The interior of the main house was dark, warm, and smelled overwhelmingly of old leather, linseed oil, tobacco, and roasting beef. The central great room was dominated by a river-stone fireplace large enough for a grown man to stand upright within the hearth. Heavy hide rugs covered the plank floors, and the walls were decorated with mounted elk antlers, old cavalry carbines, and raw rawhide lariats.
An elderly woman with steel-gray hair knotted severely at the base of her skull emerged from the kitchen doorway, wiping her red hands on a flour-sack apron. Her face was as lined as a dry creek bed, and her dark eyes were sharp as awls.
"This is Martha," Nathan said, stepping into the hallway and kicking the snow from his heels. "She's been cooking for this outfit since my father broke ground here thirty years ago. Martha, this is Mrs. Pierce. She'll be handling the books, the provisions, and whatever else keeps the hands from drinking us dry."
Martha looked Eleanor up and down with the ruthless economy of an old frontier woman sizing up a heifer. Her gaze lingered on Eleanor’s thin wrists, her patched hem, and the hollow shadows beneath her cheekbones.
"She looks like a brisk breeze would blow her clear across to Nebraska," Martha pronounced, her voice like gravel sliding down a chute. "And the boys look half-starved."
Eleanor’s chin lifted automatically. "My boys are healthy, Mrs.—"
"I didn't ask for a speech, girl," Martha cut her off, though her eyes softened with something that looked suspiciously like grudging sympathy. "I said they're starved. There's cornmeal mush with maple syrup and fried salt pork on the back of the stove. Boys, take your boots off at the mat and get in here before the grease turns white."
Henry looked at his mother for permission. Eleanor gave a small, stiff nod. The two boys scurried into the warmth of the kitchen like frightened rabbits heading for a burrow, leaving Eleanor alone with Nathan in the great hall.
Nathan gestured toward a heavy pine door at the far end of the hallway, beside the base of the open stairs.
"My father's study," he said. "Or what's left of it. Let's see what you make of the ruin."
The study was colder than the rest of the house.
When Nathan pushed the door open, a hinge shrieked in protest, disturbing a layer of pale, powdery dust that lay across the threshold. The room was illuminated by two tall, narrow windows that looked eastward toward the snow-choked ridges of the Black Range. Against one wall stood floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, their pine planks sagging under the weight of leather-bound legal tomes, agricultural reports from Washington, and rows of black cloth-covered binders.
In the center of the room sat a massive desk carved from solid black walnut, its surface completely buried under an avalanche of papers: yellowed invoices, bills of lading, crumpled telegrams, tally sheets from cattle drives, and half a dozen massive, leather-bound folio ledgers with mold spots speckling their spines.
"My father bought this desk in Omaha," Nathan said, leaning his shoulder against the doorframe, his thumbs hooked in his belt. "Hauled it two hundred miles by ox-cart. He sat behind it like a judge on the bench. After he died... well, I preferred the saddle. If a man brought me a bill, I paid him out of the safe or I told him to go to hell. If a cow was sold, I stuck the bank draft in a drawer."
Eleanor walked to the desk, her fingers trailing across the dusty wood. She picked up a sheet of paper at random. It was a receipt for fifty sacks of salt from the Union Pacific depot at Rawlins, dated four years earlier, with a red stamp that read UNPAID - DISPUTED. Beneath it lay an uncashed sight draft for eight hundred dollars from a Chicago packing house, dated October 1883.
"You have uncashed drafts sitting here to rot?" she asked, turning to him with genuine shock.
Nathan shrugged, unbothered. "Bank was sixty miles away. Roads were muddy. By the time I got around to it, the clerk told me the draft had expired and I had to apply to the main office in Illinois. I had three thousand calves to brand. I didn't have time to write love letters to Chicago."
Eleanor shook her head. Her tidy, methodical mind—the mind of a schoolmaster’s daughter who had been taught that an unbalanced column was an offense against God and decency—was appalled and exhilarated all at once.
"It is a catastrophe," she said.
"I told you it was."
"It's worse than a catastrophe. It's willful neglect." She untied her shawl, folded it neatly, and placed it on a corner of the bookshelf. She rolled the sleeves of her dress up past her forearms, revealing wrists that were slender but corded with sinew from years of chopping wood and hauling well-buckets. "I need three things immediately, Mr. Crowley."
Nathan’s eyebrows rose at her sudden change in tone. The quiet, defensive widow from the sod cabin was gone; in her place stood a woman who looked ready to drill a cavalry unit.
"Name them," he said.