Levi rode out before the light was good, with the snow coming down fine and dry as sifted flour and the creek ice talking under the crossing. The horse picked his way the way horses do in new snow, head low, testing. Levi rode with his brother-in-law's old sheepskin coat buttoned to the throat and his ranch journal in the saddlebag, wrapped in oilcloth against the weather — a foolish thing to carry through a storm, and he had not for one moment considered leaving it home.
San Tomas at mid-morning was chimney smoke and shuttered storefronts, the courthouse square empty but for a team standing in the snow with blankets on. The courthouse itself was sandstone, territorial, and cold in the particular way of buildings heated by one stove and a great deal of paper. The stove in the clerk's office roared. The paper won anyway.
Otto Lindqvist came out from between the deed shelves wiping ink off his fingers, thirty years old and built like a fence rail, with a pleasant, ready face and the eagerness of a man who files other people's lives in alphabetical order and sleeps sound on it.
"Mr. Hartman! Merry Christmas to you. Land business in this weather — you ranchers are a hardy breed." He was already moving toward the shelves. "What are we looking up?"
"Samuel Little's homestead," Levi said. "The whole of his paper."
Otto brought the volumes the way a good clerk brings them — fast, and in order, and open at the ribbons. And the paper was all there. Sam's entry under the homestead law, his filings, his yearly proofs, the patent in the end, signed and sealed. Taxes receipted year by year in the treasurer's column — Sam had paid in coin, mostly, in the fall, and the receipts ran unbroken to this last one, paid in October by Kaya at the treasurer's window, which Levi had not known and which he stood looking at for a moment longer than the looking required. The deed was clean. The place was Sam's and Sam's heirs', on the territory's own paper, and no instrument against it but one.
Levi found that one in the margin of the index, in a later hand and a different ink, small and neat as a mouse track:
Note — S. Little to San Tomas Land & Water Co. Filed October 1883. See Misc. Rec.
"Now this," Levi said, and put his finger under it. "Let me see the miscellaneous record. And the filing book for October."
He watched it happen — he would remember watching it happen, afterward, the way you remember the exact second a horse decides to shy. Otto's readiness did not vanish. It aimed itself, like a lamp turned, at everything else in the room.
"The miscellaneous volume is out," Otto said. "Binder in Santa Fe. We had a binding give way in the fall — you would not credit the state of it. Now the deed — if it's a certified copy of the deed you're wanting, I can have that for you inside the hour, and the patent record too, both."
"I've seen the deed. I want the filing entry for the note."
"The filing book for October—" Otto turned, took down a volume, put it back, took down another. "—is with the judge's papers, I believe. His clerk was working from it. Land disputes, you know how it is at year's end." He smiled with great helpfulness. "But there's nothing in an entry that isn't on the instrument itself, Mr. Hartman. A note, signed in June, filed regular in October. The company was in no hurry about it. A June note, filed in October — it happens every season. Harvest paper."
"I didn't say June," Levi said.
It was a small silence. The stove ticked in it.
"Well — the notice, though." Otto recovered smoothly, the way a man recovers who has rehearsed his footing. "The sheriff's notice has the date on it, don't it? Served on the widow Christmas week — everyone in the square knows the whole of it by now. You'll forgive me, Mr. Hartman, the town talks."
"The town does," Levi said.
He did not press. There was nothing to press with — a man's memory of what he had not said, and a clerk who smiled and brought him a certified copy of the deed, handsomely done, and offered him coffee from the pot on the stove, and was helpful about the roads, the weather, the judge's circuit, the price of the new ribbon for the office typewriter, everything on God's earth except the one page.
Levi copied the margin note into his pocket book, word for word, in his own slow hand, with Otto watching and not watching. Then he rolled the deed copy, put on his coat, and stood a moment in the doorway looking at the clerk's office — at the shelves running floor to ceiling, at the October-shaped hole in them that Otto had talked all the way around without once touching.
A man did not hide a page because the page was ordinary. Levi had known that since he was old enough to keep a journal. You hid the page that would hang you.
He rode out of San Tomas with the snow thickening and the courthouse windows going gold behind him, and turned the horse not toward home but toward the bank, two doors down, where an old man named Septimus Crane had been counting other people's money, and remembering how they signed for it, for thirty years.
Chapter 13 — The Cashier's Memory
The bank stood two doors from the courthouse, in a stone building with its name cut over the lintel. Inside it smelled of ink, coal oil, and old coin, and Septimus Crane stood behind his grille in a green eyeshade like a man behind the bars of a very small, very respectable jail. He was sixty-odd, dry as a church notice, and he ran the bank's memory the way Otto ran its paper — except that Crane's memory had never once been for hire.
"Mr. Hartman." Crane did not look up from his ledger until the line was ruled. Then he did. "You'll be about the Little matter. The whole square's about the Little matter. Sit down, if a cashier's stool doesn't offend a rancher's dignity."