Yes. Did it cost you anything? Gideon took off his coat, hung it. Considered the question honestly. Not as much as I expected, he said.
Desa looked at him. Then he looked at your barn from the track. I was watching through the root cellar gap. He spent more time on the barn than the cabin. Gideon turned.
He and Desa looked at each other. He put his coat back on, went to the barn. She followed. They found it in the northeast corner behind the grain sacks. In the snow that had drifted under the baseboard gap, snow that was packed, not fresh, tracked through before today.
Two sets of footprints, small, deliberate, the depth of men who knew how to move quietly. Someone had been here before Apprentice arrived. He'd sent men first, then come himself to read Gideon's face. He moved the grain sacks. Nothing missing, nothing disturbed.
But there, wedged in the corner, a small metal disc, no bigger than a shirt button, stamped with a number, survey marker, railroad land assessment. Apprentice hadn't sent men to look for the women. He'd sent men to confirm this barn, this ground, this exact location fell within the right coordinates. Gideon closed his fist around the disc. Very small, very cold, meaning something very large.
He already has the survey done, Gideon said. Desa looked at the disc before he came to you about the north 40, she said. He already knew what was here. He was just waiting for everyone standing on it, too. She stopped to cease to be a problem.
The wind pushed at the barn walls. Abel shifted in his stall. the letters. Gideon said, "We need copies, multiple roots, " Desa said immediately. "Yes, she was already ahead of him.
He could see it. " The way her mind was working through branches and contingencies the same way she'd mapped the ridge, changed the pattern, read the bootprints. "Mama writes, clearest, " she said. "But she needs her rest. " "Tomorrow, " Gideon said.
Tomorrow they went back inside. He set the survey disc on the table next to Apprentice's folded letter. Two small objects, ordinarylook, between them, the weight of what one man with enough certainty could do to a landscape. To the people on it, Amma looked at the disc. Then at Gideon, then at Desa, he was here, she said, and his men before him, Desa said.
Amma was quiet a moment. Then she picked up her pencil. We should work tonight, she said. While we have the light, they worked through that evening and into the next day. Amma copied each letter in her clear, careful hand.