Chapter 12
: What Micah Knew
They worked over the slip until the lamp burned low and Saba went to sleep. There remained Jonas, who read ground as other men read print; Willa, who knew every fold of the valley; and Nahlin, missing nothing.
Jonas copied the bearings in his own steady hand, for Micah's figures crowded one another. "He paced from a fixed point," he said. "Every line starts from the same place β a man does that when he means another man to come after him. This mark, drawn three times: two willows."
"His mark for the lockets," Willa said. "He saw mine that night, and yours in Prescott years before. And he never mentioned yours, Jonas."
The fixed point was no mystery: the old shrine spring on the valley's eastern wall. From there the bearings ran north by west, along the cliff foot, then up, doubling back as a man follows not a road but a seam.
Willa stood in the doorway. "The cliff inside our own valley," she said. "Not Harrow's ground. Not the territory's, by any paper filed in Prescott. Our ground. He has been digging toward us under a claim describing a hill that does not exist."
"That is his whole method," Nahlin said. "Ezekiel Harrow files for what is not there, digs toward what is, and counts on distance and fear to keep the two from being compared." His voice was even; Jonas knew the man's anger by its quietness. "Your brother was the first who would not be bought."
"He rode here to warn us there was a bought man in this camp," Willa said. "A voice among us carries word out. He would not say whose, because he did not know β only that word of his finding reached Prescott faster than his horse could carry it. Someone here has been selling us for silver."
"No one in this room," Nahlin said.
"No. Which is why what we plan here stays in this room, and the slip goes back behind my mother's face. A bought man cannot sell what he cannot overhear."
They returned to the paper. Among the names stood one neither surveyor nor land clerk: T. Renner, with no sum beside it, but a phrase in Micah's smallest hand: keeps copies of everything. Keeps them against his own hanging.
"Tobias Renner," Nahlin said. "Clerk and bookkeeper to Harrow Consolidated for eleven years. He wrote the contracts and kept the ledgers. A man who writes a crooked thing for another, year upon year, learns to keep a true copy for himself. It is not conscience. It is ballast."
"Micah went to him before he came to us," Willa said. "Renner would not give him the mining contract itself; he was afraid. But the copy existed, he said. If a court ever asked in the right way, or a man came who could keep him alive past the asking, he would produce it."
"A contract between Harrow and whom?" Jonas asked.
"Between Harrow Consolidated and the territory," Nahlin said, "granting the right to work the lode in his filing: the false hill, the empty ground. If the contract names the false place and the workings run to the true one, inside our cliff, the enterprise is fraud upon its face, and the silver is theft provable with two papers side by side. Micah's bearings are one. Renner's copy is the other."
"Where is he?" Jonas asked.
"Dismissed in January," Willa said. "Harrow turned him off without a reference, which in a company town is a sentence. Micah's last word was that Renner had gone to ground at Dos Rios, working for his keep under Marisol Vega's roof at the way station, using no name but Tobias. Whether he is still there, no one has had word since spring."
"If we ride openly," Jonas said, "we will be reported before our horses are watered. If we send word ahead, the bought man may hear of it. If we wait, Harrow's digging reaches the seam, then the valley, and the evidence ends in his smelter."
"Then we ride secretly," Willa said, "and soon, and by night. I know the river road in the dark better than any man in Harrow's pay knows it in daylight."
"You will be veiled," Nahlin said. It was not a question.
"I am always veiled beyond the valley. Let them report a cowboy and a veiled woman on the Dos Rios road; a veil tells a man only what he brought with him." She folded the slip along its old creases, set Clara's portrait over it, and closed the silver over both. "I can carry it farther."
"Ride tomorrow night," he said. "Tell no one the hour. Not Saba, not the horse guard, no one. Let the bought voice sell an empty stable and choke on the price."
Jonas looked at his copy of the bearings β the seam Micah had paced in the dark inside the cliff β and felt the settling before hard work honestly chosen.
"Tomorrow night," he said. "We find Tobias Renner."
Chapter 13
: The Ride to Dos Rios