Ana Zubizarreta had not slept well, and she knew, as she rode toward the Bar Seven in the thin morning light, that it was not the ride that had kept her awake. It was the refusal. She had walked into the house of the most powerful woman in Sweetgrass Valley and told her that her money was not enough, and the woman had listened, and had torn up her own settlement, and had said the waterhole would go back in the Zubizarreta name. Ana had ridden home with that promise in her ears like a bell, and all night she had turned it over, the way a teacher turns over a child's answer that is too good to be true, looking for the flaw in it. Promises, in her experience, were easy to make in a study and hard to keep in a county book. Men who had promised her aunt a school had promised it for eighteen years.
She had come back in the morning for a practical reason, and she told herself, firmly, that it was the only reason. She had drawn, on the back of a school slate, a plan for the schoolhouse at Cottonwood: one room, a stove, benches enough for twenty children, a shelf for books. She wanted Rosalind to look at it and tell her whether the Bar Seven's carpenters could raise it before the snow, and what it would cost, and who would pay the teacher. She did not want to be grateful. She wanted to be exact. Exactness, she had learned from Miren, was the only thing that kept poor people from being cheated twice — once by the theft, and once by the settlement.
What she found at the ranch house was not a woman waiting to discuss a schoolhouse. It was a kitchen table covered in tally books.
Rosalind sat at the head of the table with her sleeves rolled to the elbow, a pencil behind her ear, and three years of the Bar Seven's records spread in front of her like a battlefield. Sam Kearney sat opposite, hollow-eyed, with his own small pocket book open beside the big ledgers, and between them were two cups of coffee gone cold and a plate of bread no one had touched. They looked up when Ana came in, and for a moment neither of them spoke, as if she had walked into a room where a quarrel had just ended and the air had not yet settled.
"Miss Ana," Rosalind said, and she sounded almost relieved. "Good. You have a teacher's eye, and I need one. Sit down."
Ana sat. She put her slate on the edge of the table, carefully, away from the books. "What is this?"
"Counting," Sam said. "Three years of it, all in one morning. Mrs. Carmichael asked me last night to bring every tally I ever kept, and we have been matching them against Mr. Pryce's ledgers since dawn."
Rosalind pushed a ledger toward her. "Duncan's book says the Bar Seven lost forty head to drought last quarter. Sam's book says he counted the north pasture himself the week before the drive, and found the herd whole. Forty head do not die of drought in a week, Miss Ana, and they do not die without leaving bones."
Ana looked at the two books, side by side. Duncan's ledger was neat, confident, written in a hand that had never hesitated. Sam's pocket book was smaller, rougher, the numbers crowded and corrected, with notes in the margins — "creek low," "two calves, twins," "old red cow lame, left behind." It was the difference, Ana thought, between a story told to be believed and a record kept to be true. A teacher learns to tell that difference in the first week of school, when a child copies another child's sums and the figures are too perfect to be honest.
"Show me the pattern," she said.
So they showed her, and as the morning wore on, the pattern rose out of the numbers the way a fence line rises out of snow when the wind blows it clear. The drought deaths in Duncan's book were never scattered, the way real deaths scatter. They came in round numbers — ten, twenty, forty — and they always came from the far pasture, the one farthest from the house, where no one would go looking for carcasses.