Colonel Harland arrived eight days later with an escort and a face like winter. He read Hale's report, examined the practice signatures, the pouch, the ledger, Kane's confession, and the testimony of Briggs, Ruiz, Grey Feather, and Rain Song. Harland was an old Regular who disliked mess and disliked unfinished sentences more. He looked at Hale across the command table for a long time.
"Some in the district," Harland said carefully, "will say you endangered the fort by trusting outside scouts over a commissioned officer."
"Some in the district," Hale answered, "would have ridden into Hollis's canyon with full wagons and come home as bones. I chose the living."
Harland grunted. "Kane goes east under guard for court-martial. Hollis and his wounded follow. You will receive a commendation that will not say everything it should, because Washington prefers tidy myths. And you will remain in command here, unless you prefer a softer post."
"I prefer this one," Hale said.
Harland's gaze flicked to the doorway, where Grey Feather waited in the light. "And your arrangement with that man?"
"Is the reason this fort still has walls," Hale said. "I will keep it."
When Harland left, he shook Hale's hand in full view of the yard. It was a small thing. It was not nothing.
The morning Kane left Fort Red Clay in irons, the sky was the hard blue of a scrubbed pan. Harland's escort formed in the yard. Kane walked between two guards with his wrists bound, fair hair lank, chin lifted in a last performance of pride. Men watched in silence. No one jeered. Hale had ordered that—no theater of humiliation. Justice, he believed, lost its shape when it became entertainment.
Kane paused as he passed the porch. "You won a day," he said to Hale. "The country will still prefer men who look like me when it writes its songs."
"Then the country will have to learn a new tune," Hale said. "Or keep singing itself into graves. Either way, you will not conduct from a saddle again."