Nothing came back from the South Ridge. Ferris was was a thin man in his mid-40s with inkstained fingers and the slightly windburned look of someone who had ridden hard in cold weather and was committed to not complaining about it. He carried a leather satchel that he sat on Gideon's table with the care of someone transporting something breakable, and he shook Mara's hand when Orson introduced them with a directness that she appreciated no hesitation about the crutch. No visible calculation about what a widowed woman in a borrowed cabin represented. Just a firm handshake and immediate attention to the task.
District Attorney Whitlock sends her regards, he said, already opening the satchel. And her apology for not coming herself. She felt her presence here might complicate the evidentiary chain. She didn't want Ror's lawyers claiming she coached the documentation, Mara said. Ferris looked up at her.
Exactly right, he said in the tone of someone who had expected to need to explain this and was adjusting. You understand how this works. I understand how Ror works, Mara said. Which amounts to the same thing. He produced his own instruments from the satchel, a magnifying glass, a set of reference documents she didn't immediately recognize, a portable ink block, and several blank sheets of recording paper with the territorial seal already printed at the top.
He arranged these on the table with the efficiency of a man who had done this many times in many different conditions and had stopped needing ideal circumstances. Mara unwrapped the oil cloth packet for the first time in front of witnesses. She had unwrapped it alone at night had read it so many times she'd nearly t memorized the particular slope of the recorder's handwriting from 1,882. But unwrapping it here at this table with Ferris's careful hands waiting and Gideon standing near the far wall and Orson in the chair by the stove felt different. It felt like the document was finally becoming what it had been designed to be.
Not a thing she carried to stay alive, but evidence. An instrument of a process larger than her survival. She set it on the table. Ferris put the magnifying glass over the surveyor's mark first. He studied it for a long time without speaking.
She watched his face for the particular micro expression of someone who has found what they hoped to find. And she saw a small controlled release of tension around the eyes that a different kind of man might have let become a smile. This is the 1,882 territorial survey designation, he said. Specific to this district, the character formation on the numeral sequence, he stopped. Looked up.
I don't need to explain the technical details to you unless you want them. Will they matter in court? Mara said,"They'll matter considerably in court.""Then I want to understand them,"he explained. She listened with the concentrated attention she'd always been capable of when something mattered. The same attention she'd given to Thomas's books when he brought them home from the settlement.
The same attention she'd given to Toby's fevers and the farm seasons. Ferris explained the surveyor's notation system, the specific district encoding, the way a fraudulent recreation would inevitably fail to replicate certain procedural elements that only an original recording would contain. He pointed to three places in the document where Ror's version, which Ferris had apparently, already obtained a copy of from the territorial recording office differed in ways that were small enough to miss casually and damning enough to not miss once you were looking. By the time he finished, Gideon had moved from the far wall to the table without Mara noticing when it had happened. He was standing close enough to the document, following the explanation with the focused look of someone who wants to underscend rather than just be assured.