"This court rules as follows, and the clerk that this court appoints — " a dry glance at the empty clerk's desk " — will enter it this afternoon."
"First, as to the note. The instrument dated the twelfth of June, 1883, filed in October and held by the San Tomas Land and Water Company, is a forgery. It was traced by hand, backdated by design, and filed by corruption. Samuel Little did not sign it. On the twelfth of June he was forty miles from any place it could have been signed, riding scout for the United States Army beside Levi Hartman, whose journal, written two years before any of this, bears the dead man's true signature, and the comparison condemns the note out of its own ink. The note is void from its beginning. The company takes nothing by it: no money, no land, no leverage, no spring."
A sound went along the benches, and the gavel did not fall. Tully let it pass the way you let weather pass.
"Second, as to the eviction. The notice served on the twenty-third of December was founded upon the forged note and upon nothing else. It is void with it. There will be no removal, no possession, no sale. The file is closed, and the sheriff will see the notice struck from the record, so that no clerk of the future may resurrect it against this family."
"Third, as to the marriage." He took up, for the first time, the great register that Father Anselmo had carried in out of the snow, and laid his palm flat upon its cover. "It has been suggested that Kaya Little was not lawfully married to Samuel Little, and the suggestion has been used as a second key to the same door the forged note was cut for. The court has examined the mission register of this valley: the marriage of Samuel Little and Kaya of the Sevani, solemnized in 1875, recorded in the hand of the priest who performed it, with witnesses named. That is the law's own paper, eight years old and unimpeached. The marriage was lawful. It was lawful when it was made and it is lawful today, and this court will not hear it called otherwise in any filing. Mrs. Little is Samuel Little's widow in the eyes of this Territory in the same full measure she is in the eyes of her own people and her God."
"Fourth, as to the land." Tully's voice, which had been level as a plumb line, did the closest thing to softening it had done all day. "The homestead of Samuel Little — one hundred and sixty acres, the house, and the spring upon it — is confirmed to Kaya Little, his widow, and to Lucy Little, his daughter, in fee, free of any claim by the San Tomas Land and Water Company, and free of any claim advanced on behalf of any other person. What a man built with his hands and a woman kept with hers, this court will not unbuild with a traced name."
"Fifth, as to Cornelius Draper." Now the room was absolutely still, and Draper, at his table, had gone a color that his counsel's whispering did nothing to improve. "The evidence before this court shows a forgery ordered, paid for, and used; a public record stolen and concealed; and a fraud practiced upon this county, upon this court, and upon a widow and child, to take a dead man's spring. Mr. Draper, you are bound over to answer to the next grand jury of this Territory on charges of fraud, forgery by procurement, and conspiracy to defraud. The sheriff will take your recognizance in a sum this court will set, and you will not leave this Territory until the grand jury has done with you. As for Mr. Lindqvist — the grand jury will hear him too. This court notes, for that record, that in the end the truth came out of the mouth of the man who had buried it, and came out standing up. It will be remembered in the right place."
He closed the register carefully, as a man closes a door he respects, and set both hands upon it.
"This emergency session stands adjourned." His eyes traveled once over the benches — the townswomen leaning toward each other, Diego Fuentes grinning openly into his beard, Elias Little at the back with his hat still against his chest and something in his face resolving itself into peace — and came to rest on the right-hand bench, where Lucy had climbed half into her mother's lap, and Nashona sat with her eyes bright and her chin high. "It is the day after Christmas, and this court is mindful of the season. Go home. Those among you who have a home to go to — and thanks to a signature a man made in a friend's kitchen two years ago, everyone in this room does — go home and keep it kindly."
Beckett stepped to Draper's table, unhurried, and the whole room understood that the man with the black portfolio would walk out of this courthouse in the sheriff's company and not in his own.
Kaya stood. She did not look at Draper. She took her daughter's hand in one of hers and her mother's arm in the other, and she walked up the aisle with her head up and the snow light from the high windows falling across all three of them, and the benches, as she passed, did a thing no one had planned and no one afterward could say who began: the people of San Tomas stood up for her, row by row, the way you stand when something enters a room that deserves it, until Kaya Little walked out of the courtroom into the white day between two walls of her standing valley, and the door swung wide, and stayed open.
Chapter 26 — What It Cost