You built something real, he says. Not a compliment. The voice of a man who has been wrong about something and is acknowledging it in the only way he knows. Go home," she says finally before it starts again. He collects his horse.
At the edge of the clearing, he pauses and looks back once, the lantern in his hand, his expression unreadable in the dark. Then he rides north and is gone. She goes inside, changes out of her wet clothes, and lies down on the cot she built into the north wall. The roof does not leak. She lies in the dark listening to the last of the rain and thinks about Henry and 40 acres and the particular arithmetic of what a person can build when they have nothing left to lose except the thing they are building.
The child moves against her ribs. She puts her hand there and is still. The trouble arrives in September with a man named Roy Dunar, rancher 50some, heavy in the chest and accustomed to arriving places and having things go his way, and a land agent from Durango named Perch, who has the practiced neutrality of someone paid to deliver bad news without emotional investment. Clara is in the garden when she hears the horses. She straightens and looks at them and before either man has dismounted, she understands from the way they hold themselves that this is not a social call.
Dunar holds out a document. It is a land claim official looking territorial seal at the bottom. Her name is not on it. The parcel boundaries match hers closely shifted north by 200 yd which includes the cabin site. This parcel is registered in my husband's name, she says, and transferred to me on his death.
That transfer is what we're contesting, Perch says. The witness listed on the transfer document, a freighter named Edmund Cole, was Perch argues, not a territorial resident at the time of filing. Under territorial law, land transfer documents require a resident witness. If the witness was non-resident, the transfer is technically invalid. If the transfer is invalid, the land reverts to unregistered status and Dunar has filed a prior claim on the northern portion which includes everything she has built.
She looks at the document. Her hands are completely steady. When was your claim filed? She says to Dunar. 3 weeks ago.
This land has been actively settled for 11 weeks. She says by me. That's a legal question. Perch says smoothly for a court to decide. She folds the document and holds it out.
Take it back. He takes it slightly surprised. I know exactly what you're doing, she says. The Whitmore claim was registered legally. Edmund Cole had been working the Durango to Denver freight route for 3 years.