Outside, the night had come down whole over Coyote Creek, and somewhere east, six miles off, water was running behind a stranger's gate, and a camp was counting the hours until dawn. Caleb folded his father's map along its old creases with a care that felt, in his hands, very much like loading a weapon, and slid it back into its oilcloth. "Then I ride to Paloma at first light," he said, "and I look at that ledger with my own eyes."
Chapter 5
: The Ledger in Paloma
Paloma at midday was twelve miles of dust made town: one long street of false-fronted stores, a hotel with a sagging veranda, the assay office, the bank, and at the north end the territorial land office, a low adobe building with a flag hanging limp in the heat. Caleb had ridden in slow. A man who arrives in a hurry at a government office announces what he wants before he opens his mouth, and Caleb wanted this visit to look smaller than it was.
He tied Flint in the shade by the trough, brushed the road off his shirt, and put Samuel's map, still in its oilcloth, inside his coat against his ribs. He did not plan to show it. Not yet. A true paper shown too early to the wrong eyes has a way of suffering accidents.
The clerk was a man Caleb knew by sight: Hollis by name, thin as a ledger page himself, with ink ground deep into the sides of his fingers. He looked up as Caleb entered, and Caleb watched recognition arrive, and behind it, quick as a curtain, something else β a readiness, as if the clerk's morning had included a description of a young rancher from Coyote Creek who might come asking.
"Mr. Wren," Hollis said. "Sad business, your father's β well. Some time back now. What can the office do for you?"
"Asking after a survey," Caleb said easily. "My father's survey. San Rey Valley, 1868. I wanted to check its entry in the territorial ledger, for our ranch papers." It was true in every particular except the largest one, which he kept folded inside his coat.
"1868," Hollis repeated. "That's early work. Early work was all recopied when the new ledgers were made up β ten, twelve years since. Consolidated. A great labor." He did not, Caleb noticed, rise to perform any of it. His hands stayed folded on his desk. "If it was surveyed proper, it'll be in the valley volume. I can look in time. Leave the request wrote down, and come back the following Monday. These searches take time, Mr. Wren. Accuracy can't be hurried."
"I've ridden twelve miles, Mr. Hollis. I'd be obliged if accuracy could be attempted while I stand here. I'll turn the pages myself, if your time's dear."
The clerk's smile thinned. "The ledgers don't leave the desk, and the public doesn't handle them. Regulations." He rose with reluctance in every joint, and took down a great bound volume β NEW TERRITORIAL LEDGER lettered on its spine β and laid it open with the ceremony of a man laying out a corpse. He turned pages. His finger traveled columns of fine script, names and townships and water notations, and stopped, and traveled on, in a performance Caleb might have believed in a worse light.
"Nothing," Hollis said at last, and closed the book with a soft, final sound. "No entry for any Samuel Wren survey of San Rey Valley. No common grazing designation. No water notation at all for the spring they call Ojo Azul. The valley, for this office's purposes, stands open to claim and lease under the new filings. And a lease has been filed. A proper lease, duly entered. By the Voss Consolidated Water and Land Company." He said it with the faintest emphasis on proper, and let the emphasis do its work.
Caleb stood with his hat in his hands, feeling his father's map warm against his ribs, true and unentered and, in this room, invisible. "A man could almost think the copying was done by someone who knew which pages to lose," he said mildly.
"A man could think a deal of things," Hollis said, "and prove none of them in this office. Good day, Mr. Wren. Mind the step going out. It's wore uneven."
Outside, the street's glare came down like a hand. Caleb untied Flint and stood at the trough, letting the gelding drink and his own temper cool. The lease was entered. The survey was not. Between those two facts lay seventeen years and one blank line in a record block, and somewhere in those years his father had died under a barn beam that fell, the coroner said, by accident.
He was leading Flint toward the hotel stable when a stranger's remark caught him β not addressed to Caleb at all, which was why it stayed. Two travelers stood on the hotel veranda, one pointing east toward the valley road. " β saw their rods and chains right across the valley floor yesterday," the man was saying. "Railroad surveyors. Continental Pacific, by the flag on their wagon. If that line comes through San Rey, friend, every acre down there turns to gold by Christmas."