"Why would anyone—" Louisa began, and stopped, because she knew.
From the mail sacks Snell said, "Scotchmen."
They both looked at him. His face was grey under the burn. He had been lying with his eyes shut, but they were open now.
"Dunmore Land and Cattle. Out of Edinburgh. They want forty thousand acres on the Purgatoire breaks and the Freedom Creek bottom is the only live water for twenty miles. They'll pay six dollars the acre if the title's clean. Your father owes the New York bondholders a payment in January he can't make. That's the whole of it, miss. It ain't wickedness. It's arithmetic."
"Forty-one families," Louisa said, "is arithmetic."
"Yes'm." Snell shut his eyes again. "I know it."
Gabriel turned his bandaged hands over in his lap. "You read that notice at my sister's door in January," he said. "With the snow coming down. Her youngest was crying."
"I remember."
"And the next morning there was a sack of flour on her step. Fifty pounds. No name on it."
Snell said nothing for a while. The car swayed. Somewhere forward the engine whistle sounded for a crossing, long and mournful.
"I lost two fingers making up a train in Pueblo yards in seventy-six," Snell said at last, and lifted his right hand, and they saw the gap where the third and fourth fingers should have been. "Company paid me nine dollars and gave me a badge so's I wouldn't sue. I've got a girl, eleven, with a cough that the doctor in Pueblo wants to send to a sanatorium at Manitou. Mabry said five hundred dollars. He said, Amos, it's a show for the newspapers, nobody aboard gets hurt, the passengers keep their watches, the coin goes to a bank in Trinidad under another name, and the old man gets his insurance and his problem goes away." He opened his eyes and looked at Louisa. "He never said to me, the old man wants it burnt. I want that understood. Mr. Kittredge never said one word to me. But I've worked for Corwin Mabry nine years, miss, and Mabry don't spit without he's been told which way the wind blows."
"You knew what was in the car," Gabriel said.
"I knew." Snell looked at the blanket at the far end of the car. "Dutch didn't. Dutch thought it was gold. I told him it was gold. He had a girl in Littleton he meant to marry at Christmas."
Nobody said anything after that.