“Then why does it say appeared before?”
Bell snapped:
“Miss Mercer.”
“No.”
She looked at him.
“You filed this in my office.”
“Did you read it?”
“Of course.”
“And you didn't notice the witness had been dead six weeks?”
Bell’s face reddened.
“I am not required to know every death in San Aurelio.”
“You represented the document.”
Silas stepped between them.
“That is enough.”
Anna looked toward him.
“No.”
His voice lowered.
“Go home.”
Margaret moved closer to her daughter.
Anna’s fear arrived then.
Not because Silas shouted.
Because he did not.
Men like Silas rarely needed volume.
Anna had seen families lose grazing claims after disagreeing with him.
She had watched a blacksmith lose his lease.
A widow discovered her supply credit had been withdrawn one week after refusing to sell Silas a strip of land.
Coincidence, everyone said.
San Aurelio contained many coincidences.
Silas looked toward Reverend Locke.
“The claim has been reviewed by territorial counsel.”
“Has it?”
Anna asked.
“Yes.”
“Name.”
He stared.
“Miss Mercer.”
“What counsel?”
Bell answered:
“Land Office review does not require explanation to you.”
Anna laughed once.
That was when she heard the horses.
At first only hoofbeats.
Slow.
Many.
People near the edge of the street began turning.
Then someone whispered:
“Apache.”
Silas’s hired men moved toward their rifles.
Marshal Thomas Brigg, who had been standing beneath the awning, immediately stepped into the street.
“Hands off the guns.”
One of Silas’s men looked toward his employer.
Brigg raised his voice.
“I said leave them.”
The riders entered San Aurelio from the east.
Five horses.
Then seven.
Then nine.
They did not charge.
They rode at a walking pace, dust rising around the animals’ legs.
At the center walked an older Apache man carrying no visible firearm.
His long black hair, threaded heavily with gray, fell over a brown buckskin coat. A narrow breastplate rested over his chest. Beside him walked a woman perhaps forty-five, her dark hair divided into two braids, a rolled paper held beneath one arm.
Behind them, two riders led a mule wagon.
Something large sat beneath a canvas in the bed.
Anna recognized the woman first.
Mara Kase.
She had met Mara twice.
Once at the schoolhouse, when Mara brought her niece to ask whether Apache children would be allowed to attend during winter.
The second time at the recorder’s office, where Mara attempted to locate a survey map from 1877.
The map was missing.
Anna remembered because Mara had not become angry.
She simply asked who had last signed the index.
Anna found the name.
Deputy Clerk Samuel Creel.
Creel had resigned years earlier and moved to Tucson.
Now Mara stopped in the middle of San Aurelio’s main street.
The older man beside her looked toward Silas.
Jacob Kase.
Mara’s older brother.
Anna had heard the name often.
Some people called him troublesome.
What they generally meant was that he wrote petitions.
Reverend Locke descended from the platform.
“Mara.”
She nodded.
“Reverend.”
Silas stepped forward.
“This gathering concerns a recorded land claim.”
Mara looked toward him.
“We know.”
Her English was measured, unhurried.
Silas glanced at the wagon.