Thorne took his horse's reins. He did not take the paper. He mounted, and the column turned in the white dust of the yard, and they rode out the way they had come, their intentions no longer hidden by the flat noon light, because the flat noon light had shown them for what they were.
Nate stood in the empty yard and watched them go. Then he opened the blue book and wrote beneath the morning's entry: Thorne came with order dated April 2. read him my April 2. he left.
He closed the book. The house was still locked. The yard was still empty. But the well stood where it had always stood, and no paper with a brass disc pressed in the margin could make it otherwise.
Chapter 14
The Surveyor's Confession
They brought Gideon Pryce to the tent at sundown, and he came the way a man comes to his own hanging: upright, because there is no other way left to walk. Two of Thorne's riders had fetched him from the survey camp west of the ridge. The marshal's deputy took charge of him at the flap, and Marshal Bell stepped inside behind him, and Father Ruiz, and Hollis Farr, and Cobb from the surveyor's office, and Nate, and Deya, who would not be left out of this no matter what Nate said about her arm.
The tent was the big canvas one Kanoa's people had raised that morning. On the plank table, covered with a clean cloth, lay the torn map, pieced with flour-sack strips, its jagged tear running down the middle like a scar. Beside it lay the clean copy, the one the company had filed, whole and innocent and lying.
Pryce stood before the table and looked at the two maps, and the color went out of his face the way water drains from a tub.
"Mr. Pryce," Marshal Bell said, his voice level. "You surveyed the Coldwater section. That is your hand on the clean copy."
Pryce said nothing. His hands hung shaking at his sides, and the shaking was the only honest thing in the tent.
"Your signature is on the certification," Cobb said quietly. "I know your hand, Gideon. We trained together."
"Mine," Pryce said. "The signature is mine."
"And the alterations?" Bell said. "The aquifer's course, drawn over and redrawn. The hatching that is not yours. Speak to it, Mr. Pryce."
Pryce looked at the torn map. The true course of the aquifer ran through it in the old ink, the ink he had laid down when he was still a man who measured land for the love of true lines.
"I altered it," he said.
The tent went still.
"Say the rest," Father Ruiz said, gently. "The clean copy did not alter itself, and the certification did not sign itself, and you did not do it for money, because a man who does it for money does not shake the way you are shaking."
Pryce's face broke, the way a dam breaks, all at once.
"Thorne," he said. "He sent Wray to my camp in March. They said the map had to show the aquifer running west, under company land, not under Gentry's. I refused. Wray came back with two men and a paper I was to sign, and I refused again, and thenโ" He stopped, and his hands went to his face. "My wife. My daughters. They knew where my family lives. Wray described the house to me. The color of the door. I signed it. I signed the backdated certification and cut the true course out of the map with my own knife, and I have not slept a whole night since."
"Backdated," Bell said. "To what date?"
"April second," Pryce said. "To match the order. Wray told me the date to write. He said the clerk would do the same with the docket."
Hollis Farr swore softly. Cobb sat down on a camp stool as though his legs had given out.
Father Ruiz stepped to the table and laid the torn map beside the clean one, side by side, so all of them could see what Pryce's hands had done and what his hands had been made to do. The priest placed his own hand on the torn piece, the true one, and held it there a moment in silence.
"This is the land's testimony," Ruiz said. "A man can be threatened into lying. The land cannot be threatened. It says what it says, and what it says outlasts every paper ever signed in fear."
Pryce was weeping now, openly, the way a man weeps when the weight has been on him too long and finally shifts. "I will sign a statement," he said. "I will sign anything. Tell my wife I am not the man who did this willingly."
"You will have your chance to tell her yourself," Bell said. "You will sign here, before these witnesses, and then come with me to Fort Verde, where you will sign it again before a judge." He turned to Cobb. "You will attest to the maps."
Cobb nodded. He could not speak. He took out his magnifier and laid it on the cloth, and that was his attestation, for now: the instrument of his trade, set down beside the truth.