"And the school?"
"The school would be standing on an Indian's claim," he said. "Without a deed worth the paper. Joseph Red Willow was a reasonable man and I was sorry when he died. The son is another sort. He has a lawyer in Omaha and a grievance he means to feed." Whitcombe spread his hands. "A special agent of the General Land Office is coming out on tomorrow's train to take testimony. Today, the family has asked to walk the ground. I thought it best that they see the school is not an empty building. That it is a place children have used, and loved, and that the whole district depends on."
It was a reasonable thing to say. Afterward, when she went over it in her mind, Cora would find no single word in it that was untrue. That was what she would remember about the whole of that morning: how much of it had been true.
"It has always been the children's," she said.
"Exactly so. That is all I ask you to say."
They stood together at the open window to wait. From there they could see the wagon road come down off the bench, cross the dry fork at the gravel ford, and climb the knoll. Below the knoll, to the east, a line of new barbed wire ran along the bottom on cedar posts, glittering where the sun caught it, and on the far side of the wire was the spring: a green eye in the brown, with a stand of chokecherry and willow around it. The wire was Pruitt's. It had gone up in June. Before June, Cora had seen the Red Willow horses watering there in the mornings, mares with foals at their sides, and once she had held a reading lesson at the window so that the children could watch a colt not two days old try to make its legs agree with each other.
She had not thought much about the wire when it went up. A company fenced its land. It was something people did.
At half past nine, riders came down off the bench.
***
There were four of them, and a woman walking. The man in front rode a tall brown horse with a white snip on its nose, and in front of him on the saddle sat a small boy, perhaps six, with his hands buried in the horse's mane and his legs sticking straight out on either side. The man was perhaps forty. He had long black hair, loose to his shoulders, and he wore a fringed buckskin shirt over dark trousers and a cartridge belt with nothing in the loops. Everyone in the district knew him by sight. He was Amos Red Willow, and he had come to the spring program once, three years ago, and stood at the back of the room with his arms crossed, and left before the prizes.
Behind him came two younger men she did not know, and a girl of fifteen or so on a paint mare. The woman walked beside the mare with one hand on its shoulder. She was old—sixty, seventy, it was hard to say—with long braids gone iron gray and a buckskin dress worn soft and dark at the hem. She walked as if the ground were a floor she had swept herself.
They crossed the ford. The horses' hooves knocked on the gravel. They came up the knoll at a walk and stopped in the yard below the window, so close that Cora could see the dust in the creases of the boy's sleeves and smell the horse.
The boy looked up at the window and the door, the way children look at any building they have never been inside.