Duncan Pryce heard about the visit before the dust of Ana's mare had settled on the drive. He heard it the way men like Duncan always hear things: from a hand who had been mending fence by the road and had seen a schoolteacher ride up to the big house and ride away again, and who had repeated it at the bunkhouse table as if it were nothing, and from a second hand who had seen Rosalind standing at the window long after the rider was gone, which was not nothing at all. Duncan had spent eighteen years learning the weather of Rosalind Carmichael's moods the way a sailor learns a coastline, and he knew, with the cold certainty of a man who has survived by reading other people, that the weather had changed.
He did not panic. Panic was for younger men. He went to his own small house behind the barn, poured a glass of whiskey he did not drink, and sat with his ledger open in front of him, turning the pages with a steady hand. The ledger was a good ledger. It was the ledger he showed Rosalind every quarter, neat and careful, with the drought deaths entered in his own hand, forty head here, sixty head there, the losses mounting just slowly enough to be believed. What it did not show was the second tally he kept in his head: steers driven off at night to a buyer at Miles City. He had been skimming for three years, and he had told himself, each time, that it was only what he was owed for eighteen years of silence and service. A man who has kept a fire secret for eighteen years does not feel like a thief. He feels like a creditor.
But a creditor, he understood now, needs the debtor to stay blind. And Rosalind Carmichael was no longer blind. She had delayed the waterhole sale twice, once for "inventory" and once for "the county clerk's schedule," and a woman who had signed every paper put in front of her for eighteen years does not delay twice without a reason. The schoolteacher's visit was the reason. Duncan did not know what Ana had said, and he did not need to know. He knew what a woman like Ana would say, because he had spent eighteen years dreading the day someone from the shepherd camp would stand up in a room and say it.
So he did what he had always done when the ground moved under him: he moved first, and he moved fast.
That afternoon he rode to Juniper Creek and into the railroad agent's office, where a man named Cole, with ink on his cuffs and a map of the valley on his wall, had been waiting for months for the Bar Seven's signature on the waterhole sale. Duncan did not have the signature. He had something almost as good: a letter, written in Rosalind's name, in a hand close enough to hers to pass a tired clerk, authorizing him to "proceed with preliminary arrangements" for the sale. He had practiced that hand for years, on tally sheets and on orders, and Cole, who wanted the waterhole more than he wanted to ask questions, took the letter and smiled and said the surveyors would be out by the end of the week.
"And the old woman?" Cole asked. "She'll sign the final deed?"
"She will sign what I put in front of her," Duncan said, "when the time comes. She has always signed what I put in front of her."
It was true, and it was the truest and most dangerous sentence he had ever spoken, because it was the sentence that had kept him alive for eighteen years, and it was about to stop being true.
On the ride back, Duncan stopped at the north pasture, where Sam Kearney's crew was moving a string of steers toward the creek, and he watched Sam work for a while from the shade of a cottonwood. Sam was a good foreman. That was the trouble with Sam. He counted cattle the way other men counted money, and he had begun, in the last quarter, to ask questions about the drought deaths that did not quite add up — why the deaths were always in the far pasture, why the carcasses were never found, why the numbers rose whenever Duncan rode to Miles City. Sam had not accused anyone. He had simply started keeping his own tally, in a small book he carried in his shirt pocket, and Duncan had seen the book, and had understood what it meant, the way a man understands a rattlesnake when he hears it in the grass.