Levi had meant to ride home after the service. Instead he found himself on the hotel porch with a cup of the landlady's coffee going cold in his hand, watching the empty street and telling himself he was waiting to speak a word to Beckett — though Beckett had gone home to his Christmas dinner an hour since, and they both would have known it. The truth, which he did not bother dressing up, was that he had put a journal and a forged name in his coat pocket that morning, and a man with a thing like that in his pocket does not ride away from the town where the thing will be decided. He stays, and he watches the road it will come by.
The stage came in a little before noon, six horses steaming like a small weather of their own, the driver standing in the box and cursing the drifts in a voice worn cheerful with practice. The town that had nothing better to do on Christmas Day — which was most of the town — drifted toward the hotel to see who the storm had delivered.
A drummer got down first, with his sample cases and his grievances. Then a woman wrapped to the eyes in somebody else's coat. Then a tall man in a black coat cut the Kansas way, with a carpetbag in one hand and a storekeeper's soft white hands, who stood a moment in the street snow getting his land legs and looking up and down San Tomas as if it owed him money.
Levi knew him before the name was spoken. He was forty-five, weathered and firmed with years, but the brow was Sam's brow and the jaw was Sam's jaw set harder, and the eyes that went over the hotel front were the eyes that had looked at Levi across a campfire on the Fort Bayard road and laughed at his cooking. It was like being visited, briefly and without malice, by the dead.
"Elias Little," the man said at the desk, through the open door, in a voice meant to be heard. "Of Kansas. I keep a store there." And then, lower, to the clerk's polite inquiry, in the tone of a man who has rehearsed a sentence on a long ride: "I've come about my brother's property. Samuel Little. I'm told there's a woman on the place who has no right to it, and papers that want sorting before strangers sort them for us. I've had letters — full particulars — from a Mr. Draper of the Land and Water Company."
The clerk's eyes went, involuntarily, to the porch. Levi studied his coffee.
"I am told the law clears the place tomorrow," Elias said. "The day after Christmas. I mean to be on it when it does, to take possession for the family."
Levi set his cup down on the porch rail. "You'll find the place different from the letters, Mr. Little," he said.
Elias turned. "And you are?"
"Levi Hartman. I farm across the creek from it." He paused, because the rest of it was not a thing to throw at a man in a doorway, and then he said it anyway, plain. "I helped dig your brother's grave in July."
The man's face worked once, hard, and was mastered. "Then I thank you for the kindness, Mr. Hartman," he said stiffly. "It doesn't change the right of it."
"No," Levi said. "It doesn't change anything. I expect you'll see the place for yourself."
Whatever Elias might have answered was taken out of both their hands by Mrs. Park, who came up the hotel steps at that moment marshaling her schoolchildren for the town's old custom — a carol for the stage passengers, to earn the drummer's pennies and the landlady's cider. She set them in a row on the porch with the smallest in front, and the smallest in front, in a clean white pinafore, with her mother's braid and her father's eyes, was Lucy Little.
They sang. Lucy's voice carried over the older children's the way it had carried in the mission, clear and certain, and Elias Little turned from the desk with his room key in his hand and stopped the way a man stops who has walked into a fence in the dark. When the song ended, Mrs. Park, who missed nothing and feared less, presented the children to the travelers by name, as custom demanded — and reached the front of the row.
"Lucy Little," she said.
The child looked up at the tall stranger with her father's face and delivered, politely, the piece she had prepared for guests: "I'm Lucy Little. My papa was Samuel Little. He's in heaven now. But I keep the lantern lit in our window every night, so he can find the house."
"Samuel—" Elias got out, and no more. His carpetbag hung in his hand, forgotten. Down the steps Kaya Little came to collect her daughter, and stopped at the sight of the man on the porch — the husband's brow, the husband's jaw, standing in the snow with her husband's eyes gone wet — and the three of them stood there in the bright noon with the child between them and the whole town pretending not to watch.
Levi picked up his cold coffee and kept his peace. He had some notion of what a letter could do to a man who had believed it, arriving from a great distance with his mind already made up. He watched Kaya take her daughter's hand and walk away down the street into the glare of the snow, straight-backed as a plumb line, and he watched Elias Little still standing on the hotel steps with his bag in his hand long after they had turned the corner, looking after them like a man rereading something.
Chapter 11 — What Elias Believed
Elias Little had kept store in Kansas for nineteen years, and he believed in paper the way other men believed in weather. Paper did not lie for pleasure. Paper lied only when a man made it lie, and a man made it lie for money, and money left tracks in a ledger as plain as hoofprints in mud. It had carried him, unbloodied and solvent, through two panics and a grasshopper year.