---
Chapter 21
The Trial of Thorne
The courthouse in Santa Fe had been built when the territory was young, and the autumn of 1881 found it showing its age: the plaster cracked like riverbeds, the pine floor cupped from years of boots. Nate Gentry sat in the second row and tried to keep his hands still. He had ridden three days to be there, and Deya rode beside him the whole way without speaking of it, which was his kindness.
Magnus Thorne entered at nine with two lawyers, his coat brushed, his beard trimmed to a point. He was near sixty and carried it like armor. He had owned half the basin on paper, and paper was his country.
The charges were read aloud. Bribery. Fraud. The prosecution laid its case the way a man lays fence wire, line by line. First the forged court order: a document bearing a judge's signature that the judge himself, old and squinting, climbed the stand to disown. He looked at the paper a long time and said it was not his hand, and the room went quiet in a way Nate had only heard before at funerals.
Then Eben Fisk took the stand. The clerk was a small man with ink under his nails that no washing ever reached. He had confessed in a letter three weeks earlier, and now he confessed again in person, his voice thin. He had altered the maps, he said. The survey lines. At Thorne's instruction he had moved the eastern boundary of the CB&L claim twelve hundred yards to take in the stone well, and he had backdated the filings so the theft would wear the mask of age. He described the nights he did it, the lamp turned low, the ruler sliding across the vellum. He described the money, too. An envelope, every quarter. He did not look at Thorne once. Nate almost felt sorry for him. Almost.
Gideon Pryce, the surveyor, followed. He had confessed as well, and he stood straighter than Fisk, as if the truth had been a weight he was glad to set down. He walked the jury through the altered maps with a pointer, showing where the true section lines ran and where the lies had been drawn over them. A map, he said, was a promise. You broke it at the cost of everything under it.
Reese Callahan testified next, twenty-eight years old and pale, and told the court how the money had moved: from Thorne's accounts through Dawson Wray's hands to the men who were meant to look the other way. Reese's testimony was plain and steady, and when Thorne's lawyer tried to make him out a liar, Reese only answered, "I kept the receipts," and produced them, folded small as a handkerchief, from his coat.
Nate watched Thorne through it all. The man sat with his hands folded, and for a long time his face did not change. But as the afternoon wore on and the documents piled up β the forged order, the doctored maps, the clerk's ledger of bribes β something went out of him, the way air goes out of a bladder. His lawyers objected and were overruled. His lawyers whispered and he stopped listening. By the third day he sat alone in the middle of his own counsel, a man marooned on paper he had written himself.
On the fourth day the jury went out. They came back in two hours.
Guilty, on both counts. Bribery and fraud.
The judge spoke the sentence in a voice like gravel turning. Thorne stood to receive it. When it was done, the bailiff stepped forward, and Thorne reached up and took off his hat β a fine hat, beaver felt, the kind of hat that had once opened doors β and held it in both hands in front of him like a man at a graveside. He walked out of the courtroom that way, hat in his hands, his lawyers trailing behind with nowhere left to put their cleverness.
Outside, the wind was coming down off the mountains with the smell of snow in it. Deya was waiting by the horses. Nate stood on the courthouse steps and felt the strange hollowness of a thing long dreaded and now finished.
"He built it all out of paper," Nate said.
Deya nodded. "Paper burns," he said. "Stone doesn't."
They rode south the next morning. Nate carried the blue book in his saddlebag, wrapped in oilcloth, and at every camp he opened it and wrote down what had happened, in his plain hand, so the record would be straight. The trial. The forged order. The clerk's confession. The maps. He wrote that Thorne had left the courtroom with his hat in his hands. He wrote that a coyote had crossed their path that evening and stopped to look at them, unafraid, before trotting on into the sage. He did not know why he wrote that down, only that it seemed to belong with the rest.