"He was going to hang me or bury me," Sorrell said to no one, the pistol drooping. "One or the other. It was in his voice." He let Caleb take the gun from him without resistance. "Now I'm yours, Wren. For whatever that's worth to a court."
Caleb eased Voss down against the corral post and pressed his own folded neckerchief hard against the wound, feeling the man's blood warm through the cloth. "It may be worth a great deal," he said. "If you live to spend it, Mr. Voss. And if you talk."
Chapter 22
: The Marshal and the Railroad
They bound Voss's wound with torn sheeting and sent the fastest company rider — disarmed, and glad enough to go — into Paloma for the doctor, with a note in Caleb's hand saying the man's master had been shot by his own right hand and was in no condition to be moved. Then Caleb did the thing he had been putting off since the night of the fire. He saddled Flint, put the stolen files in his saddlebags with Samuel's map on top of them, and rode for the town he no longer trusted, to lay the whole of it before the only law that did not answer to Harlan Voss.
Marshal Wade Callahan had come into Paloma two days earlier on railroad business no one could quite name, and taken the room above the hardware store. He was forty-seven, broad and slow-moving, with a mustache gone iron-gray and eyes that missed nothing they passed over. He listened to Caleb's account without interrupting, turning the pages Tess had tied in twine, and when he reached Voss's order of September 1883 his hand went still on the paper.
"Read that date again to me, son," he said.
"September fourth," Caleb said. "My father died on the eighteenth. A beam fell in our barn that nobody could explain."
Callahan set the letter down as carefully as if it were loaded. "In my experience, Mr. Wren, beams are explained."
He worked through the rest with a surveyor's patience — the lease book, the transfer papers, the bribery file with its neat columns of names and sums. When he came to the lease itself he held it to the window light, then laid it beside a territorial form from his own case, and called Caleb over. "Look here. This is the company's vaunted title to your valley." His thick finger traced the printed heading. "This form went out of use in '79, when the territory changed the seal and the wording of the attestation. Every genuine lease since then is drawn on the new paper. Whoever forged this used old stock — likely all he could steal — and signed it with a clerk's name spelled wrong besides." He sat back. "In a courtroom, this paper confesses itself."
Caleb felt something loosen in his chest that had been knotted since the corral gate stood open at dawn, weeks and a lifetime ago. "Then the spring—"
"The spring will need its ruling, and Judge Whitcomb will have words about being shot at in the course of his duties that I expect he'll enjoy delivering." Callahan stacked the files square. "But a forgery this clumsy only walks into a valley when the men behind it believe no one will ever look close. They were counting on the railroad to make looking pointless. Money that big buries questions." He stood and reached for his hat. "So before we arrest anybody, we are going to visit Mr. Bellamy. Forgers fear courts. Companies fear losing a railroad."
Arthur Bellamy received them in the hotel's back parlor, his survey maps rolled in a leather tube, his transit case by the door. He had the harried look of a man whose employers wanted a route decided by Friday. Callahan laid the lease before him without preamble and let him find the old seal himself. Bellamy found it in under a minute. Surveyors and forgers both live by paper, and he went pale and then angry, the anger of a craftsman shown a counterfeit of his own trade.
"Do you understand what this means?" he said. "My party has spent six weeks sounding that valley because Voss's people assured the Continental Pacific the title was clean and the water secured. If we had laid track on stolen land— on murdered man's land—" He broke off and looked at Caleb. "Your father drew the '68 survey, Mr. Wren. I studied his maps in the territorial archive when I was a young chainman. Beautiful work. Honest work. There was never a line of his I couldn't trust."
"The line runs through Ojo Azul because the water's there, isn't it?" Caleb said.
"It was the leading route," Bellamy said. "Was. The company does not build on forgery and it does not water its engines at a spring men were killed for. My report goes north, gentlemen — the northern pass costs more and asks nothing of anyone's conscience." He rolled the lease and handed it back to the marshal like something unclean. "I'll put that in writing for your judge, with my chief's seal, before my train leaves. The Continental Pacific wants no part of stolen land."