Corporal Klemm took the stand last. His nose had healed crooked, with a new bump halfway down. He sat with his hands flat on his knees.
"I was in the wrong, sir," he told the president of the court, a gray colonel from Fort Whipple. "At the gate. I spoke of the scout like he was an animal, and I spoke to Miss MacRae like she was a fool, and I pushed my finger in her face. The Captain struck me for it. He'd no right to strike me. I'll say that plain, because it's true, and because he told me to say it. But I'd like it in the record that I wasn't so much wronged as stopped." He paused. "I'd like it in the record that I've been stopped before, by better men than me, and never listened, and this time I did."
The colonel looked at him over his spectacles for a long moment and told the clerk to take it down.
Nalté was called as well. A captain on the court, a man with a long jaw, asked him whether an Apache scout understood the nature of an oath. Nalté looked at him and said that he had sworn one at Fort Apache six years ago and had kept it, and he would be glad to hear the captain describe how the army had kept its half. The colonel told the clerk to strike the question, and the answer, and then, after a moment, told him to leave the answer in.
The sentence was published in General Orders on the last day of the year. Captain Whitcombe was to be reprimanded by the department commander, the reprimand to be read at the head of every company in the district, and to be suspended from rank and command for six months on half pay. Asa read it standing in the snow outside the adjutant's office, folded it, and put it in his breast pocket next to his watch.
"It's fair," he said to Iona.
"It's cheap," she said. "For what it cost Klemm to say what he said."
"That's not mine to pay. Mine was the fist."
In Tucson, the grand jury of the First District sat in January. Callum MacRae testified from a chair with his leg straight out in front of him on a stool. Saybrook's ledger, taken from the near wagon in Cañon Quemado, was entered in evidence, page by page: payments to J. Tull, payments to men named only by their initials, a payment of eleven hundred dollars against the account of D. Holloway, and a line in Saybrook's own hand, three weeks before the wagons reached Ojo Prieto, that read simply: Cibecue campaign—forage est. Saybrook's lawyer, a smooth man in a gray suit, rose to tell the grand jurors that the principal witness was an Apache who had been an Apache scout, which was to say an Apache twice over, and asked them how far they meant to trust him.
Corporal Klemm, who had come down on his own furlough and paid his own stage fare, stood up in the back of the room before the bailiff could stop him and said, loud enough to be heard on the street, that he had seen the painted men with his own two eyes and that the scout had told it true, every word, before any white man had believed him. The bailiff put him out. The grand jury indicted Wendell Saybrook on eleven counts. He was released on bail of ten thousand dollars that afternoon, and his trial was set for April.
Holloway lived. The ball had gone through the top of his lung and out his back, and for a week Birch had not expected him to see Christmas, and then one morning he asked for coffee. He pleaded guilty in the territorial court to conspiracy and gave his evidence against Tull and Saybrook in full, and he waited in the Pima County jail for his sentence.
Nalté went to see him once. He went alone; he asked Iona to wait outside in the street, and she did, for nearly an hour, watching mule teams go by in the dust. When he came out she did not ask, and after they had walked half a block he told her anyway.
"He asked about my daughter," the scout said. "He has always asked about my daughter. Three years. Every time I came back from Cibecue." He walked on a few steps. "I don't know what to do with that. I don't think I am meant to know yet."