The Daughter No One Chose: An Apache Chief's Ultimatum, a Cowboy Who Would Only Marry a Willing Heart, and the House That Filled a Silent Valley With Children

Naya looked at him over the rim of the tin cup, at this man who kept asking where other men had only announced. "Ride beside me," she said. "As my witness. I will have you." And it was only a sentence about a courtroom, and it was not only that, and they rode on pretending, for a little while longer, that it was.

Chapter 21

The Interpreter's Price

Cedar Flats had dressed itself for the occasion the way a man dresses for a hanging — scrubbed, self-important, and faintly ashamed of how much it was enjoying itself. The territorial courtroom occupied the upper floor of the new brick building on Main Street, and by nine o'clock every bench was full: ranchers, merchants, miners in their one clean shirt each, Brandt's railroad men in a deliberate block near the front, and at the windows, where they had been told to stand because the benches were spoken for, Naya's people, with Chief Noche at their head in a black coat Sister Agnes had altered for him herself.

Judge Emmett Hale — no kin to any party, he announced first — opened the hearing by explaining that this was a matter of record and evidence, not sentiment. Brandt's lawyer, a Phoenix man named Corcoran with a diamond in his cravat and a voice like warm oil, rose and gave the court its story.

It was a good story. Corcoran was paid to make good stories. In his telling, the Apache of Red Willow Valley were a wandering people, picturesque and unrooted, who drifted through the valley the way weather drifts, staying a season, leaving for years, knowing no more attachment to that ground than a hawk knows to one thermal over another. The valley, he said, stood empty when Mr. Brandt's surveyors found it — empty of fences, empty of deeds, empty of any mark the law could recognize. And when the tribe's own chief, perceiving the tide of settlement, had wisely chosen to sell what little claim sentiment afforded him, why, here was his deed, his mark, his price fairly paid. Corcoran held the paper up the way a preacher holds a Bible, just long enough, and no longer.

Then Garrett Sloane took the stand, and Naya understood that Corcoran's performance had only been the overture.

Sloane had dressed down for the occasion, which was its own kind of lying — a plain coat, a workingman's boots, his hat held humbly in both hands before they swore him. He testified smoothly, pausing in the right places, looking at the judge and never once at Naya. He had, he said, carried Brandt's fair offer to the camp himself, as a friend of the tribe. The chief had deliberated. The chief had agreed. The chief had made his mark in Sloane's own presence, slowly, understanding every word, and Sloane had paid over the consideration in silver, counted twice. He described the day, the fire, the very weather of a day that had never happened, and his details were so quiet that Naya felt the room leaning toward him like grass toward light, and she hated him with a clean, cold clarity — not for the winter he had mocked her, but for this: that he had taken the summer he spent learning her people's ways and sold it as the varnish on a lie.

Then Chief Noche was called, and the court provided an interpreter.

He was a thin man from Tucson with a mustache waxed to points, introduced as Mr. Pruitt, competent in the Apache tongue, and Naya knew within three sentences that he was either incompetent past forgiving or bought past pretending. Her father spoke carefully, choosing words the way he chose footing on a night trail. He said: I made no mark. I sold no land. The valley is not mine to sell; it is held by the people, as the treaty says, for the generations unborn. The springs are our mother. We do not sell our mother.

Mr. Pruitt rendered this as: "The chief says he might have made the mark — his memory is not what it was — and if the paper says he agreed, then perhaps he agreed. He says his people are tired and might go quietly if the money is right."

A murmur moved through the benches, satisfied, the sound of an audience hearing what it came to hear. Noche looked out with the stillness of a man feeling ice give under his feet in a language he could not cross-check. He turned, searching, until he found his daughter's face, and what Naya saw in his eyes was not fear. It was a chief discovering that the ground of this contest was not the facts, but the carrying of them — and that the carrier had been purchased like a mule.

Corcoran was on his feet, proposing that the chief's gracious uncertainty be entered as assent, when Judge Hale's gavel came down — not in agreement, but in irritation at the haste of it. "We'll have the record kept clean, Mr. Corcoran," the judge said. But the translation on the record was Pruitt's, and it sat there smiling, and everyone understood that unless something changed before tomorrow, it would be the only version the law ever read.