"That's Pruitt's wire," someone said.
"It's on my father's ground," said Amos, "and the man from Washington just measured it."
Pruitt said to the floor, "Take it down. I don't care."
"Until the Commissioner rules, the patent stands as issued," said Moberly carefully. "I can't tell you to cut a fence, Mr. Red Willow."
"I didn't ask you to," said Amos.
***
They took the wire down at sunset. It was not a grand thing. It was Amos and Lucas and Henry with fence pliers and a crowbar, and Tom Garrity, who walked down from the schoolhouse without being asked and took the crowbar out of Henry's hands, and Henry let him. Lyman Ferris loaded the twins into his wagon and drove off before the first staple came out. Pruitt's foreman sat his horse at a distance with his hands crossed on the horn, and after a while rode away.
The wire came off in long singing coils. Garrity worked a long time at his own cedar post from 1874, levering at its foot while the rocks rolled away. It would not come. It had been in the ground too long. At last Amos put a hand on his shoulder and said something, and Garrity stopped, breathing hard, and left it standing.
Moberly, at the depot that evening, shook Cora's hand on the car step. "Two years at the least," he said. "Perhaps three. If Fifteen is wrong, so is every section run off that post. Eleven families in this township have fences on Garrity's lines. Some will lose their wells, and they will blame the Red Willows and they will blame you. Garrity will likely be indicted; whether it sticks after twelve years I can't say. Whitcombe is finished in office. What else he loses depends on what else is in the Surveyor General's files, and I expect a good deal is. Men who own the paper are rarely careful." He put on his hat. "You'll have a hard winter. Teach them about the chain. It's the most useful thing they'll ever learn."
Whitcombe was not on the platform. Someone said he had shut himself in his room at the Commercial Hotel. Someone said his wife had taken the noon train east without him. Cora did not know which was true, and found she did not much want to. She had seen his face.
From the knoll, before she walked to town, she had watched Mary Red Willow bring the mares up from the river, eleven of them with five late foals, heads low, ribs showing through the dust. At the gap where the wire had been, an old bay mare lifted her head and blew, then walked down to the spring and put her muzzle in the water. The others followed. Ina stood at the edge of the willows and watched them drink, and Eli, beside Cora at the unglassed window, said, "That's the foaling ground," with the enormous certainty of a child saying something he has always known.
***