Levi said what he wanted. Sam Little's account. Sam Little's hand.
"Account closed in August," Crane said. "Small balance. Paid over to the widow through the sheriff's office, proper and receipted — I saw to it myself, and a neater set of books that woman keeps than half the merchants in the territory." He took a key from his waistcoat, unlocked a drawer, and drew out a card, thick stock, ruled, with a signature across the middle. "Every depositor signs a card. Samuel Little signed this one in seventy-six, when he put his army money in, and again in seventy-nine when we changed the cards." He turned it so Levi could read it. "Look at the L, Mr. Hartman."
Levi looked. He had looked at the true hand that morning in his own journal and he looked at it now in the bank's drawer, and it was the same hand in both places — Sam's big, leaning signature, the L gone down low and looping under like a rope dropped in a loop at a horse's feet, written by a man in no hurry.
"You've seen the other one," Crane said. It was not a question.
Levi took the copy of Draper's note out of his coat and laid it on the counter, and Crane put on his spectacles and bent over it a long time, gone still like a man reading figures that refuse to sum. At last he took the spectacles off and polished them, which was his way of buying a moment to be angry in private.
"That L stands up like it's saluting," he said. "Sam Little's L lay down low, like a tired dog. I have watched that man sign his name on my counter going on eight years, Mr. Hartman, and I will tell you what else I have watched. Samuel Little read a paper aloud before he signed it. Every paper. Every time. Read it aloud, like a schoolboy at his lesson, moving his lips. Once — it was the winter of the big beef prices — he read an entire bill of sale for forty head aloud in this lobby, beginning to end, while a line of men waited to the door, and when the seller twitched, Sam looked up over the page and said, A man should hear his own name before he lends it to a piece of paper." Crane put the note copy down and slid it back across the counter with two fingers, the way a man returns a dish he will not eat from. "That man did not sign a note in secret and die with it unmentioned. It is not in the character of the hand."
"The date on it is the twelfth of June," Levi said.
"Yes." Crane's mouth tightened. "That troubles me too, and I will tell you why. Samuel Little did no business in this bank in June until the last week of it. Then he came in with dust to his knees and his scout pay in a government envelope, and he deposited it, and he bought a hair ribbon at the mercantile for his little girl — red, I saw it in his hand at the counter — and he was a man trail-worn to the bone, Mr. Hartman. Where he was on the twelfth of June I cannot swear. But he was not at mine, and he was not at any desk in this town that my clerks saw, and if he had signed a note for the Land and Water Company in June, he would have read it aloud in their office first — and that office talks, Mr. Hartman. This town would have known by the fifteenth."
He closed the drawer on Sam's signature card and turned the key.
"If a judge asks me what I remember," he said, "I will say exactly this, and I will bring the card. I am too old to be bullied off my own memory by a company with a brass plate. Now — you'll want to be home before this snow makes up its mind."
Levi rode home through the early dark with the storm shouldering in from the north, and at his own table, by lamplight, he opened the ranch journal to the summer just past and read his own pencil, gone faint.
June 9. Rode out with S. Little on the fort road. Hot. His gray in good flesh.
June 12. Wind all day out of the west. Sam's gray cast a shoe at the arroyo and we shod him with a mule shoe and laughed about it till dark.
June 17. Home. Sam stayed to supper and Mary —
He stopped there. The name still did that, three years on, in his own handwriting. He sat with the journal open and the lamp smoking a little, and did the arithmetic he had been doing since the night he laid two signatures side by side.
A journal was a neighbor's paper. It would be believed or not, as men chose. But somewhere there was another paper — an officer's paper, a roster at the fort — that said the same thing his pencil said, and a court would have to swallow that one whole. He would have to find it, and find who had buried it, before the twenty-sixth.
Levi closed the book and blew out the lamp, and in the dark he could hear the wind trying the corners of the house like something looking for a way in.
Chapter 14 — The Fence Cut
It woke him out of the first true sleep he'd had in three nights — not a sound, exactly, but Diego's voice and lantern at the door, and behind it the bawling of cattle where no cattle should be at that hour, out on the creek road.
"Patrón. Cattle moving. Not ours." Diego had his coat over his nightshirt. "They come down from the Little place. Something has broke over there."