood at the yard's edge with his apron still on. Erik watched him look at the wagon, at the prisoner in the good coat, at the band's men standing unarmed by the fence as the truce required, and then Paine did a thing that cost him something: he turned around and walked back to town ahead of the wagon, alone, so that the whole valley would see the store had chosen its side before the court did.
"That man will feel that in his ledger," Nils said quietly.
"He will feel it in more than his ledger," Erik said. "That is what changing costs. It is still cheaper than the other thing."
Kramer was untied from the stool and bound again for the wagon, with his men — the two taken in the coulee guard camp, sullen and silent — and Erik watched Mato oversee it, making certain the knots were firm and not cruel. The band's men and the militia men worked the same ropes together without a word said about it.
"They go to the territorial court," Alcott told Gray Elk, formally, as one government to another. "The foreman's testimony will be written and a copy sent to the agency, so the band's name stands clear in the record. I will see to it myself."
"That is well," the chief said. "A man's name should stand where his deeds stand." He inclined his head, the smallest degree, toward the captain. "Your men came to my camp's edge with guns, three days past, believing a lie. Today they tie the liars with their own hands. Let the record hold that too."
"It will," Alcott said. "I'll write it myself."