She unfolded the paper next. The wax seal broke with a small, dry crack. The paper inside was a brand registration, written in a clerk's careful hand and signed at the bottom in a signature she knew the way she knew her own heartbeat. *Elias Carmichael.* The registration recorded a brand — the Bar Seven, seven bars burned into the hide — and beneath it, in a paragraph written in a different, more hurried hand, a provision she had never seen in any ranch document in her life.
She read it twice, because the first time she was certain she had misread it.
The provision protected Cottonwood Waterhole, the only reliable water for miles in a dry year, the waterhole she had fought to keep, the waterhole Duncan Pryce was even now urging her to sell to the railroad. It protected it, the document said, for the use of the Zubizarreta family, in perpetuity. The name meant nothing to her. She had never heard it spoken in Juniper Creek, or if she had, she had not listened. It was a Basque name, she thought, the name of shepherd people. And her husband, the man she believed had burned a shepherd camp to take that very waterhole, had signed a paper giving the waterhole to a shepherd family forever.
Her hands began to shake. She put the paper down on the lid of the trunk, carefully, as if it might tear, and picked up the tintype.
The photograph showed a man standing in front of a canvas tent, holding a baby wrapped in a shawl. The man was Elias. She knew his face at once, though the photograph had darkened with age: the straight nose, the heavy brow, the mouth that in life had rarely smiled and that in the photograph was doing something she had almost never seen it do. He was looking down at the baby in his arms, and his expression was not the expression of a hard man, or an ambitious man, or a man counting cattle. It was the expression of a man who had just been handed something infinitely fragile and who was afraid to breathe too hard lest he break it. The baby was small, its face a pale blur in the tintype, and around its shoulders was wrapped a shawl of a yellow so bright it seemed to burn through the old photograph.
Rosalind stared at the tintype until Edith touched her elbow gently.
"Mrs. Carmichael," Edith said. "Are you unwell?"
"No," Rosalind said, and then, because it was not true, she said, "Yes. I do not know. I need to take this trunk home."
She did not ask permission. She was not in the habit of asking permission. Edith helped her carry the trunk to the wagon, and Rosalind loaded it herself, settling it behind the seat with the care she would have given a crate of eggs, and she drove out of Juniper Creek with the trunk behind her and the brand registration folded inside her coat, next to her heart, where it seemed to beat against her ribs with every jolt of the wagon.
The road home ran along Juniper Creek itself, a thin silver thread in the dry grass, and the hills rose on either side in the tawny colors of late summer. She had driven this road a thousand times. She knew every gate, every cattle guard, every place where the creek bent and the cottonwoods threw shade. Today the road looked unfamiliar, as if she were seeing it through someone else's eyes. She found herself thinking of the autumn of 1872, when she had been twenty-four and the ranch had been small and Elias had still been alive, and she tried to remember whether he had ever mentioned a shepherd family, or a baby, or a waterhole that was not his to sell. She could not remember. That was the worst of it. She could not remember him mentioning any of it, and she did not know whether that meant he had hidden it from her or whether she had simply not been listening.
When she reached the ranch house, Duncan Pryce was waiting on the porch, his hat in his hands, his face arranged in the expression of respectful concern he wore whenever he wanted something from her. He was a big man, broad through the shoulders, his hair going gray at the temples, his eyes the pale blue of a winter sky. He had been with Bar Seven since before she had married Elias. He had been the foreman when Elias died. He had been the one to tell her how it happened.