Do you? He thought about his father and the judge and the particular helplessness of watching something unjust proceed with institutional authority behind it. He gave her Kansas about what it did to his father, not the loss itself, but the specific shape of it, about the gap between a court that functioned and one that merely performed the motions. She was quiet for a long time after that. Miguel believed in courts.
She finally said, "Not blindly. He was not a man who trusted blindly. But he believed that a notarized document with a federal signature had more power than the men who wanted it gone. If you could get it in front of the right court, he waited. The document might be enough in the right court. in Santa Fe, not Cimarron.
She looked at the braiding. It has to be, she said, at the way a person says something, they have been living inside for a long time. Not a wish, but a loadbearing beam. No particular attachment to Rayado or anywhere else. And the federal investigator was going to need whatever weight Beckwith and an eyewitness could bring.
She looked at him for a moment. All right. She turned back to the braiding. The two men came on the 23rd day. Levi saw them from the window before dawn.
Two figures moving through the cottonwoods from the east. Not riding the track from the main road, but cutting across country. They knew where the camp was, or had been close enough long enough to work it out. He was dressed and at the door with his rifle before the gray light had fully come on. Shenoa appeared at his shoulder, already dressed, the folding knife closed in her fist.
She was looking at the same angle he was. She recognized the taller one, a man named Darnell Walsh, who had been in the hall outside room 7 at the accidental hotel in October of 1882. What followed was not a gunfight. Walsh and his companion came within 30 ft of the door, and Levi stepped outside in the early dark and held the rifle in a quiet, conversational way, and informed them that they were on private land belonging to a former United States Marshal, and that the next thing they decided to do was going to determine how the rest of their lives looked. A long silence, Walsh offered that he was looking for a stray animal.