"In December I carried his gold down here. Five hundred, to buy her gone. She refused it in front of me. In January I held the horses in the willows while Rhee cut Mr. Crowe's fence and cut his mare. I didn't hold the knife. I want that in it too, and that it doesn't matter the way I wanted it to matter. I took my pay every Saturday since, and it's been getting heavier, and this morning I rode down here with it and I find I can't carry it into this yard. So. Whatever the court does with me is the court's. I'm done lying for wages."
"Tobin," Tully said, into the silence. "You've heard the man."
Rhee had stopped weeping. He stood with his rifle forgotten in his hands, a weak man watching his residence burn down around the story he'd lived in all winter, and what came out of him at last was the truth arriving the way it does in such men β sideways, and blaming the weather. "He said it'd never go this far. He said the sheriff'd fold or she'd run. I never cut nobody. Ward said scare them, just scare them, it was supposed to stay scaring themβ"
"And the fence in November?" Tully asked quietly. "The post? Who tied the woman to Crowe's fence, Tobin? Because that's the one part nobody in this yard has confessed to yet."
Rhee's face went the color of his own shirt. He looked at Calloway. Calloway, cradling his bandaged hand, looked back at him with an expression that promised, very clearly, everything.
"That was before the complaint," Rhee whispered. "We found her on the north road with the branded horses raising hell, and Ward said leave her where her friend the blacksmith'd find her, teach them both the neighborhood. I held the mare. Ward did the knots. Ward's good atβ" He stopped. "He did the knots himself."
Sela made no sound. But Eli, beside her, felt the whole winter tilt on its axis β the mystery of the fifth post, closed at last in the ugliest possible hand β and he put his hand, very lightly, on the small of her back, not to hold her up, because she did not need holding, but because his own hand needed somewhere honest to be.
"I'm arresting you," Tully said, "on the word of twenty witnesses, a confession, a wounded horse, a cut fence, and a pistol in the dirt that you pointed at a woman in front of half the valley. Brandt, the irons. Mr. Calloway β for conspiracy, false swearing, and assault. Mr. Rhee β the same, and the mare. Mr. Pellβ" the sheriff paused, and looked at the man with the hat in his hands "βMr. Pell, you are under arrest, and I will say in my report and in person to the court exactly how you came to be, and the order in which you stood up. That's all I can promise you, and it's more than most men get for the truth."
And then they were taken β Calloway to the wagon, cursing the whole road north in a voice that got smaller with every mile of it; Rhee silent now, emptied; Pell walking unbound between the deputies at his own request β and the town of San Tomas stood in Elias Crowe's yard in the bright morning and watched it happen, every face uncovered, every eye up. Delgado's old father crossed himself. Ines Aguilar sat with her hands folded like a woman at a christening. The schoolteacher, who would write the account that winter for a newspaper back east, said afterward that the remarkable thing was not the arrests. It was that nobody β not one soul in that yard β had looked at their boots.
"He did the knots himself," she said at last, to the air, to the ridge, to November. "All this time, the man who tied me was standing in my yard asking to buy me. I am glad to know it." She turned to Eli and her face was clear as creek water. "A thing you know, you can put down. Come. The mare will foal in a few weeks, and there is a fence to look at, and I find I am hungry in a way I have not been since I was fifteen. Make the coffee, Eli. The strong kind. We have earned the strong kind."
Chapter 26
The law, having been handed its morning, took its own sweet time with the rest, the way a river takes its time with a canyon β invisibly, and then all at once.