Tully took in the yard in one ledge-browed sweep: the nine men, the shotgun in the dirt, the pistol in the dirt, Calloway cradling his hand and swearing in a monotone at nobody, Rhee weeping openly, Sela and Eli standing side by side with their rifles down. He reined up and sat a moment, and when he spoke it was to the whole assembled valley.
"I rode out to Red Hollow in December on a complaint," he said, in the voice a man uses to enter things in a record, "and I did not find the woman described in it. I find this morning that the woman described in it does not exist anywhere โ but I've found a great many other things, and I mean to have them said out loud in this yard where they were done. Crowe. Begin."
So Eli laid it out, in order, the way he had on the porch โ but this time before an audience, and this time with exhibits. The fifth post, described. The rawhide, and the state of her wrists on the first morning, which half a dozen people in that crowd now turned to look at, on Sela herself, who raised them one more time โ not high, not theatrical; she simply held them out at waist height in the sunlight, the pale circles and her mother's bright band above them, and let Delgado's old father say, in a voice that carried, "My God. My God, the girl's wrists," as if he were reading it for everyone who didn't want to.
The fence, examined where it stood โ Tully himself walked Reyes down the east line and came back with the cut strand Eli had kept coiled in the forge since the January morning it was cut, the nippers' bright work still on its ends. Juniper, led out by Sela at a word, with the stitched seam on her shoulder shown to the deputies and the crowd like scripture. The brand story, told by Eli last and shortest: what Sela had seen in the arroyo โ changed brands, Apache-marked horses, riders she could name.
"That's a serious charge," Tully said.
"It is," Sela said, speaking for the first time since the sheriff's arrival, "and I will make it under oath, in a court, with my name on the paper. My full name. Which no one has asked me for until this morning, including the law." A ripple went through the crowd at that โ the good kind, the kind that precedes a change of weather. "Ask me, Sheriff."
"Sela'na," Tully said gravely, "daughter ofโ"
"Daughter of Tsohano and of Aiyana the healer, of the people your maps call Apache, at present of Red Hollow, in the territory of New Mexico." She said it like a woman entering a house by its front door, in daylight, for the record. "That is the name for the paper. All of it."
Calloway found his voice then, through the pain of his hand, and used it the way a drowning man uses a spar โ to pull himself under. "This is a performance. A squaw and a squatter and a sheriff who shops for his verdicts at the Aguilar storeโ"
"Ward," Tully said, almost gently, "you are holding a hand that Elias Crowe shot a pistol out of, in front of twenty witnesses, after you leveled it at an unarmedโ" he glanced at the carbine. "โat a woman who had not raised her weapon. I have a wagon coming behind with rope in the bed that your own men drove onto this man's land at dawn. I have a sworn complaint I believe to be false, a cut fence, a wounded horse, and a shot fired on a man's property by the complainant. Son, if this is a performance, you are the one who built the stage. Reyes. Brandt. Take Mr. Calloway's remaining weapons, and bind that hand, and we'll sort the charges in town where there's a stove."
It was then โ with the deputies moving, and the morning balanced on its hinge โ that Pell stepped forward out of the line of hired men, holding his hat, and said, in a voice that shook and then steadied: "Sheriff. Before you sort anything. There's a man here needs to confess to some of it, and it's me."
Chapter 25
Pell told it standing with his hat in his hands, to the sheriff, to the crowd, and โ though he never once looked directly at her โ to Sela, the way a man confesses to the person the debt is owed to.
"I held the horses," he said. "That's where it starts. It starts in the yard at Three Buttes, last fall, with Mr. Calloway saying a complaint wants an assault and an assault wants a mark, and Tobin Rhee laughing and showing the old branding scar on his arm. There was no attack on the north road. There was never any attack. She never cut him. She never touched him. What she did was see the riders changing brands in the arroyo, and everything since has been to make sure nobody official ever heard her say it."