"You've got somewhere now."
"Yes," she said. "I have."
In April, a year almost to the day after the high water, they put the stone up on the rise.
It was gray granite from a yard in Laramie City, plain, the size of a hearthstone. The coffee tin had had seventy-four dollars and sixty cents in it by the middle of March, thirty-seven dollars and thirty cents of it in Keziah's coins and the rest in Linnet's, and they had carried it to the bank together and bought the draft. The stonecutter had wanted to put a verse on it. Keziah had wanted a verse too, something out of Ivanhoe, and Linnet had told her firmly that you did not put Sir Walter Scott on a grave in the Wyoming Territory, and they had argued about it for a week, which Linnet enjoyed more than she let on. In the end it was Nehemiah who decided, the only thing all winter that he had asked to decide. He brought the honest letter into the shop one Sunday evening and laid it on the imposing stone and put his finger on two words.
So the stone said CALEB MORGAN, and the years, and under that, in letters Linnet laid out herself in pencil for the cutter so that the spacing would be right: YOURS HONESTLY.
There were perhaps thirty people on the rise that Sunday. The Reverend Lathrop, over his cold at last, said a prayer. The Noble Grand of the Odd Fellows said that Caleb had pulled his boy out of a well. Fenna Gault cried, and Mrs. Dimmock, after a struggle, came and stood next to Linnet and said, not looking at her, that the shop's handbills for the spring sale had been the handsomest in the county, and that she supposed some things worked out. Keziah did not cry. She stood beside the stone in a new dress she had paid for herself, with her hair up for the first time, and when the Reverend asked if anyone else wanted to say something, she stepped forward and took a folded sheet of paper out of her pocket and read, in her clear schoolroom voice, the letter Caleb Morgan had dictated the week before he died, the whole of it, down to the part where he said it was not very well put but she was to leave it alone.
When she finished she folded it and gave it to Linnet. "It was addressed to you," she said. "It's yours. It should have gone a year ago."
Linnet took it. She found she could not say anything at all.