"You did the sum right," said Cora. "The chain was wrong. That's different, Gus. Remember that."
***
Moberly insisted on walking the line. He said he had not come nine hundred miles to look at paper he could have looked at in Washington. With Garrity at one end of the tape and Moberly at the other, Henry Red Willow driving pins, and half the district trailing behind through the dry grass, they measured from stone 1451 along the course in the 1868 notes. Ina walked beside them. Now and then she stopped and spoke in her own language, and Amos put it into English, and Moberly wrote it down: here the winter lodges. Here the meat racks. Here the edge of the foaling ground. Once she stopped where nothing showed at all and said her husband had buried a good gray mare there that had foaled nine times, and Moberly wrote that down with the same care he had given the chain.
Where the 1868 notes put the true corner, there was bunchgrass and a gopher mound. Henry drove an iron pin there and tied red flannel to it. Then they walked back to Garrity's cedar post, gray and checked, with Pruitt's wire stapled to it, and Moberly measured between them. Nobody spoke.
"Four chains, eighty-one links," he said. "Three hundred seventeen feet, five inches."
Cora shut her eyes. When she opened them, Ina Red Willow was looking at her. The old woman did not smile. But she inclined her head very slightly, the way you might to someone who had finally arrived at a place you had been waiting at a long time.
***
Back inside, Moberly took Ina's statement through the window.
"Why did your husband not move the post?" he asked. "Or the wire?"
She looked at him as if the question were strange. "Because then he would be the one who moved a marker," she said. "And the paper would say so. Paper says what it is told. We knew the stone. We could wait for the paper to learn."
"Twelve years is a long wait, ma'am."
"Yes," said Ina Red Willow. "My husband did not finish it."