"That," he said, "is forgery, and attempted theft of a man's land and water, and it goes to the county with the rest." Through the window Josiah could see the street, and Voss's buggy standing in it, and Voss himself descending the store steps into a crowd that had already heard everything — for a store, like a river, carries news — and for the first time in Josiah's memory the crowd did not part for Colonel Voss. It closed, quietly, and stayed closed, and he had to walk through it as other men walk.
Chapter 26
: Fire's Answer
Marshal Everett Sloan set the papers on the table in the order he meant to speak them, and the room in the Cienega store went quiet the way a church goes quiet, not from reverence but from men understanding that what came next could not be unsaid. Outside, the heat stood white on the street. Inside, the air smelled of coffee, dust, and the kerosene that had not yet been wiped from Micah Trent's counter.
Sloan laid down Trent's sworn statement first. "Micah Trent has testified that Colonel Harlan Voss paid him, over three years, to record false brands, to hold stolen cattle on his books as lawful purchases, and to say nothing when wagons rolled past his store at night toward the colonel's range." He looked neither at Trent nor at Voss as he said it. "He has given dates. He has given sums. He has signed his name to all of it, knowing what it costs him."
He laid down the second paper. "Rance Killion, foreman to Colonel Voss, has confessed in my hearing and in writing. He confessed the rustling of Ben Rawlins' herd and of others besides. He confessed the fouling of the spring above the Apache camp with dead stock, done to drive them from water they had used since before any of us were born. He confessed the laying of a false trail, moccasin prints pressed into dust that no Apache foot had made, so that theft would wear another people's face."
A murmur moved through the settlers crowded along the wall, and Sloan waited until it died.
"The third matter is older." His hand rested a moment on a small oilcloth-wrapped book before he opened it, and Josiah Merritt, standing by the door with his hat in his hands, felt his throat close. "This is the journal of Miriam Merritt, kept in her own hand until October of 1872. In it she records Colonel Voss's offers for the Arroyo Seco ranch and its well, made three times. She records her refusal, three times, in plain words. She records, in the final entry, her fear that a man refused water-rights by fair means might seek them by foul ones. The book was kept these five years in a flour tin by the woman who washed her linen, because she did not trust the ground to keep it safe from digging."
Sloan turned a page he did not read aloud, out of decency, and closed the book.
"The fourth matter is testimony of the eyes." He nodded toward the doorway, where Old Sowe stood wrapped in a blanket despite the heat, her face carved and patient. "Sowe, of the Apache council, was a girl grown to womanhood herding goats on the ridge above Arroyo Seco on the night of the fire. She has told the council, and now tells this assembly through her niece's tongue, that she saw lanterns at the Merritt house before any flame. Two lanterns, carried low, moving room to room in a house whose people were known to be at the Rawlins place for a christening supper. She saw men who were not Apache. She has named the scar on the hand of one of them, and the name she gives for the man who bore it is Pete Doyle, foreman to Colonel Voss, dead these three years in a fall from a horse he had no business riding drunk."
No one spoke. The stove ticked as it cooled.
"Doyle is beyond my warrant," Sloan said. "The man who ordered him is not." He gathered the papers into one stack and squared them with care. "Harlan Voss. By authority of the United States and the Territory of Arizona, I arrest you for arson, for the murder of Miriam Merritt, for cattle rustling and conspiracy to rustle, and for forgery of a land grant presented to the territorial court as genuine. You will be held at Prescott for trial."
Voss had sat through all of it in the only chair with arms, his boots crossed at the ankle, his white mustache immaculate. Now he rose slowly, as a man rises from a dinner table, and smoothed his coat. "You have built a handsome scaffold, Marshal," he said. "Paper, an old woman's memory, a storekeeper who would sell his mother for a clean ledger, and a hired man singing for a shorter rope. I do not deny I am impressed."
"Your opinion is noted," Sloan said, and took the irons from his belt.
Voss looked past him then, around the room, at faces he had fed and faces he had ruined, and he smiled the smile of a man counting money no one else could see. "Arrest me, then. Try me. Money outlasts marshals, gentlemen. It outlasts droughts and juries and the memories of old women. I will be drinking coffee in my own house while you are still telling this story."