"Where?"
"The Odd Fellows and the church took up a collection after the funeral. For a stone. Seventy-four dollars and some cents. People gave what they couldn't spare, because they thought a lot of Caleb. It's in a coffee tin on the shelf over the stove, waiting till I could get to Laramie to order the granite, which I haven't, because I haven't been able to make myself." He climbed up onto the wagon seat and reached down a hand to her. "I'd bet you my saddle that tin is empty."
She took his hand and climbed up. The seat was hard and the springs were poor and the wagon smelled of hay and axle grease and, faintly, of coffee. He clucked to the team, a pair of sorrel mules with white noses, and they went out of Elkhorn Siding at a walk, past the stock pen and the water tank and the last fence, onto a road that was two pale lines in the yellow grass going north toward a row of low blue hills.
For a long time neither of them spoke. Linnet sat with the leather case on her knees and watched the country open up around her, and she found, somewhat to her own surprise, that she was not crying. She had expected to cry. She had thought, if she thought about it at all, that if anything went wrong at the end of this journey she would sit down and weep the way Adah wept, freely and with a kind of relief. Instead she felt clear and cold and very awake, the way she had felt the morning she climbed out of the attic window over Penn Street with her mother's carpetbag and walked to the depot in the dark rather than face Prosper at breakfast.
That was a thing she had not told Nehemiah Morgan yet. She had not told the letters either. She had told the letters that Prosper had given his grudging blessing. It had been the only lie she had put in nineteen letters, and she had told it because she was ashamed that a grown woman of twenty-six should have had to climb out of a window.
So I lied too, she thought. Only once. But I did.
"Mr. Morgan," she said, when they had gone perhaps three miles. "What will you do to her?"
He drove a while before he answered. A hawk was hanging over the grass to the east, motionless, the way they did, as if it were pinned to the sky.
"I don't know," he said. "I've never hit her. I've never hit anybody that wasn't a man trying to hit me first. I'm not going to start." He was quiet again. "That's not really your question, though."