that you can endure it so coolly. This isn’t chess, you know. We live here, too. If Desma folds, so do we all.”
He spoke without looking up from the Clarion. “One doesn’t fold in chess.”
In the intervening months, she had often regretted her inability to summon a smarting enough reply. “Surely not everyone can be in favor of moving the seat.”
“You’re damn right, Mama,” said Rob.
Emmett shrugged. “Of course not. But I told you, they’ll only ever print the ones who are.”
“Why aren’t we printing the rest?”
“What rest?”
“The rebuttals.”
“If there’s rebuttals, they’re not coming in to the Sentinel.”
This was beyond endurance. Since when had he ever relied on others’ words to fill his pages? Certainly not when he was decrying the miner’s plight, or enumerating the sins of the latest Indian agent, or scurrying off to the mountains to ask the old-timers exactly how much snowfall they’d had, and just how much more they could earnestly prophesy. “Then write you something, Mister Lark.”
“I suppose I may.”
To calm herself, she aimed all the false exuberance she could muster in Rob’s direction. “On the bright side, should Ash River become a proper cattle-town, you might consider staying here after all, and not go grumbling off to Montana.”
Rob looked darkly from her to Josie, and back down at the boot he was patching.
For a little while, Emmett seemed to undertake the task of drafting some response. He stayed up nights writing, and it heartened her to see his forehead so often in his hand by lamplight. But time went on, and this supposed answer went unprinted. When he’d fared off in spring—hurrying to Flagstaff when the ink delivery failed—she brooded the secret hope that he had left because the article was finally meant to run, and he could not bear to linger and be praised for it. But not a word appeared. Nothing.
The next reader to favor moving the county seat was some Ash River schoolmarm. She feared Amargo’s reputation was still too proximate to its lawless early days to make it reliably representative of the county. “We need only consider,” Emmett, loudly mirthful, read, “the significant fact that the Amargo Canyon Road seems to remain a haven of villains and badmen, while the Ash River Road is spared these blights.”
“We ought to go over there,” Rob had said. “We ought to go over there, and give the Ash River Road a taste of what blights really are.”
Emmett looked at him. “You leave off that kind of talk.”
“But there’ve been no holdups on the Amargo Canyon Road, Papa. None at all.”
“There will be,” Emmett said. “Closer to the vote.”
Sure enough, in July, a holdup was reported. In what was probably the longest tract of text Nora had ever seen committed to a Clarion column, a traveler from Prescott detailed his encounter with two hatted men on “stole-looking” horses who delayed him for three hours near the Cortez aguaje before relieving him of his purse and boots. His trials were considerably worsened by the long, barefoot trek into Amargo to notify Sheriff Harlan Bell of this depredation. “Imagine my anguish,” Dolan read, in a profoundly nasal mimicry of the writer’s voice, “to learn that my reward would be a further three hours’ detour to a parched little pueblo, where Sheriff Harlan Bell, a rough man of unsympathetic disposition, directed me to an establishment he referred to as a ‘hotel’—which turned out to be a drafty ruin as old as the frontier itself, where the apex of hospitality was being assigned a room whose windows had not been shot out.”
“Moss Riley will take exception to that,” Nora said. “He’s let the Paloma House go a little, sure—but it’s still a very fine place.”
Emmett’s head, fixed in a sour smile, floated around the parlor door. “Ah, poor wretched pilgrim. If only Ash River were the county seat—then the Sheriff’s office would be there, mere steps from all the new hotels, and not here in this backwater.”
Dolan rustled the paper in his father’s direction. “I believe their point is: it’s a no-water.”
This glibness was got from Emmett’s side of the family, and it did not suit Dolan at all. Nora found herself unbearably provoked. What were they doing, sitting here in the kitchen, chuckling at the inevitable dissolution of the town—as though that smug pedant, Bertrand Stills, were the sole owner of a printhouse in the entire valley? As though they were powerless to do anything but shrug and be swept away?