"I'll write to him," Nils said. "Before you get there, if I can. I'll say what you did here."
"You can say it. I do not know if it will matter. He has a great many letters from a great many settlers, and most of them say the other thing." Tukweyit let go of his hand. "But say it anyway. My grandfather would say, a true thing does not have to win to be worth saying. That was one of his sayings. He had a great many. Most of them were very tiresome."
He swung up on the gray. He looked once more at the cabin with its canvas-covered wall and its stump of a chimney, and then down toward the draw, where the stones sat gray and quiet above the spring in the early light.
"She is home," he said. "That was the reason. All the rest was the road."
Then he rode north across the stubble at a walk, not hurrying and not hiding, and Nils and Ketti stood in the yard and watched him go until he was a dark speck and then nothing at all against the long tawny swell of the prairie, and the mare called after the gray once, high and lonely, and then put her head down and began to graze.
Nils wrote to the sub-agent at Lapwai that same night, by lamplight, at the table, with Ketti reading over his shoulder and correcting his spelling. He wrote three pages. He wrote about the horse, and the old man, and the stones, and the three days on the scaffold, and Coker on his sorrel in the yard, and the water Ketti had poured on the head stone. He did not make any of it sound better than it was. He wrote that he did not know what Tukweyit had done in the war and did not pretend to, but that he knew what he had done on the Camas Prairie in the last week of September, 1879, and that it was the work of an honest man finishing a debt that was not even his own. He wrote that the landowner of the southwest quarter of section fourteen gave his leave, now and in future, for the women of the family of Teekáyu to camp and dig at the spring in the draw each spring for as long as he held the land, and that he would be glad to have it witnessed. In the morning he rode the mare to Mount Idaho, with the colt trotting at her side, and Wardell Brisbin read the last page twice and signed it without a word, and the next freighter north took it to Lapwai.
No answer came. The sub-agent was a busy man.
Nils built a new chimney in October from field stone, rough gray granite and pink quartzite and the plain brown rock of his own plowing, and it was ugly and lopsided and drew better than either of the other two had. The colt was weaned in January and bawled for two nights and then got over it, and spent the rest of the winter following Ketti around the yard like a dog and trying to eat her braids. Pastor the mule regarded him with deep suspicion. Solvei, as far as anybody could tell, regarded the whole arrangement with the weary tolerance of a horse who had been to the Grandmother's country and back and was not going to be impressed by anything ever again.