He found Otto Lindqvist alone in the records room, feeding the stove, with the particular brightness of a man who has decided to be helpful at top volume.
"Mr. Hartman! Christmas morning, near enough — you're at the deed books again? The deed books are—"
"Not the deed books, Otto." Levi set his hat on the counter. "The Army claims file. When the Bayard detachment was cut down, the scout pay-and-muster copies came to the county. I watched a sergeant carry the volumes in myself, two summers back. I want the volume for eighty-three."
Something went through Otto's face the way wind goes through a wheat field — visible, and gone, and the field pretending afterward to be still. "The claims volumes," he said. "Yes. Yes, of course, they're — let me think where they've got to—"
They had got to a bottom shelf, behind the tax rolls, where Otto produced them with the air of a man producing something from much farther away than the bottom shelf. The volume for 1883 was bound in boards the color of weak tea: Claims — Army Scouts, Fort Bayard, 1881–83. Levi laid it on the counter and turned the pages with a horseman's patience, one leaf at a time, while the stove ticked and Otto found employment for his hands in every corner of the room.
Neat columns, in a sergeant's clerkly hand. Names, dates, rates of pay. May went by — Little, S., three days, the Tularosa road; Little, S., five days, escort to the railhead. Then June. Page forty-one ended on the eighth of June, mid-column, the ink steady. Levi turned the leaf.
Page forty-three. The twentieth of June, and the column marching on as if nothing in the world had happened between the eighth and the twentieth — nothing, except that the sergeant's numbering had stuttered, and close against the binding there was a stub of paper no wider than a thumbnail, where a leaf had been taken out with a knife, close and careful.
"The index," Levi said, without looking up. "Read me the index leaf, Otto."
"Mr. Hartman, some of these old volumes came to us damaged," Otto said, very quickly, to the room in general. "Water, mice — the roof over the old office, before my time, leaked something terrible—"
"The index, Otto."
Otto read it with his finger, because his eyes seemed to want supervision. Little, S. — pp. 39, 40, 41, 42. His voice went down the scale on the last number like a man stepping off a stair that isn't there. "Forty-two," he said. "Well. Well, the index is — the index was made at the fort, it may not reflect—"
"The leaf is gone as far as page forty-three, and the rest of June is here entire." Levi closed the volume the way a man closes the door of a room where somebody is sleeping. "Eleven days of June rode in that gap, Otto. June the ninth to the seventeenth among them. That's a sizeable hole for mice to eat. Mice with a knife."
Otto had gone the color of the stove's ash. He made a business of the inkstand, and upset it, and stood looking at the black flower blooming across a tax receipt as if it had been addressed to him personally. "I can't — Mr. Hartman, I keep these records, I don't — a man in my position can't simply—"
"I'm not asking you for anything," Levi said, and was surprised at the gentleness in his own voice, because gentleness had not been in the plan when he rode in. "I came to look at a book. I've looked." He put on his hat. "Only I'll tell you a thing for free, since it's Christmas. On the twenty-sixth, Judge Tully is going to want the clerk who filed Mr. Draper's note to stand up and swear to his records — all of them, Otto, the whole shelf — and a missing page has a way of being found at the worst possible hour, generally by the man who hid it. I'd not want that hour to be in a courtroom, with the whole valley watching. That's all I came to say."
He rode home through the early dark with the lamps coming on behind him in San Tomas, and the snow smoking off the road under a rising wind, and he was not a praying man in any regular way, but he found himself saying some of it aloud anyway, to the horse, to the cold, to whatever kept the accounts: Let him carry it one more day. Just let him carry it till the twenty-sixth, and set it down himself.
He had gone hunting paper, he thought, and found a man instead. It remained to be seen whether the man would stand up or fall down — but Levi had seen Otto Lindqvist's face, and he had been reading men's faces across campfires for twenty years, and he did not think the falling down was finished yet.
Chapter 20 — The Night Before the Hearing
Levi crossed the creek at dusk with a flour sack over his saddle horn — coffee, two oranges in his coat pockets, and, wrapped in a feed cloth, the thing he had finished that afternoon at his own hearth. The snow had stopped. The sky over the valley had the deep, rinsed blue of Christmas night, and the Little house stood in it with every window lit and Lucy’s lantern already burning on the sill, small and steady, so her papa could find the house.
Kaya took the coffee and the oranges from him on the porch with the gravity of a woman receiving tribute, and Lucy took the oranges the way a general takes a surrendered city. "One tonight," Kaya said, "and one for the pageant," and Lucy, who had plainly intended to eat both before supper, accepted the ruling with the dignity of the outvoted.