The train from the east did not stop at Juniper Creek so much as it hesitated, the way a man hesitates before delivering bad news. It came down out of the Sweetgrass hills with its brakes sighing, set three boxcars and a single passenger coach onto the siding, and stood there steaming while the depot agent worked the manifest with a pencil chewed to a stub. Rosalind Carmichael watched it from the wagon seat, her hands folded over the reins, her back straight in the manner she had cultivated over eighteen years of being the only woman in any room where cattle were counted. She had not come for the train. She had come for an explanation.
Forty head of Bar Seven cattle were missing from the autumn tally. Not lost to wolves, not drowned in a coulee, not sold with a bill of sale she had signed in her own firm hand. Missing in the quiet, bookkeeping way that frightened her more than any stampede ever had, because a stampede left tracks and a thief left only a gap where numbers ought to have been. Duncan Pryce, her manager, had told her the tally men must have miscounted in the dust at the fall roundup. He had said it easily, the way he said most things, and she had nodded, because she had trained herself long ago to nod at Duncan Pryce. That morning she had decided, without quite deciding, to stop nodding.
She climbed down from the wagon and crossed the depot yard, her boots striking the planks in a rhythm she recognized as her own: unhurried, certain, the walk of a woman who owned six thousand head of cattle and the ground they stood on. The depot smelled of creosote and coal smoke and the faint iron tang of the rails themselves. Inside, Edith Marlow stood behind the counter with a ledger open before her and a pair of spectacles perched low on her nose, the way she had stood there for as long as Rosalind could remember, a small, precise woman who treated freight the way other people treated scripture.
"Mrs. Carmichael," Edith said, without looking up. "You have come about the consignment."
"I have come about forty head of cattle that are not where my books say they ought to be," Rosalind said. "But I will take the consignment first, if it will get me to the bottom of either."
Edith closed the ledger with a soft, deliberate sound and looked at her. There was something in the woman's face that Rosalind had not expected: not the brisk competence of the depot, but a carefulness, as if Edith were choosing which door to open.
"There is something else you should see before you go," Edith said. "It is not on your manifest. It has been here a long time. We are required to auction unclaimed freight at the end of the month, and I did not want it to go to auction without you seeing it first. I am not entirely sure why. It is only that the name on the tag made me think of you."
Rosalind frowned. "What name?"
Edith did not answer directly. She came out from behind the counter, took a key from the ring at her waist, and led Rosalind to the back of the depot, past the stacked crates of barbed wire and the barrels of nails, to a storeroom where the light came thin through a high window and fell in a single dusty shaft onto the floor. In the corner, half-hidden behind a tarpaulin, stood a trunk.
It was not a fine trunk. It was a working trunk, of oak and iron bands, its leather handles cracked with age, its corners worn down to the pale wood beneath. A paper tag, yellowed and curling, hung from one handle by a length of twine. Rosalind bent and read it, and the breath went out of her as if someone had struck her between the shoulders.
The tag bore a name in a clerk's faded hand: *E. Carmichael, Juniper Creek*. Beneath it, a date: *September 1872*. And beneath that, a single word in a different ink, the ink of a depot man settling a matter: *Unclaimed*.
"Eighteen years," Edith said quietly. "It came in the week after the fire at the shepherd camp. Everything was confusion then. The trunk was put in the back, and then it was behind other things, and then the years went on. I found it when we cleared the storeroom for the new siding. I thought — I thought you ought to be the one to open it."