"Widely suspected," he agreed, and handed her the coffee, and they stood in the evening light doing nothing at all, which felt, after that summer, like the most luxurious activity in the world.
Chapter 26
The Trial
They tried Garrett Sloan in Prescott in the autumn of 1884, in a territorial courtroom with a federal judge sent down from the circuit β a lean, unsmiling man named Halloran who had read the indictment twice on the train and arrived with the air of a person who has already decided that nobody in his courtroom is for sale, a novelty the territory discussed for weeks. Judge Cornelius Webb did not attend. Judge Webb had resigned his seat in September, citing his health, and removed to a sister's house in Kansas, where his health, the Gazette reported with newfound delicacy, remained poor.
The trial lasted six weeks, and Maren attended every day of it in the same dark dress she had worn on the porch in August, sitting in the second row with TomΓ‘s on one side and, on the days he could be made to sit still, Harlan Beckett on the other, ancient and upright as a fence post himself. Stanton testified on the ninth day β the ambush, the schoolhouse, the twenty years β in a voice so level that the court reporter asked him twice to speak up, and the jury, twelve men who had never met Rose Delany, looked at Garrett Sloan afterward the way men look at a snake found in a child's bed.
But it was the paper that hanged him, week by patient week, the way Stanton had always said it would. The iron box was carried into court in week two and opened in front of the jury: Thomas Ellison's map, unrolled across the prosecution's table with its blue river shining under the hills; the list of twenty-three names, with the clerk reading them aloud one by one β and reading, beside each, what the deed books said had become of that family. The Pruetts, gone to California. Ivers, auctioned off the courthouse steps. The Okafor brothers, summoned back from Tucson at federal expense, testified about the lawyer and the Spanish grant that had never existed, and wept on the stand, both of them, without shame.
Doyle Ketch testified in week three, in a clean shirt, under a deal that would put him in a territorial prison instead of a federal grave, and he told it all: the fence, the fire, the canyon payroll, Finch's drunken talk about silver. The prosecution produced the surveyor's certificate Thomas had prepared in 1881 β the filing he never lived to make β and then produced its devastating twin: a second certificate, found in Sloan's own desk, commissioning a private survey of "mineral and water resources underlying the northern valley" dated eleven days after Thomas Ellison's death, in a hand the Prescott surveyor identified as his own, hired and paid in cash by Garrett Sloan and sworn to silence.
Sloan's lawyers were expensive and it showed β in the shine of their boots, in the elegance of their objections, in the theory they built like a cathedral: that a grieving widow and a vengeful drifter had conspired to ruin a public benefactor; that the map was a fantasy, the list a grudge, the canyon a hunting club's store. It was a beautiful theory and it might have held, in a county court, in front of Judge Webb. In front of Judge Halloran it ran into the capped well on the Hendricks line, which federal surveyors had opened, measured, and photographed by lantern light β a river, flowing, in a hillside, under a tarpaulin, behind a claim line staked on land Garrett Sloan had never owned. The chief defense counsel, examining the photographs, was heard to say, in a voice he may have intended to be private: "Oh, Garrett. You stupid, greedy son of a bitch."
In the evenings Maren walked the Prescott streets with Micah and did not talk about the trial, because the trial was all either of them could hear by then, even in silence: twelve men deciding whether the last three years of her life β and the last twenty of his β amounted to the truth.
"In Colorado," Micah said one night, out of nowhere, on the steps of the boarding house, "and in Sonora, I had the story and no paper. All those years I thought what I lacked was the chance." He looked up at the stars over the courthouse square. "It wasn't the chance, Maren. It was Thomas. It was a man who wrote things down and buried them in the ground for whoever came next. The dead did the heavy lifting in this case. I want that remembered when they write it up."
A reporter from a San Francisco paper had asked her on those same steps, that morning, whether she was enjoying her revenge, and Maren had said, "Young man, revenge is a cold dish. This is a warm one. It's called a record," and the quote had run in three states by the end of the week.