Then he put two fingers into the breast pocket of his vest and drew something out and held it up in the sun.
It was a single link of chain. It was the same dark iron as the rest, but it had not rusted the way the rest had; it had been kept somewhere dry and close. It was about eight inches long, a stiff oblong of iron wire with an eye bent at each end. One of the eyes had been cut clean through. Cora could see the bright, slanted face of the cut where a cold chisel had gone into it, and the little burr of metal the chisel had raised.
Garrity climbed the slope. He walked past Whitcombe as if Whitcombe were a fence post. He went to the brown horse in the yard and he held the link up, and Amos Red Willow leaned down out of the saddle, past his son, and took it.
He weighed it in his palm. He turned it over once. The boy reached for it, and his father closed his hand.
Then Amos Red Willow touched the horse with his heels and rode it the three steps to where Cora had come back up into the yard, to where Whitcombe stood beside her with the dust of the slope on his good shoes. He held his closed hand out over the deed in Cora's hands, over the linen plat with its red circle and its pressed seal.
He opened his fingers. The link fell onto the paper with a small, flat, terrible sound, and lay there across the line between Section Fifteen and Section Fourteen.
"Ask who paid him," he said.
Cora looked at Horace Whitcombe.
She had known that face for three years as a public thing. She watched it come apart. It did not happen all at once. First the color went out of it, from the forehead down, so that his beard looked suddenly too dark against his skin. Then his mouth opened and did not say anything. Then his eyes went to the link on the paper and stayed there, and she saw in them the thing she would think about for the rest of her life whenever anyone told her a man in a good suit could not be afraid: they were the eyes of a man who has heard the ice crack under him and knows already, before he moves, how far it is to the shore.
***
He tried. Cora would remember that later with something closer to pity than she wanted to feel.
"This is a drunkard's lie," Whitcombe said. "Garrity has been in my debt and out of work for half a decade and he has found someone to pay him better." He turned to Amos. "How much? How much did your Omaha lawyer give him?"