"Tomorrow," she told TomΓ‘s, who was mending harness by the same lamp, "we start calling on the list. Not to warn them. To ask them. There's a difference, and I believe it's the whole difference in the world."
Chapter 14
A Henchman Talks
They caught Doyle Ketch on a Thursday, in the hour before dawn, doing something so stupid that Stanton said afterward it amounted to a confession all by itself: he was standing in Maren's north pasture with a surveyor's chain over his shoulder, measuring her land for a man who did not own it yet.
TomΓ‘s saw him from the windmill platform. By the time Ketch understood that the widow herself was coming across the pasture with a rifle cradled in her arms like a baby and the drifter walking wide on his other side with his pistol still holstered and his hands loose, the arithmetic had already been done for him. He dropped the chain. He put his hands up. He said, to his credit or his shame, "I told them this was a fool's errand," before anybody asked him anything.
Doyle Ketch was thirty years old, with the permanently startled eyes of a man who has been taking orders from frightening people since he was old enough to saddle a horse. They sat him in Maren's kitchen β because Stanton said a man talks better at a table than at gunpoint, and because Maren insisted on coffee for the prisoner on the grounds that her mother would rise from the grave if she interrogated a man in her kitchen without feeding him β and Shaw came out from town by midmorning, and the four of them had it out.
Ketch talked the way a dam gives: first a trickle of lies out of habit, then the real water.
The fence cutting, yes β Sloan's orders, through his foreman. The hidden boy in the rocks, Fenn, yes, and Ketch turned green telling it: the arrangement was that if the widow made trouble about the wire, Fenn was to fire close β close, not at her, Mr. Sloan was specific β to stampede her into town, into the papers, into being hysterical. That Stanton had read it and ended it in one shot still seemed to offend Ketch's understanding of how the world worked. The barn fire, no β that was a pair out of the canyon crew, and Ketch named them, and Shaw wrote the names down with a hand that shook slightly, because they were men the sheriff had played cards with.
"And the canyon," Stanton said. "Whose war is that, Doyle?"
Ketch looked into his coffee like it was a well. "Mr. Sloan says it's insurance. Says if the territory won't respect property, property has to respect itself. He's got forty-odd men promised β railroad crews, mine guards, boys like me only meaner β to come when he sends the word. The word goes out when he's got the water locked. Not before." He swallowed. "It's the water and it ain't the water. That's the part I wasn't supposed to know, and I know it because Finch talks when he drinks, and Finch drinks whenever the second set of books keeps him up."
The kitchen went very quiet. Shaw's pencil stopped.
"Say the rest," Maren said.
"There's silver under them hills, Mrs. Ellison. Not near the water β under it, in the same rock. Your husband found the signs of it when he was doing his water figuring, and he went to Mr. Sloan β God forgive him, he thought the man was a banker, he went for a loan to develop it proper, legal, with the filings and all β and showed him enough to hang himself with." Ketch's eyes were wet now, with the misery of a small man at the bottom of a large crime. "Mr. Sloan smiled and shook his hand and lent him nothing, and two weeks later your husband was dead in that ravine, and Mr. Sloan has been buying the valley ever since, patient as Sunday. The water's for the valley. The silver's for him. And you β begging your pardon β you're not the blackboard, Mrs. Ellison. You're the lid. Once you're off, everything under them hills is his in one piece, water and silver both."
Maren sat with that for a moment, with the coffee going cold in her hand and her husband's voice in her memory saying the hills are keeping a secret, Maren, and she understood that Thomas, in his innocence, had carried his secret to the one man in the territory who killed for a living, smiling, in a bank office, with a pen.