"I am going to Tucson," Nalté said, "to speak at the trial of Saybrook. The agent asked me. I said I would come by the river road, because I wanted my daughter to see what a river is when it has enough water." He looked at Iona. "Also, you owe me a lesson. About the two letters in the middle."
"It's double consonants," said Iona. "It's a terrible rule. Half of it's not true."
"Then it is like most rules," said Nalté.
"Did they read the report?" Asa said. "At Fort Apache. Aloud. Both languages."
Nalté looked at him for a long moment.
"Yes," he said. "In January. Corporal Klemm stood at the front while they did it. Nobody asked him to." He shifted the girl in his arm. "I have not signed again. I have not said I won't. The trial is in April. I will see what a jury in Tucson does with what I tell it. Then I will decide."
"And if they don't believe you?" Iona said.
"Then I will tell it again," said Nalté. "I have found that I am good at it."
The children had crept closer. The girl in the red dress put out one finger toward Tobias's slate, where the word was still written in chalk, two r's in the middle where there should have been one. Iona looked at it and did not correct it.
She thought of the star, back on her brother's coat in Tucson, with its dent and its brown stain. She thought of how it had come into Ojo Prieto in a bleeding hand, carried by a man no one at the gate would listen to, and how it had been meant to make them listen, and how it had not. It had not been the star. It had been a man who rode nine miles with one hand on the reins, and then kept speaking after it was clear no one would hear him, and then came back down out of the light, again and again, until they did.
Nobody yet knew what a jury in Tucson would do in April. Nobody knew whether Asa would put the brass back on come summer, or whether he would stay by the river, or what she would say to him if he asked her which. The sun went down red behind the ridge. The rider who had been a shape against it was only a man now, on a tired horse, with his daughter in his arms, asking a schoolteacher about a rule that was only half true.
"Come down," Iona said. "There's coffee. I don't drink it, but there's coffee."
Nalté swung down from the saddle, one-handed, and lifted the child after him with the other.