He was leading his saddled horse, as if he had decided he would rather arrive on his own legs. He was a rangy man in his thirties, in a wide-brimmed brown hat stained dark at the band, a faded blue shirt and an old canvas vest, and leather suspenders. Over his right shoulder and across his chest, coiled in heavy loops, he carried a surveyor's chain. Even from the knoll Cora could see that it was old. It hung off him dull and red-brown, every link scaled with rust, and it swung against his hip as he walked and made a sound like a dog shaking itself.
"Tom Garrity," said Whitcombe, and his voice had changed. It was still deep. But it had lost its bottom, the way a floor loses its bottom when a joist gives under it.
Garrity crossed the ford and came through the yard and down to the sand, and stopped across the stone from the old woman, and he took off his hat. His hair was matted with sweat. His eyes were red-rimmed. He looked at the numbers on the stone for a long time.
"Mrs. Red Willow," he said.
"Mr. Garrity."
"I looked for it," he said. "That fall. I want you to know that. I looked for it, for half a day, and I found it. I had my hand on it. Right there." He nodded at the cross. "And I wrote in my book that I couldn't find it."
Whitcombe said, "Tom."
Garrity did not turn around. Up in the yard, on the brown horse, Amos Red Willow had not moved, but Cora saw that the boy in front of him had gone very still, with his mouth a little open.
"Mr. Garrity," said Cora. She heard her own voice and did not recognize it. "I don't understand. Mr. Whitcombe says the stone was not found. He says the corner of record is somewhere else. If it was here, why wouldn't—why would the measurements not agree? You measured from the corners. It's in the notes. It's all on the plat." She held up the deed and the linen plat with it, as if he could not see them. "How could the lines be so far wrong?"
Garrity looked at her as if he were sorry for her, and she hated that, and kept her chin up.
He lifted the coil of rusty chain off his shoulder and let a length of it run down through his fist, link after link, until the brass tally tag on it clinked against the stone.
"Because someone shortened mine," he said.