"All right."
"When I was fourteen I sat in those hemlocks all day and watched you. I thought you were the most foolish man I had ever seen. You fell in the creek. You lost your sticks. You stood there in the water talking to yourself. I laughed so hard I had to put my hand over my mouth." He did not smile now. "Then I went home and told my grandfather, and he laughed, and it became a story the old men told. The drunk white man in the creek who gave us our sugar bush. They told it at every sugar camp. Children who were not born yet know it. It is a funny story."
Sorley said nothing.
"But I paced it out," Makoons went on. "After you were gone. I went back with a cord my grandmother knotted for me, and I measured from the big hemlock with the old blaze, and I found the ten chains. I was very proud. I thought I had caught the white men in their own counting. And I did not think, until much later, until I was working at the mill at Chippewa Falls and saw men lose their wages over a mark in a book, that somebody must have paid for that count. That a thing so funny on our side of the line must not be funny on yours." He looked at Sorley. "Was it your brother?"
"It was my brother."
Makoons nodded slowly. "Then the story is wrong," he said. "We have been telling it wrong for six years. The drunk white man did not give us the sugar bush. His brother did. And the drunk one paid a different way." He pushed off the post. "When we go to Bayfield, I will tell the agent what I saw. Not because you need it. Because I want to be in the story the right way. Not the boy hiding in the hemlocks laughing. The one who measured it."
"They won't take your word over Ingle's surveyors," Sorley said. "Your uncle said so."
"My uncle is often right," Makoons said, "and he is not always right. Also I am not fourteen now. I can read a field book. I worked a whole summer for the mill's timber cruiser. I know what Ingle's surveyors measured and I know where they started from. They started from the wrong hemlock." He grinned suddenly, the old grin. "That is a thing I have not told my uncle yet. I was saving it. I wanted to see if you would come first."