She put her hands flat on the desk on either side of the deed and did not look at anyone.
"I should have asked," she said, finally. "I should have asked why the wire went up."
"You'd have been told," said Amos. "And you'd have believed what you were told. That's what paper is for."
"That isn't an excuse."
"No," he agreed. "It's not."
Garrity had his head down. "I'll say it all tomorrow," he said. "To the agent. I came today so Whitcombe would hear it before he had a night to arrange things. I owed the Red Willows that much. I owed them a good deal more."
"Why now?" said Cora. "Why not ten years ago? Why not when Joseph Red Willow was alive to hear it?"
Garrity was quiet so long she thought he would not answer.
"Ten years ago I had a wife and a baby and a note that Whitcombe could call any morning he liked," he said. "Five years ago I had a girl about to start in your school and a dead wife in the ground and no contracts, because Whitcombe stopped giving them to me as soon as he didn't need me. And every year it got easier not to. I'd ride by here and see the smoke from your chimney and hear the kids at recess, and I'd think, well, there's some good come of it anyway." He laughed, short and ugly. "That's what I told myself. Some good come of it. Then in June Pruitt put the wire around the spring, and in August I saw Amos Red Willow's mares standing at the wire in the heat with their tongues out, and his boy with them, trying to reach the water through the strands with a tin cup. I went home and got the link out of the bottom of my trunk, where it had been wrapped in oilcloth for twelve years. Then the letter came saying I'd be called to swear my notes again. And I thought, I'm not going to do it twice."
***
Cora walked Hannah Garrity home.
She had meant to walk the three miles to town alone and sit in her room at Mrs. Okerlund's with the curtains closed. But when she came out into the yard with the key on its ribbon, Hannah was sitting on the step of the woodshed with her lunch pail between her feet. She had not gone home at all. She had hidden in the cottonwoods by the ford, and she had seen all of it.