"He said all I had to do was run my lines a little short. He said the country was so big that a few chains were a rounding error, and the Indian would still have his hundred and sixty acres, just a little east of where he thought they were. He said the bank would forget my note. He said there would be four hundred dollars besides, and a contract for two more townships the next year."
"A surveyor's chain," he said, "is sixty-six feet long. A hundred links. Eighty chains to the mile. Every claim and every fence anybody ever argued over in this country is counted out in those links. You trust it the way you trust your own feet.
"That night, after Whitcombe left, I laid the chain on the tailgate under a lantern and counted to the fiftieth link, in the middle where you'd never notice, and put a cold chisel to it. Then I closed the links on either side together with pliers and a hammer. My hands were shaking so bad I hit my thumb twice."
He held up his left hand. There was an old flat scar across the nail of the thumb.
"Ninety-nine links," he said. "Sixty-five feet, four inches, and a little more. One part in a hundred short. You'd never see it. But over six miles that's near five chains. I measured north from the township corner with that chain, and when I came to where the section corner ought to be by my count, I was short of this stone"—he nodded out the window—"by better than four chains. It was set solid as a church. The men who set it in '68 knew their business. I stood there with my hand on it and I wrote in my book: Original corner not found; searched diligently; set cedar post, marked, and raised mound. And I walked back to where my short count ended and I drove a post in the ground and called it the corner, and every line in this section that I ran after that, I ran from the post."
"That strip," said Cora. Her mouth was dry. "The four chains."
"Is this knoll," said Garrity, "and the spring, and the best of the bottom along the fork. Where the grass comes first in spring and the Red Willow horses dropped their foals. The plat put it in Fifteen, and Fifteen went to Pruitt. Joseph filed on Fourteen the next spring and got his hundred and sixty acres. Good acres. Just not the ones with the water."
"My father knew," said Amos.
"The first year Pruitt's cattle came onto the bottom," Amos said, "my father walked the line from the stone the way my mother said, the way the first surveyors showed her, so many steps, and he found the company's post four chains short, and he knew. He went to the agent. The agent sent him to the Land Office. The Land Office was this man"—he did not say the name; he did not need to—"and this man said the stone was not the corner and the notes were sworn and the plat was approved and the matter was closed. My father went back four more times in seven years. He learned to write his name so he could sign the letters. Then the company built your school on the knoll."
He looked at Cora, then.
"They built it in the fall," he said. "The fall after the survey. Whitcombe stood in this yard in a black coat and gave a speech to the settlers about education and progress and the generosity of Abner Pruitt, and my father stood on the other side of the fork with his horses and listened. After that, every time he went to the Land Office, they asked him the same thing. Do you mean to turn the children out of their school? So he stopped going. He told me it was like trying to dig a well where someone has built a church."
Cora understood then, the way you understand a sum when the last number falls into place, what she had been for that morning. Why Whitcombe had wanted her at the window, with the deed in her hand and the children's names carved in the frame behind her. She had not been the school's representative. She had been its fence.