"No."
"Your question's whether I'm going to make her pay it back. Or turn her out. Or have the Reverend Lathrop at Rock Creek take her off my hands." His jaw worked. "Which I had already about decided to do, before any of this. That's the truth of it, and you might as well know it, since you're going to hear it from her before supper. I'm a bachelor man alone on a ranch eleven miles from town. Mrs. Dimmock at the next place over has been telling me since June it isn't fitting, a girl of thirteen keeping house for a single man that isn't any relation. The Reverend has a family in Laramie City that wants a hired girl, a decent family, a druggist. Room and board and four dollars a month and she'd go to a proper school. I told him she could go after the fall gather. The first of November."
"Did you ask her?"
"I told her," he said, and Linnet heard in the way he said it that he knew precisely what the difference was.
"When did you tell her?"
"July. The end of July."
"And the money order was bought in August."
"Yes, ma'am."
The wagon jolted over a dry wash and climbed out the other side. Ahead the hills were coming closer, and she could see now that they were not blue but a dusty green-gray, dotted with sage and something darker that might have been cedar. A line of cottonwoods marked a watercourse running down out of them, yellow already with the turn of the year.