She didn't speak for a moment, then she was ready to go. They rode into Cimarron on a clear December morning, 12 days before Christmas. Beckwith leading, Levi beside Shenoa, two of Beckwith's friends riding behind. The town looked as it always did from the road, ordered functional, holding its real transactions in back rooms. Aldis Pratt was a man from Santa Fe with a carefully neutral eyes of someone paid to evaluate without expressing opinions.
He had set up a temporary office in the Colombia hotel on the east side of the main street, not the accidental. He received them in a spare second floor room with a desk and three chairs and a lamp. Shenoa sat across from him and gave her statement in a clearer, uninterrupted voice that took 40 minutes. the hotel, the men, the three faces in the lantern light, and the name she had attached to them, the document which she laid flat on the desk, and its providence her uncle, the 1872 agreement, the translation, the notary stamp, the names of the two federal witnesses still alive to corroborate. Pratt examined the document for a long time. He posed three procedural questions.
He wrote everything down. When she finished, he set his pen down and confirmed that her statement and the document together constituted the most complete record of the matter that had come to the federal office's attention. The inquiry would proceed. She would be contacted for further testimony. He looked at her over his papers.
Her uncle had done careful work, he observed. She met his eyes. His name was Miguel Aldma, and I would like it in the record. Pratt wrote it down. Outside on the street afterward, Cimarron moved around them in its ordinary December way a wagon passing two women at the dry goods store.
The newspaper press audible through an open door. Levi stood beside Shenoa on the boardwalk. He didn't say anything immediately. He had learned the shape of her silences well enough to know when one wanted company and when it wanted space. This one wanted company.