This land is mine. You filed that claim 3 weeks after I broke ground. And you know the settlement was active when you filed it. Come back with something real or don't come back at all. Dunar looked at her with the expression of a man who had expected this to be easier.
Ma'am, without proper legal representation. I said what I said, Clara said. Good morning, Mr. Dunar. She turned back to her garden.
She heard Perch say something low to Dunbar that she could not catch. Then the horses moved. They were gone. She did not move from the garden for several minutes. She kept her hands in the earth, loosening soil around the base of the onion plants, keeping the rhythm of it, keeping her hands moving because that was the thing that worked when everything else in her was moving too fast in a direction she could not afford to follow.
Her hands still, steady, the earth under her fingers, cool and real. Then she went inside, picked up young Henry, sat in the rough chair by the window, and let her hands shake for exactly as long as they needed to. She sent word to Amos that afternoon. Three words given to a passing supply rider headed north. Come when you can.
He arrived the next morning before 8. She told him everything. Dunar, perch, the witness argument, the claim dates straight through without editorial, the way she had learned to tell him things, which was completely and in order. He listened the way he always listened without interrupting. His expression moving through things she could read now that she had been reading it long enough.
Recognition first, then calculation, then something underneath both that was harder to name. "You know Dunar," she said. "I know who he is," Amos said. "He's been taking smaller claims east of here for the past 2 years, usually from homesteaders who run out of money or lose their nerve." He paused. He's never tried one that was already built and settled.
He's trying now because he thinks I'm easier, Clara said. Yes, Amos said flat, not softened. A widow alone without means to fight him through the courts. He said it the way it was. The specific categories Dunar was counting on because softening it would have been its own kind of condescension, and he seemed to understand that.