"Tell the court about June of this year."
"The fort wanted two scouts who knew the Bayard road. Sam and I rode out on the ninth of June and came home on the seventeenth. We slept in the same camp every night of it — bedrolls ten feet apart, because Sam talked in his sleep and I am a light sleeper and armed." "On the twelfth of June we were camped on the Mimbres, forty miles from this room. Sam Little did not leave that ride. There was no day he was not beside me by daylight and across the fire from me by dark. He signed nothing in San Tomas on the twelfth of June, because he was not in San Tomas. A man cannot sign in two places, and Sam was with me."
"You keep a journal, Mr. Hartman."
"Ranch journal. Weather, stock, debts, who owes me a colt." He took the worn book from the clerk's hands and opened it to a page marked with a strip of rawhide. "Eighteen eighty-one. Sam bought a colt off me that spring and signed the page for it, because Sam said a debt between friends wants ink so it never wants words." He held the book out. "That is Sam's signature, written in my house, two years before this company ever heard his name."
The judge took the journal, and then he took the note, and he laid them side by side on the desk under the lamp, and the room watched an old man read two pieces of paper.
"Mr. Hartman. Direct the court's eye."
"Look at the L, Your Honor." Levi leaned forward, and his voice had something in it that was not dry. "Sam made his L like a rope settling — it loops low, down below the line, every time. It is in the journal. Now look at the note." The judge turned the sheet. "That L stands up straight like a fence post. It does not loop. It does not settle. That is not a signature, Your Honor. That is a drawing of one — made by a man who had seen Sam's name and not his hand."
Judge Tully set the two papers together. Then he passed them to the sheriff, and Beckett carried them along the front bench and back, so the room could see what the judge had seen. Men who had signed their names all their lives leaned over the two L's, and the murmur that ran down the benches this time Beckett did not trouble to stop.
Draper's counsel rose for the cross-examination with his smile rebuilt.
"Mr. Hartman. This journal is your own book. Kept in your own house. An entry could be written into it at any time — last week, say — could it not?"
"It could," Levi said. "It was not."
"So the court has your word for the journal, your word for the ride — "
"You have the fort's roster for the ride, if anybody in this county can find the page of it," Levi said, and at the clerk's desk Otto Lindqvist's head came up sharply. "And as for my word — I have lived on that creek twelve years, counsel. Ask the room what it is worth. You have not been here a week."
The lawyer let that pass and stepped to the thing he had been saving.
"Mr. Hartman, isn't it true that your interest in this matter is not neighborly at all? That you take your Christmas supper at the widow's table. That you have posted your own ranch as bond in this cause. That you are — the valley's word, not mine — sweet on Mrs. Little, and that this testimony is a lover's errand dressed as a neighbor's?"
The room went very still. At the right-hand bench Kaya did not move, but her mother's hand closed slowly over hers.
Levi looked at the lawyer for a moment, and then he looked at the judge, and when he spoke his voice was exactly as plain as it had been about the weather and the colts.
"Sam Little was my friend. I helped dig his grave in July, and I will not have his name traced like a stencil and his wife and his girl put out of their house on a lie. I posted my ranch because the paper is false, and I would have posted it for any family on this creek, and every man in this room knows it, including the one asking. As to the rest of it — " a pause, and something in the room held its breath with him — "Mrs. Little keeps a good house and sets a good table, and she has never once asked me for a thing. If the court wants to know whether I think well of her, I do. So does every man jack in this valley who has ever drunk from her spring or eaten at her table. That is not a lover's errand, counsel. That is a census."
Nobody laughed. But something in the benches settled and eased, the way a house settles after wind, and the townswomen sat straighter, as if a man answering clean had straightened their own backs. Draper's counsel looked down at his books, and found he had no more questions.
"You may step down, Mr. Hartman," Judge Tully said. His eyes moved to the clerk's desk, where Otto Lindqvist sat with his papers arranged in rows too straight to be innocent. "The court will now hear from the county clerk, who filed this instrument. Mr. Lindqvist — come and authenticate your filing."
Chapter 24 — The Clerk Breaks
Otto Lindqvist came to the witness chair carrying his filing book against his chest like a shield, and said "I do" to the oath in a voice that belonged to a younger man.
He was thirty-two and had been a careful man — careful with columns, careful with seals, careful never to be the most interesting person in any room.