She set the bridle strap down and looked at the lamp flame for a moment. They are running out of direct options. She said, "This is what that looks like. " He thought about that. It was accurate. Pressure on the surrounding structures was what a cornered position looks like when the direct approach has become too visible.
It meant the riders had been a mistake, too obvious, too. And now they were returning to slower methods. "Beckwith is not going to bend," Levi said. "I know. " She picked up the bridle strap again. That is why they are going to try something more direct again before long.
They cannot afford to let the federal inquiry proceed. She was right, as she was right about most things, she assessed with that same quiet precision. The two men outside the lying camp had been a probe. The next thing would not be a probe. That night he moved the table so it braced the door from inside and she didn't say anything about it which meant she approved neither of them slept especially well.
But morning came without incident and the morning after that and the one after that and the days accumulated between the probe and the federal reply slowly but steadily the way days do when you have no choice but to let them. Beckwith rode out in the early afternoon with a folded letter and the look of a man who had just watched something he wasn't sure would happen actually happen. He sat at the table and spread the letter out and walked them through it. The federal land commissioner's office had received the copy of the document. They had cross referenced it with the existing records from the 1879 price survey.
A formal inquiry had been opened into the conveyance of the eastern quarter section to the Cimarron and Eastern mining consortium. A federal investigator named Aldis Pratt was coming from Santa Fe. He would be in Cimarron within 2 weeks. The inquiry would not by itself bring anyone to justice for what had happened to Miguel Aldama, but it would put the land conveyance on hold, put the men who had arranged it under scrutiny and create the formal record that Shenoa's document could be entered into evidence against. Shenoa read the letter twice.