The killing of Thomas Greaves was not, in Kane's telling to himself, personal. Greaves was a function: seal, pouch, absence. Hollis's riders stopped him at dawn on the Ellison road where the mesquite grew thick. Greaves tried to spur through. A shot took him from the saddle. He lived long enough to look surprised that the West could be so small. They dragged him to Crow Bone Wash because the walls there hid what the road would advertise. Kane was not present for the shot. He arrived after, because Hollis wanted him to see the cost and not flinch. Kane looked. He took the ring because Hollis tossed it to him with a joke about souvenirs. He put it in his pocket and told himself that sentiment was for men who could afford it.
That night he forged the order by candle stub, window shuttered, listening for Hale's footsteps in the yard. Each practice signature brought him closer to a version of himself that could write the world into compliance. When the last Harland looked true, Kane sanded it, folded it, and slept three hours without dreams he would later admit.
Grey Feather's investigation began not with suspicion of Kane but with the land's own interruption.
Two of his young men, hunting antelope north of the fort, found buzzards working a wash. They found Greaves. They found the absence of a pouch and the pale band on a finger where a ring had been. They rode for Grey Feather. He came, read the ground—boot prints of three white men, a shod horse led aside, a scuffle mark, a single spent casing half-buried—and understood that this death was not random raiding. Raiders took boots and belts. These men had taken paper.
Rain Song searched the lining of Greaves's shirt and found Anna's letter, damp with the boy's last sweat. Little Branch found, farther up the bank, a scrap of burned letterhead that had not burned completely—someone's hurried fire in a place with too little wood. They followed a partial trail toward the fort and then lost it on the hardpan. Grey Feather decided to watch the fort's gate from a distance.
They saw the false courier arrive at noon: a thin white man, horse lathered beyond an honest ride from Ellison. They saw him leave too quickly. They saw wagons begin to fill before the courier had even drained his water cup—Rain Song noted the time by the sun's angle and by the fort's own shadow on the southern wall. Grey Feather sent Little Branch to trail the departing courier. The youth returned at midafternoon: the man had not ridden the Ellison road. He had cut west toward Aspen Canyon and met two others in scrub, then vanished into the hills.
"So the paper is a snake," Rain Song said.
"Snakes can still bite captains who step wrong," Grey Feather answered. "We take what proof the hurried man left, and we put it in Hale's hands before the wagons roll."
They found the pouch at a cold fire where the false courier had tried to destroy practice sheets and failed. That was how truth sometimes survived in that country: not by purity, but by someone's haste.
In the hours between Kane's locking and the night ride to Aspen Canyon, Hale did one more thing the forged order had tried to make impossible: he listened to his men.
He walked the horse lines and let Private Millen speak first, because Millen was young and fear made the young talk or go mute, and Millen was a talker. "Sir, if we ain't evacuating, are we still in danger? The lieutenant said two hundred."