"She is at Alder Creek. I have wired —" His voice caught, and he steadied it. "I have wired my apology. She travels west this evening in the drawing room, at the railroad's expense."
Eleanor Vance nodded slowly. "I would like to send a message with yours," she said. "If the railroad permits it."
"The railroad permits it."
She dictated it to him, standing there in the waiting room with her nephew beside her, and Pruett wrote it down in his own hand on the back of his wire pad, because he wanted no operator between him and these words.
It said: MRS VANCE IS SORRY STOP THE BROOCH IS HERS AND SHE KNOWS WHERE IT WAS FOUND AND WHAT THAT MEANS STOP SHE ASKS MRS ELLISONS PARDON STOP.
Pruett read it back to her. She nodded. He took it to the telegraph desk himself and had it sent after his own, to Alder Creek, to the woman with the station agent's blanket.
"She did not want a scapegoat, Conductor," Eleanor Vance said to him as he turned to go. "I want you to know that. I wanted my property. Not that."
"I know, ma'am," Pruett said. And he did know. That was the worst of it, in a way. No one had wanted this. The thief had wanted a case. The conductor had wanted certainty. And a quiet woman with one suitcase had paid for both.
He walked back out to the platform. His train stood there, the great streamliner gleaming in the mountain sun, Car Seven riding patient in the middle of the consist with its curtains drawn and its porters moving through it, and Pruett looked at it for a long time.
Thirty years. He had been king of this train for thirty years, and he would be king of it again this evening when it pulled out for Salt Lake City — but it would not be the same kingdom, and he would not be the same king. That was the cost, and he would pay it, publicly, every time he walked the aisle of Car Seven and remembered the berth that had been empty at six o'clock and the woman he had put off at eleven forty.
He put his cap on straight. He squared his shoulders. And he walked down the platform toward his train, to take it west, with the wire already ahead of him in the mountains, carrying his name and his apology and the plain unvarnished truth to Alder Creek.
The afternoon wire came at half past three, and Emma read it to her twice, the second time slowly, as if the words might spill if she hurried them. Martha sat on the bench by the waiting-room stove with her hands folded around a cup of tea that had gone cold, and listened to a railroad conductor apologize to her by telegraph. It was Mr. Pruett's own name at the bottom of it. Emma tapped the flimsy with one finger and said that was the part that mattered, and Martha believed her, because Emma had watched nineteen years of men write things down and knew which signatures cost something and which did not.
There was a second wire with it, this one from Denver, and it was about the room. The drawing room in Car Seven, the best room on the train, held for Mrs. Ellison of Dayton, Ohio, at the railroad's expense, on the next Rocky Mountain Limited west, departing Alder Creek on the evening of Saturday the eighteenth. Nobody was to call it anything but what it was, the wire said. Martha asked Emma what it was, and Emma said, "It is the road saying it was wrong, in the only handwriting it has."
The third wire was shorter and traveled with the second, in Mrs. Vance's own phrasing as the operator had taken it down. It said she was sorry. It said the brooch was hers and she knew where it had been found and what that meant, and it said she hoped Mrs. Ellison would not think too badly of the train. Martha read it three times and then folded it into her handbag beside the library book, which the night porter of the eastbound Limited — a man whose name she had never learned — had brought back to the platform at Alder Creek with her suitcase the night before, because Emma had refused to let the train take a single one of her things past her.
All afternoon the station was full of a particular kind of business. Emma was at the key half the time, sending Martha's existence ahead of her down the line the way other people send luggage. Salt Lake City. Reno. Sacramento. Division points whose names Martha had only ever seen printed on a timetable, and now each of them would know that a drawing room was coming through with a schoolteacher in it, and why. Martha sat by the stove and felt her name going west ahead of her like a lantern carried into a dark house, and she was grateful, and she was embarrassed, and she could not have stopped it if she had tried, which she did not try.