That afternoon, Rosalind rode out to Cottonwood Waterhole alone. She had not visited it in months, and she told herself she was going to look at the water level in a dry year, which was true, and that she was going to think, which was also true, and that she was not going because Duncan had told her not to waste a ride on it, which was truest of all. The waterhole lay in a hollow between two low ridges, ringed with cottonwoods whose leaves were already turning, and the water itself was dark and still, reflecting the sky like a held breath. In a dry year, it was the difference between a ranch that lived and a ranch that died. She understood, standing on its bank, why a railroad would want it, and why a shepherd family would need it, and why a man might sign a paper about it in a hurry, in a clerk's office, with a baby asleep in the next room.
She found fresh survey stakes driven into the ground along the eastern ridge, painted red at the tops, the railroad's mark. No one had told her the surveyors had been there. She stood looking at the stakes for a long time, and then she pulled one out of the ground and carried it back to her saddle, the way a woman carries evidence, and she rode home with it across her lap.
At supper, Duncan was expansive, the way he always was when he wanted her to agree with him. He talked about the railroad's offer, about the price of water in a dry year, about the future of Bar Seven, and he did it all with the ease of a man who has rehearsed his arguments until they sound like common sense.
"Rosalind," he said, pouring her coffee himself, which he rarely did, "the railroad will not wait forever. If we do not sell the waterhole now, they will take their line ten miles north, and we will have sold nothing and lost everything."
"I have told you," Rosalind said, and she kept her eyes on her plate, "the tally comes first. I will not sign a paper about water while I do not know how many cattle I own."
Duncan's smile thinned. "The tally is a clerk's problem. Sam can sort it."
"Sam has sorted it," Rosalind said. "That is why I am asking questions."
She watched him then, the way she had watched him on the porch the day the trunk arrived, and she saw the same thing cross his face — too quick to name, gone before she could be sure — and then he was smiling again, and talking about the weather, and she knew, with the cold certainty that had made her a successful cattlewoman, that Duncan Pryce was afraid of something, and that the something had to do with numbers, and with water, and with a trunk he did not know she had.
The next morning she rode to the depot, not for freight, but for Edith Marlow and the depot's records. Edith brought out the freight ledger for September 1872, its pages brittle and its ink faded, and together they found the entry for the trunk: received on a wagon from the direction of the shepherd camp, in the week of the fire, the driver unnamed, the consignee listed as E. Carmichael. There was a note in the margin, in a clerk's hurried hand, that the wagon driver had said the trunk belonged to "the shepherd folk" and was to be held for Mr. Carmichael. Edith read it aloud, and then she looked at Rosalind, and Rosalind looked at her, and neither of them said what they were both thinking: that a trunk belonging to shepherd folk, addressed to a cattleman, in the week of a fire, was not an ordinary piece of freight.
"Do you remember the driver?" Rosalind asked.
Edith shook her head. "I was young then, and everything was confusion. I remember only that the man would not give his name, and that he left before the trunk was unloaded. I have always wondered about that trunk, Mrs. Carmichael. I am glad it is yours now, whatever it means."
Rosalind thanked her, and she rode home with the survey stake still in her saddlebag and the freight entry copied in her own hand on a scrap of paper, and she felt, for the first time in days, as if she were walking a trail that led somewhere, instead of standing in a room full of closed doors.