Moberly asked if anyone else wished to make a statement. Cora had not planned how she would stand up. She simply stood, and the bench creaked, and every head turned.
She held up the deed and the plat so that the room could see the red circle and the seal.
"Yesterday morning I stood at that window with this paper," she said, "and told Mr. Red Willow that children had studied here for twelve years. I told him the map had the territorial seal. I said it as if that settled it. Mr. Whitcombe asked me to, but I also said it because I believed it. Nobody made me believe it. I believed it because it was written down and sealed, and because it was here before me, and because it never occurred to me to ask whose ground the children were sitting on."
She looked down at the plat.
"The seal is real. The signatures are real. Forty-one children learned to read here, and some of them are in this room. None of that is a lie. But the line under it is a lie. It was measured with a chain ninety-nine links long. I taught arithmetic from this map. The children did the sums correctly, and the sums were wrong anyway. I don't know yet how to teach them that. I'm going to have to learn." She folded the deed along its old creases. "I'd like the record to say that the teacher of the Sable Creek school believes the school stands on the Red Willow claim, and has for twelve years without anyone asking them. And that I am sorry for what I said at the window."
She sat down. Her knees were shaking. Mrs. Okerlund, without looking at her, put a hand on her wrist for a moment and took it away.
At the back someone muttered "Indian lover," and someone else, "who's going to pay for a new school, then, her?" Lyman Ferris said, "It's my girls' school," and a woman's voice said, "It was never your girls' school, Lyman, you heard the man," and Moberly rapped his pen once and the room went quiet.
"So noted," he said. "Mr. Red Willow. Anything to add?"
Amos lifted his son down and came to the window and set his hands on the sill, on top of the children's initials.
"My father wrote nine letters to the Land Office," he said. "I have the answers. They all say the survey is approved and the matter is closed. They are all signed by the same man. My father is dead five years. The spring has been fenced since June. My mares have been watering at the river, four miles, and I lost two foals in August on the walk. Nobody in this room can give me back my father's letters or my foals. The man from Washington says it will take a long time. I believe him."
He looked at the room.
"I heard about your church meeting. You think I'll burn the school, or drag it off, or turn your children onto the road. I won't. The building can stand where it stands, this winter and next, while Washington takes its long time. After that we'll talk again. But it stands on my father's ground by my leave and not by any paper, and the district pays rent for it, in my name, at the Land Office, every quarter, so there is a paper that says so. Any child of my family who wants to come here comes, and sits where your children sit, and nobody puts them on the back bench. And the wire around the spring comes down. Today."