so they could never lose the count. He had come up out of the creek with seven, or eight, and he had been too drunk and too ashamed to call out to Ledyard, who was already far ahead up the slope, shouting the count back through the trees.
So he had guessed. He had stood there swaying, wet to the skin, and guessed how many chains they had measured since the last tally, and he had guessed wrong, and Ledyard, trusting him, had called out the count Sorley gave him, and Merriwether had written it in his book, and that evening they had set the quarter corner and the section corner on the ridge above the lake by those numbers. Ten chains too far east.
He had known it was wrong by the next morning, sober and sick. He had lain in his blanket and done the arithmetic over and over and known.
And he had said nothing.
"My brother," he said aloud. It was not what he meant to say. It came out of him anyway. "Merriwether found it. Not the corner. He never found where. But when he plotted the township that winter in St. Paul, the closing was off. The lines didn't meet. He wrote to us. He asked who had kept the tally that day. And Ledyard wrote back that he had. That he must have miscounted at the front. He never asked me. He knew. He knew I'd been drinking. He knew where the bottle was. He wrote that it was his fault and Merriwether put it in his report, and the General Land Office docked the contract and Merriwether lost his next commission and Ledyard couldn't get work on a survey crew again. He went to California in the spring of 'fifty-three. He wrote me twice. He died of a fever at a camp on the Feather River in 'fifty-five. I got the letter from a man I never met."
He stopped. He was aware that his face was wet and that he did not care.
"I never told anybody," he said. "Not Merriwether. Not the Land Office. I let my brother carry it and I let him die carrying it. I came up here and built a house where nobody would ever come to my door." He laughed, a terrible sound. "And then thirty-two people came to my door."
Yellow Cloud did not touch him or say anything comforting. He let the silence be what it was. After a while he picked up his cup again, found it cold, and set it down.