And then, in September of 1872, Elias had died, and Duncan Pryce had come to the house at dusk with smoke on his clothes and a story on his lips.
Rosalind remembered that evening now, in her study, with Sam's tally book open before her, and she remembered it differently than she had remembered it for eighteen years. She remembered Duncan's torn shirt, and his blackened face, and the way he had held her hands while he told her that Elias had set fire to the shepherd camp to clear the waterhole, and that the fire had turned, and that Elias had been trampled by his own frightened cattle trying to escape it. She remembered that she had believed him instantly, without asking a single question, and she understood now why. She had needed a villain. Grief without a villain is a shapeless thing; it has no edges to hold onto, and it drowns you. But grief with a villain has a shape. You can hate a villain. You can build a life out of hating a villain. You can get up in the morning and run a ranch and count cattle and be iron, because iron does not grieve, and iron does not ask questions, and iron does not lie awake wondering whether the man you married was a different man than the man you buried.
She had built Bar Seven out of that iron. She had ruled it with a discipline that the men respected and the town feared, and she had told herself that she was honoring Elias by being hard, when in truth she had been honoring her own hatred, and the hatred had been a roof over a house with no one living in it.
That was the past. The present was a tally book with forty prime steers missing, and a manager who was urging her to sell the most valuable water in the valley to the railroad, and a trunk in her study that said her husband had given that water away to strangers, forever, eighteen years ago.
"Sam," she said, and her voice was steady, because she had trained it to be steady. "I want you to do something for me, and I want you to tell no one, not even your wife, until I say otherwise. Count the herd again, quietly, pen by pen, and write the true count in a book of your own, not the ranch book. Bring it to me, and to me alone. Do you understand?"
Sam nodded. "I understand, ma'am. And Mr. Pryce?"
"Mr. Pryce," Rosalind said, "will continue to believe that I am an old woman who trusts him. Let him believe it a little longer. Iron," she added, almost to herself, "has its uses. But it is not the only metal in this house."
After Sam left, she sat alone in the study for a long time, with the tally book open and the trunk standing in the corner where she had put it, its iron bands catching the light. She thought about the forty steers, and about the railroad men, and about the way Duncan had spoken at the feast, as if the sale of the waterhole were already decided. She thought about the fact that Duncan had been the only witness to her husband's death, and that she had never, in eighteen years, asked another man who had been at that fire what he had seen. She had not asked because she had not wanted to know. She had wanted the simple story. She had wanted the villain.
She was not sure she wanted it anymore.
She rose, and she went to the trunk, and she laid her hand on its lid, and she thought of the little yellow outfit folded inside it, and of the tintype of a man holding a baby as gently as if it were made of glass, and of a piece of paper that said a waterhole belonged to a family named Zubizarreta, forever. And she made herself a promise, in the quiet of the study, with the tally book open and the morning light coming through the window: she would find out where the forty cattle had gone, and she would find out what the yellow wool meant, and she would find out, before she signed anything or trusted anyone again, whether the man she had hated for eighteen years had been the man she thought he was, or whether she had spent eighteen years building an empire out of iron on top of a lie.