Judge Corwin presided, a spare, white-bearded man who had buried two territories' worth of frontier justice and intended to bury the frontier's way of doing it too. Prosecutor Denby, young for his office and careful as a watchmaker, opened the case not with Micah's death nor the cutting of a girl, but with paper. Paper, he told the jury, was where this empire had truly been built, and paper was where it would be taken apart.
He began with the ledgers. Renner took the stand on the second day, his arm still slung, and identified his own hand on page after page: the payments entered under innocuous headings, the initials, the dates. Denby walked him through the books slowly, lamp in hand, until the jury could see the whole dark architecture of it: money out to a rider named in the margin only as V.; money out to two surveyors whose maps of the valley's springs disagreed with every spring that God had actually put there; money out, three days before Amos Hale's deed was recorded, to a penman in Tucson whose trade was other men's signatures.
Then the photographs: the survey plates, which Harrow's counsel called inconclusive, until Denby laid the company's own recorded plat over them and the watercourses shifted before the jury's eyes like a confession. Then the letters β Harrow's own, brisk and unmistakable, instructing that the Hale matter be "settled quietly and at the root."
Last came the deed itself, and Denby saved for it his plainest hour. He called the territorial examiner of documents, an ink-stained little man who had spent thirty years among signatures, and with a magnifier and a pointer the man unraveled the forgery stroke by stroke before the whole hushed room. Here, he showed them, the downstroke of the A hesitated, as a copyist's does and a signer's never. Here the scribe had lifted his pen in the middle of a letter, where Amos Hale's true hand β proven by a dozen bank drafts entered beside it β never lifted in forty years of signing. Here the ink itself was wrong: a chemical blue of a manufacture not sold in the Territory until two years after the date the deed pretended to. Stroke by stroke, the dead man's false signature came apart, until nothing remained of it but a stranger's careful drawing.
Harrow's defense, when its turn came, had the hopeless splendor of a cavalry charge in the age of the rifle. His counsel β imported from Santa Fe at a princely fee β argued that clerks were disgruntled, that Indians were coached, that a son's grief had manufactured a case. He sneered once, only once, at Willa's scar and the nine years behind the veil, and the temperature of the room changed so plainly that Judge Corwin's gavel came down like a shot and the apology, when it came, came quickly. Tomaso testified, against himself first of all, and his plain confession of his own treachery did what no eloquence could have done: it made everything else in the room believable.
Harrow himself did not take the stand. He sat through it all in his gray coat, composed as a man at a concert he has not enjoyed, and only once β when the examiner lifted his pointer from the ruined signature β did Jonas see the baron's gaze move to the window and rest there, on the ordinary world that was continuing without him.
The jury went out at four o'clock on the fifth day. They were gone three hours, while the courthouse lamps were lit and Willa's hand found Jonas's in the darkening row and stayed there. Then the bailiff's step sounded in the corridor, and the room reassembled itself in a rustle like a field settling after wind, and twelve men filed in not looking at the prisoner, which old courtroom hands will tell you is itself a kind of announcement.
"Members of the jury," Judge Corwin said, "have you reached a verdict?"
"We have, Your Honor." The foreman's paper shook only slightly. "On all counts β guilty."
The word went through the room and out of it, into the street, toward the valley, toward the graves and the springs and the unbuilt mines. Harrow received it standing, with the first genuine surprise of his life plain on his face at last β as if, Jonas thought, he had only now discovered that the world contained a door he could not buy.
Outside, in the lamplit dusk, Willa turned her unveiled face up to the first stars over Cerro de la Campana, far off and blue, and said, "Home, then."
"Home," Jonas said, and they went to find their horses.
Chapter 26
: What Falls, What Stands