Yates exhaled. "I can hold the sale. I cannot unmake a county filing overnight. Telegraph goes out at dawn if the line is up. Until then, nobody leaves town, and those pouches stay locked."
Drake nodded once. The pouches had been his stake for a piece of grazing land two counties west—money saved across three bitter seasons of hired work, night watches, and a winter that had killed half a herd that was not his. He had been a day from riding out to put a deposit on grass that might finally be his. Now the grass would wait, or vanish to another buyer. He did not say that in the room. Saying it would have sounded like a man asking for thanks he did not want.
Crowe put on his hat. "Dawn, then. Paper is still paper."
When the door shut behind him, Pike looked at Drake. "You did a reckless kindness. Men like Crowe collect on reckless kindness."
"I noticed," Drake said.
Morning came hard and clear. The telegraph office smelled of oil and metal. The operator, a thin woman named Ruth Haver, tapped out Pike's message to the territorial examiner and a second to the county clerk's office at Fort Bridger Junction. Nora stood in the doorway with Sheriff Yates's permission and Mrs. Colm at her shoulder. Ada and Bess waited on the bench outside, close enough to hear the key's chatter.
"What if the clerk answers that the filing is good?" Bess asked quietly.
"Then we prove the signature false another way," Nora said. "Father's Bible. His old tax receipts. The neighbors who saw him make his mark. Pike's ledger is one stone. We need a wall."
Drake came up the boardwalk with his horse trailing, the white blaze bright in the sun. He had slept in the livery, not the jail. Yates had called it a courtesy. Drake called it a chain with a longer leash.
"Telegraph?" he asked.
"Sent," Nora said. "Waiting is the heavier part."