"Hello, Eli," said Cora.
The boy said nothing. He looked at the door.
"Go and look," said his father, "if the teacher says."
Cora found she could not speak, so she nodded. The boy stood on the threshold with one hand on the frame and looked in at the benches and slates and the morning's sums on the blackboard. He did not go in. After a while he came back and stood with one hand on his father's boot.
"I want to know," Cora said. She was speaking to Garrity. "I want to know all of it. Not tomorrow. Now."
Garrity looked at Amos. Amos nodded once.
"Then we'd best sit," said Garrity, "because I'm about done standing."
***
They sat on the children's benches, because there was nowhere else out of the sun. Garrity sat at the back with the chain heaped between his boots. Amos sat by the door with his son on the floor beside him, tracing letters on the boards. The old woman stayed by the stone, looking toward the spring.
Cora sat at her desk with the deed and the plat in front of her and the link still on them.
"In the spring of 1874," Garrity said, "I was twenty-three years old and I had a deputy's contract from the Surveyor General's office to subdivide four townships along the Sable. I'd borrowed eleven hundred dollars to outfit for it, on a note at the Harlan Crossing bank that Horace Whitcombe endorsed, because my father knew him in Illinois. Then my father died with nothing left over, and the Department was eight months behind paying, and my chainman ran off to the Black Hills with two of my mules. By August the bank was talking about calling the note.
"Whitcombe came out to my camp on Little Sable on the twelfth of August. He brought a bottle. He told me the railroad had the odd-numbered sections along the Sable and was going to sell Fifteen to Abner Pruitt's company, and that it would be a great pity if the best water in Fifteen turned out to lie over the line in Fourteen, where Joseph Red Willow had lived for years and meant to file a homestead as soon as the plats were approved. He said it the way you'd say it would be a pity if it rained on a picnic. I was young and stupid but not crooked yet, and I didn't understand him until he explained it.