Duncan rode down to the creek, dismounted, and spoke to Sam as a friend speaks to a friend, which was how Duncan had always done his worst work.
"Sam," he said, "Mrs. Carmichael asked me to look into the shortfall. Forty head in the last quarter. She wants to know where they went."
Sam straightened, and his face went carefully blank, the way a man's face goes when he is deciding whether he is being tested or being trapped. "They didn't go anywhere, Duncan. They're dead on paper, but I never found forty carcasses, and you know it."
"I know what the book says," Duncan said, and he smiled, and the smile did not reach his eyes. "The book says the north pasture lost forty head to drought, and the book is in your handwriting for the last three months, because you were the one who took the tally after I was laid up with the fever. Mrs. Carmichael will see that book, Sam. She will see your name on it."
Sam stared at him. "You were never laid up with the fever."
"Wasn't I?" Duncan said. "The hands will remember it differently, if they're asked. Men remember what they're paid to remember, Sam. You know that as well as I do."
He mounted and rode away without waiting for an answer, and he left Sam standing by the creek with his rope in his hands and the late sun on his face, understanding, all at once, that he had been framed — not with a lie told about him, but with his own honest work, turned inside out and laid on the table as evidence against him.
That evening, Rosalind sat in the study with the torn settlement in the fireplace and the yellow coat on the desk, and she wrote, in her own hand, a letter to the county clerk. It was not a settlement. It was a question: what papers would be needed to return the Cottonwood Waterhole to the name of the family it had been registered for in 1872, and to record a schoolhouse at Cottonwood for the children of shepherds? She sealed it, and she gave it to Edith Marlow's boy to carry to the depot in the morning, because Edith Marlow was the one person in town she trusted.
She was still sitting there, the pen in her hand, when Sam Kearney knocked at the study door. He came in without his hat, which he never did, and he stood in front of her desk with his hands at his sides, and he told her, plainly and without self-pity, what Duncan had said at the creek. He told her about the tally book in his pocket, and about the forty head, and about the fever that had never happened. He did not ask her to believe him. He simply laid his own tally book on the desk beside the yellow coat, open to the page where the numbers did not match, and waited.
Rosalind looked at the book, and then at Sam, and then, through the window, at the barn, where a lamp had just been lit in Duncan Pryce's house, and where a man's shadow moved behind the curtain, quick and restless, like a man packing a bag he had hoped never to pack. She thought of Ana, riding away down the drive that morning, refusing five thousand dollars as if it were a stone. She thought of Elias, eighteen years dead, trying to give a thing back and being burned for it. And she thought, with a clarity that felt almost like relief, that Duncan Pryce had just made his first real mistake: he had framed the one man in the valley who kept honest numbers, and he had done it in front of a woman who had finally learned how to read them.
"Sam," she said, "sit down. We have a great deal of counting to do before morning. And when we are finished, you will not be the one who has to explain himself in this house."
Outside, the wind moved through the yellow grass of Sweetgrass Valley, and somewhere in the dark, a coyote called, and was answered, and the Bar Seven settled into the night with its lamps lit and its doors unlocked, the way it had not settled in eighteen years.