Hannah considered this.
"The stone knew," she said.
"Yes," said her father, after a moment. "The stone knew. And Mrs. Red Willow. I was the only one that needed reminding."
***
The special agent of the General Land Office arrived on the eleven-forty train, and by one o'clock there were more people in and around the Sable Creek schoolhouse than it had ever held at a spring program.
His name was Franklin Moberly. He was a small, neat, bald man of about fifty with steel spectacles and a black alpaca coat, and he carried two leather cases: one full of papers, the other holding a hundred-foot steel tape on a reel, which he handled the way another man might handle a fine watch. He had investigated fraudulent entries in four territories and had been shot at twice, both times, he mentioned at the depot, by men holding territorial patents. He did not seem to find this remarkable.
He set up at Cora's desk, after asking her permission. The settlers filled the benches and stood three deep along the walls. Some had brought their children. Gus Lindahl hung off the south window with his elbows on the sill, right on top of the initials, and nobody told him to get down. Abner Pruitt sat on a camp chair at the front, a white-haired man in his seventies with a face like a dried apple, and looked at nobody.
The Red Willows did not come in. They stood in the yard outside the south window, where everyone could see them: Amos with Eli on his shoulders, Lucas and his brother Henry, the girl Mary, and Ina Red Willow a little apart with her hands folded. When Moberly asked whether they would not come in out of the sun, Amos said, "We'll hear from here," and Moberly made a note.
Horace Whitcombe came last, in the same black coat, and the crowd at the door parted for him as it always had. But it parted a little wider than it needed to. Cora saw Mrs. Okerlund draw her skirt back as he passed.
"I am authorized to take sworn statements and inspect the ground," Moberly said, in a dry voice that carried to the back without effort. "I am not authorized to decide anything. The Commissioner in Washington will do that, on my report. Nothing will be settled this afternoon. These matters take time. Sometimes a very long time. I'll call Thomas Garrity."
Garrity told it all again, standing beside the stove with the chain at his feet, looking at Moberly and nobody else. He told about the note and the twelfth of August. He told about four hundred dollars paid in gold coin in a canvas bag at Whitcombe's house in Harlan Crossing on the first of October, 1874, the day after the field notes were filed, and he named the coins and where he had spent most of them. He told about the chisel and his thumb, the stone he had found and written that he had not, the cedar post.
"You understand you are confessing to a felony," said Moberly, "and that I can't advise you whether the statute has run."