"Yes."
"What did it say?"
She untied the string on the second bundle and went through the letters until she found it. It was shorter than the ones before it. She read it aloud, because she found she wanted to hear how it sounded in the open air, in the place it had come from.
"Dear Miss Rudd. I am sorry to be slow writing. There was a bad time here with the high water and we lost a horse and I have not felt like writing to anybody. I do not want to tell you about it yet. I hope you will not think less of me. The grass is coming up very green now on the rise behind the house. You can see it from the kitchen. I think you would like it. Please write and tell me something about the print shop, anything at all, even if it is only what you set that day. I would like to think about something ordinary. Yours truly, C. Morgan."
When she looked up Nehemiah Morgan had turned his face away toward the plains. She waited. A man rode by in the street on a gray horse and touched his hat to them and kept going.
"We lost a horse," Nehemiah said at last, without turning around. "That's one way to put it. The horse was the mare. Penny. The one he bought in Rock Creek. She broke a foreleg in the same fall and I had to shoot her in the creek with him lying on the bank." He breathed out. "The grass on the rise. That's where we put him. You can see it from the kitchen window. Whoever wrote that letter was standing in my kitchen looking at my brother's grave."
Linnet folded the letter along its old creases.
"Mr. Morgan," she said, "I think you know who it is."
"I think I might," he said. "I hope to God I'm wrong."