CHAPTER 22 #2
Mahon came in through the back gate at ten past noon.
He stood with us in Hattie's kitchen at the small pine table where she keeps her preserving jars, with a brown loaf and a stoneware crock of butter and tea-things and ginger biscuits between us, because Hattie is a Cornish-German woman and she feeds men who have been afraid in her parlor.
"Tell me," Mahon said.
"Watermark Crane and Sons Dalton, 1878 design. Date June 1, 1877."
Tate said, "The wax on the seal is the wrong green. The Bear Fork green is darker. The wax is the giveaway under bright light."
Mahon nodded once.
"I cannot arrest a man for forgery on a watermark unless I have a federal land-office investigator confirm the paper.
I will write to Granite Forks today for Marshal Quint Lawler.
He came down two years ago for the matter at the Fishhook claim and he was straight on the paper.
He will be down in a week or two. Tate carries the letter on Friday's stage. "
I said, "Aye."
Tate said, "Aye."
Hattie set her cup down.
"Beck. Mind your wife. The eastern man asked after her by name this morning while you were behind the door of my parlor.
He set his cup down and said to my face, Mrs. Doss.
Is it true Mr. Carrow has a wife of paper and partners on the marriage certificate?
I told him I do not speak of my customers' wives.
He laughed. He leans on the silver-headed walking stick the way a city man leans on a banister. "
I scratched the scarred palm.
"Hattie. We will move the patent papers from the cabin tomorrow into your safe-box. The deed amendments. The marriage certificate. The Bible. We need the paper away from the basin in case."
"Aye. I will hold them in the safe-box under the post-office floor. Sheriff Eames sat for me on the floorboards in '77 while the carpenter set the safe in. I have not opened it for any man since."
Tate said, "We ride up before dark."
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We rolled out of Larkspur Bend at three. Hattie had brought us two wrapped bundles for the wagon-bed — her spare quilt and the boarding-house mending Willa had not yet finished from the August run. Bring the mending up; the lady will return it in two weeks.
The Devil's Hairpin took us at a slow careful walk. The brake-handle was warm in Tate's right hand at the Hairpin and cool again at the Second Bridge. The smoke held at twelve miles north — the wind had not pushed it down and the wind had not pushed it back.
I figured the dates in my head all the way up the road.
April 17. May 4. December 12. June 1. Three forensic points.
The June 1 sat in a window the county clerk had already closed.
The June 1 named a bearer and not the partners.
The June 1 was written on a sheet a Massachusetts mill had not yet milled.
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We came up into the dooryard at six.
Willa was at the porch with the mending-basket between her feet. Levi was at the iron pump with the second water-can. Old Brigham was on the porch step at her left foot, although he does not normally come up on the porch. Tate set the brake. The mules blew out long breaths.
I climbed down. I walked across the dust to the porch step. I looked up at her the way I had looked up at her in the morning.
"His name is Cyril Mosely."
Tate came up to the porch step at my right shoulder.
"He is an eastern speculator. He has a forged deed on eastern-bonded paper dated June 1, 1877, but the watermark on the paper is from 1878.
He filed it at Mahon's clerk window Thursday.
Mahon cannot arrest him until a federal investigator confirms the paper.
He has written today for Marshal Quint Lawler.
Tate carries the letter on Friday's stage. Lawler will be a week or two."
Levi had walked across the dust without my hearing him. He stopped at the porch step beside Tate.
"I knew."
He scratched the cleft of his sternum-scar with two fingers.
"I knew there was a man out there. I felt it. I felt it the morning the rider brought the first word."
Tate said, "Aye."
Willa said, "Show me the date again."
"June 1, 1877."
She set her mending down across her knees.
She came forward in the rocker until her right hand could come down off the porch and find my left palm, which I had been working with my right thumbnail without noticing.
She turned my left palm up the way she had turned it up at the kitchen table at five o'clock that morning.
She set her right hand on the long pink crescent. She laid it flat on the scar.
She looked at it for the length of one breath.
Then she looked at me.
"I see it. June 1, 1877. Levi was not yet on the claim."
I looked at her. I looked at Levi.
The girl is faster than I am, I thought.
I had carried the three forensic points up the road and had been figuring how to lay the third on the table without losing the second, and the woman with the mending in her lap had taken the date out of my hand and laid the third forensic point on top of the first two without my having to walk her there.
"Aye," I said. "The deed predates Levi's amendment by six months.
Mosely's forger did not know Levi was added by courthouse amendment on December 12, 1877.
The deed names a bearer. If it were the true conveyance of the basin, it would name the partners who held the basin on June 1, 1877 — Tate and me — as grantors. It does not."
She did not let go of the scar.
"Then we have him."
Levi laughed once, dry — the laugh of a man who has come back from a fire and finds the cabin standing. "We have him on the paper alone."
Tate said, "We have him on the paper, the date, and the bearer. Three forensic points."
Willa said, low, "I want to see the deed at the sheriff's office tomorrow."
"We go together."
She closed her hand over the scar at last and held it for the count of three of my own pulse beats at her thumb. She let go. "I will bring up the un-watermarked sheet Hattie keeps in her writing-box tray. I want the 1877 stock next to the deed in my own hands."
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She brought the cups across two at a time.
Tate laid his right hand on my shoulder when he sat — half a breath — and took it off, because Tate touches a brother at the shoulder to mark a passage and not to dwell.
Levi had set the English shotgun against the inside of the cabin's east wall by the door, the long barrel inside the cabin, the lock-plate close enough for a man to take in his hand without crossing the threshold.
The shotgun had been on a peg by Levi's cot since the morning of August 7.
Tonight, for the first time in the four months I had been Willa's husband on paper, the shotgun was inside the cabin's east wall by the door.
Levi sat. He drank. I drank. Tate drank. Willa lifted her cup with both hands and drank.
The eastern man was at Hattie Doss's boarding house with his portfolio under the lid of her writing-box and a silver-headed walking stick beside his bed and his eye on a basin he did not know the shape of.
The smoke was at twelve miles north and the wind would shift tomorrow.
The Marshal was a week or two out of Granite Forks.
The deed was sealed in an iron-banded box behind the clerk's window in Larkspur Bend with a man named Owen Mahon at his plank desk minding it.
I have a wife who can see paper, I thought. I have brothers of the claim. I have a fire to the north and an eastern man at the boarding house. I have a stopped pocket-watch in my vest at four-eleven and a Marshal at Granite Forks.
Christ Almighty.
Willa's right hand came down to mine in the dark below the planks and closed over the scar a fourth time that day, and this time she did not let go, and the kettle clicked as it cooled, and Old Brigham settled in the chicken yard, and the basin's iron pump-handle's two-strokes-pulling-air sound came once through the open kitchen window and then was quiet.
Then we have him, I had said.
Then we had him.