"I want to apologize," he said, "for what I did not do. Ten days ago, when Mr. Mercer..." He stopped, collected himself. "I should have spoken. It was wrong of me not to, and I have been unable to sleep soundly since."
Margaret considered him for a long moment. "Reverend," she said, "if your conscience is troubling you, I know a way you can do something about it that goes further than an apology."
She directed him toward Hart, who was already dismounting and opening his satchel with the practiced efficiency of a man who knew that witnesses had a short window of courage, and you moved fast when it opened. Hollis talked to Hart for forty minutes outside the dry goods store. When he was done, he went inside and sent a wire to three other clergymen in the county.
That was only the beginning. By noon, four more people had approached Hart on the street: a farmer named Gus Peterson, whose brother had lost his homestead to Mercer two years ago; Clara Briggs, who had account books of her own from when she'd done the store's bookkeeping, books that showed Mercer had charged the Briggs family for supplies they'd never received; and old Pete McAllister, who was mostly deaf and didn't care much who knew it, who told Hart in a voice loud enough for the whole block to hear that he'd seen Roy Cutter cut the Lawson fence line four nights ago with his own eyes, and had been afraid to say so until right now.
Margaret stood on the boardwalk outside the dry goods store and watched this happen, and felt something she did not immediately have a word for. Then she found the word: vindication. Not the clean, triumphant kind from stories; the messy, complicated, bittersweet, real kind. The kind that comes after a long time of being right and being alone in it, and finally seeing the world catch up.
Nathan appeared at her elbow. "Pete McAllister saw Cutter at the fence," she said.
"Apparently, Pete doesn't sleep well and his bedroom window faces your north boundary road," Nathan said. "He's been watching Mercer's men ride by at night for weeks. He just thought no one would believe an old deaf man."
She looked across the street at Pete, who was gesturing enthusiastically at Hart and drawing something in the dirt with the toe of his boot—a map, she realized, of the fence line and the road. "People always underestimate the ones who stay quiet," she said.
"Yes," Nathan said.
She looked at him sideways. He was watching Pete McAllister with an expression she was beginning to understand—that particular combination of patience and attention that meant he was seeing something most people missed.
"Is that what happened to you?" she asked. "People underestimated you because you were quiet?"