The first letter from the San Tomas Land & Water Company came in September, on good stock. It regretted to inform him that his brother Samuel was dead — thrown from a horse in July, in the Arizona Territory — and that Samuel had left a promissory note unpaid, held by the company, and a woman upon his homestead to whom he had not been lawfully married. The woman was of the Sevani Apache. She was occupying the place, selling off stock, letting the improvements go to ruin. The company, the letter said, was not a hard creditor and would far rather settle with Samuel's own family than foreclose upon a widow — if the family would only assert what was plainly theirs.
Elias read it at the store counter, and what he felt first, before grief, was shame — because the letter told him nothing about his brother that he had not already half believed. Sam had been the wild one. Sam had run to the army, run to the desert, married some way never spoken of at their mother's table. The family had not heard from him in eight years. Eight years, and not one line, Elias wrote back to the company. That is my brother all over. He had let himself believe it so long it had worn smooth, like a coin in a pocket.
The second letter came in November, and it was warmer. It spoke of the family's honor. It spoke of Samuel's good name being traduced by a squatter's claim. It mentioned, almost in passing, that there was a child on the place. It said the company would make the road easy for an heir who came in person. Elias closed the store for a week and took the cars and the stage south, telling himself he was going to rescue Sam's property from a cheat — and, in the smaller hours of the night journey, that he was going at last to see where Sam had gone and why he had never come home.
Then, this morning, on the hotel steps in San Tomas, there had been the child.
She had his brother's eyes, set in a brown face, and she had asked him, straight as a surveyor's line, whether Kansas was very far, and whether her papa had ever talked of it. Elias had answered like a man talking in his sleep. He had thought about that child all day. A squatter does not teach a little girl her dead father's name the way that child said Papa — as if it were a place she visited.
Now it was evening, and the hotel dining room was loud with Christmas, and Levi Hartman sat across the table from him, having eaten almost nothing, listening.
Elias laid it out the way he would lay out a hand of cards — because he wanted, he realized, to watch another man read the letters and tell him whether the hand was honest. He told him about September, about November, about the family's version and the eight years of silence. Hartman asked very few questions, and none of them were the ones Elias had prepared for.
"Did the company write you before your brother died," Levi said, "or only after?"
"Only after. September."
"Hm." Levi said. "Did Sam ever write you of owing money?"
"Sam never wrote me at all."
"Did he write your mother?"
"Not that she ever showed me. She died in seventy-nine still looking for his hand in the mail. You knew him at the end, Hartman. Was he a man to sign a note and say nothing to a living soul about it?"
"He was a man who read a paper aloud before he signed it," Levi said. "Even a feed bill. It used to slow up the whole mercantile."
It was not an accusation. It was not even, Elias noticed, an argument. The man was declining to sell him anything, and Elias — who sold things for a living — recognized the weight of a man who will not push his goods. Liars pushed. He had watched a thousand of them across his counter.
"There's a grave," Levi said. "Up the mission slope. I helped dig it. There's a stone coming from Prescott in the spring. If you want to see it before you sign anything, I'll take you in the morning."
"If I sign anything," Elias said.
"Sam kept his papers in a tin box on his mantel," Levi said. "What's his is still in that house. Before you sign a live man's papers, storekeeper, I'd read a dead one's." He stood, and put his hat on. "You've come a long road on two letters. I'd want to know who ground the pen."
Elias sat a long while after he had gone. The dining room emptied around him. Upstairs, in his room, he took the company's letters out of his valise and read them again — this time the way a storekeeper reads paper another man has made, listening for the sell in it. The family's honor. Your brother's good name. The second letter knew him very well for a stranger's letter. It knew exactly where a Kansas storekeeper kept his pride, and it had put its thumb there.
He thought of the child on the steps. He thought of Hartman's flat refusal to call any man a forger or any woman a squatter — less diplomacy, he saw now, than a man holding a full hand and waiting for the table to fill.
The doubt went into him the way a green stick goes into a crack in winter ice — quietly, and with the whole season to work. Elias folded the letters away unsatisfied, and for the first time since September, he did not sleep the sleep of a man certain of his errand.
Chapter 12 — The County Seat