IX.
The hearing on the Freedom Creek contracts was held on the twenty-eighth of October in the upstairs courtroom of the Arapahoe County courthouse, before Judge Amory Fitch, a small dry man who was said to have been a Methodist preacher before he read law and who still kept a Bible on the bench beside the statute books, closed.
The courtroom was full. Half the seats were taken by newspapermen and the curious. The other half had been taken since seven in the morning by men and women from Freedom Creek, who had come up from Bent County in two wagons and on the cars, paying full fare to the Kittredge Western because there was no other way, and who sat in their church clothes in a solid dark block on the left side of the room and did not speak above a whisper. Hester Bly sat in the front row with her two oldest. She was a tall woman with her brother's stillness and none of his patience, and she watched the door to the judge's chambers as if it owed her money.
Hollis Kittredge sat at the back on the right, alone, in a black coat. He did not sit with his lawyers.
His lawyer was Rutherford Vane, the best in Denver, silver-haired and courteous and very good. Vane argued for most of the morning that the Pueblo receiving book was an irregular document kept by a dismissed employee; that it was damaged and incomplete; that no court could rely on it to establish title against the company's audited accounts. He was reasonable about it. He was so reasonable that Gabriel, sitting at the plaintiffs' table beside Weatherby with his scarred hands folded, felt the floor of the room tilt under him.
Then Weatherby called Anders Lindqvist.
The clerk had come from Kansas City on a ticket bought with eighty-three dollars passed in a hat at the Freedom Creek meeting house; Louisa had offered the fare, and Gabriel had thanked her and declined, and had not explained, and she had not asked him to. Lindqvist was a thin fair man with trembling hands and a voice that dropped almost to nothing when he was frightened, so that Judge Fitch twice asked him to speak up. But he identified his own hand on every page. He described the second book: a fair copy prepared in the Denver office in the spring of 1882, on the instructions of Mr. Corwin Mabry, from which certain entries had been omitted. He said he had been told it was for the auditors. He said that when he had asked why the colored accounts were left out, Mr. Mabry had told him that it was not a clerk's business to ask why.
"And where is that second book now, Mr. Lindqvist?"
"I don't know, sir. I never saw it again."
Vane did not cross-examine him long. There was not much to cross-examine.
After the noon recess, Weatherby called Louisa Kittredge.
She took the stand in grey. She put her hand on the Bible that Judge Fitch held out and swore, and her voice did not shake, and at the back of the room her father lowered his head.
She told it plainly. The mark on the revolver. The man's hand on her arm. The explosion. The car on the rails, and the coal oil, and the ledger at the bottom of the forward shelf directly beneath where the oil had been poured. She said the words "a quantity of ash" and saw two of the newspapermen write them down.
Vane rose to cross-examine. He was gentle with her, as she had known he would be.