That evening, Sam came to the study after dark, as she had asked him to, and he laid a small, plain book on her desk. It was his own count, made pen by pen, in his own careful hand. It agreed with the first count exactly. Forty head were missing. And on the last page, Sam had written something else, in a hand so small she had to hold it to the lamp to read it: the names of the buyers on the questionable sales, and beside each name, in Sam's plain script, the words "no bill of sale found."
Rosalind closed the book and looked at Sam, and Sam looked at her, and in that look an understanding passed between them that did not need words. Someone at Bar Seven was stealing cattle, and selling them, and writing the losses down as drought, and the someone had access to the tally book, and to the buyers, and to the railroad men who came to town in the weeks the cattle went missing.
"Keep counting," Rosalind said quietly. "And keep it between us. I will deal with Mr. Pryce in my own time, and in my own way."
After Sam left, she sat alone with the two books on her desk — the ranch tally, with its practiced, in-between handwriting, and Sam's plain book, with its honest numbers — and she thought about the trunk in the corner, and the yellow wool folded inside it, and the waterhole with its red survey stakes, and the shepherd camp that had burned eighteen years ago. She did not yet suspect Duncan of the fire. That suspicion was a door she had not opened, and she did not know it was there. What she suspected, coldly and clearly, was theft. And theft, she had learned in eighteen years of running a cattle empire, was a thread. If you pulled it gently, and steadily, and without letting the thief see your hand move, it would lead you, in time, to everything else.
She opened the ranch tally to the page where the in-between handwriting appeared, and she studied it by lamplight, comparing it in her mind to the letters Duncan had written her over the years — notes about prices, about buyers, about the weather — and she felt the first true chill of the investigation settle over her, because the handwriting was not quite Duncan's, and yet it was not quite anyone else's either. It was the handwriting of a man trying to be someone else, and failing, in the small, human way that all forgeries fail.
She closed the book, and she blew out the lamp, and she stood at the window looking out at the dark yard, where the Bar Seven cattle moved like shadows in the far pasture. Tomorrow, she decided, she would ride to the sheep camp at the edge of town, and she would ask the old shepherd woman there what she knew about yellow wool, and about a trunk, and about a fire. She did not know the old woman's name yet. She did not know that the woman would have a flock book, or that the flock book would have a date in it, or that the date would be the fourteenth of September, 1872. She knew only that the thread was in her hand now, and that she intended to follow it, wherever it led, even if it led back to the house she lived in, and to the man who had managed it for eighteen years.
Before she went to bed, she thought about the winter of 1875, the winter the men of Juniper Creek had first started calling her iron. The cattle price had fallen, and the buyers had come to Bar Seven expecting a young widow to sell at a loss, and she had refused them, one by one, standing in this same study with the tally books open and her back straight, until they went away and came back in the spring with a better price. The men had respected her for it, and the town had feared her a little, and she had taken both the respect and the fear and made a home out of them. Iron had kept her alive. Iron had kept Bar Seven alive. But iron, she understood tonight, had also kept her from asking questions, because questions are not iron things. Questions bend. Questions open doors. And for eighteen years she had chosen the metal that did not bend, because bending had felt too much like breaking.