"You put sixty thousand dollars in gold in that car," she said, "insured with the Hartford for its full value. You don't ship gold in a twenty-year-old express car with one guard, Father. You ship it in the steel car with three. Mr. Quarles has told me so since I was a child. Did you think about that when you signed the bill of lading?"
He turned around then. "Do you know what this railroad is?" His voice was low, and not angry; it was the voice he used to talk to the men in the shops, which was the best voice he had. "It's four hundred and eighty miles of track that wasn't there when I came west. It's eleven hundred men on the payroll. It's the towns. Every town between Pueblo and Trinidad is a town because I put a water tank there. In January I owe one million, two hundred thousand dollars to men in New York who have never seen a prairie and never will, and if I don't pay it, they will put the road in receivership and sell it to Jay Gould for scrap, and those eleven hundred men will be on the street in the snow. That is what the Dunmore sale is. That is all it is. One valley."
"With forty-one families in it."
"Who would have been paid. I'd have seen them paid. Fair value for their improvements. I told Corwin—"
"They had paid, Father. They paid you. Every quarter, for seven years, they paid you, and you had a second book made to say they hadn't." She heard her voice rise and pulled it back down. "I read it. I sat in a baggage car with Dutch Rennick under a blanket and read their names. Hester Bly, eleven dollars. Eli Strickland, nine dollars and fifty cents, in a winter when we had oysters sent up from Galveston on ice."
He set the whiskey glass down on the mantel very carefully, as if it might break of its own accord.
"Who is he?" he said. "The colored man. Quarles said—"
"His name is Gabriel Tolliver. He was a first sergeant in the Tenth Cavalry for ten years. He keeps the books for Freedom Creek. He walked into a burning car for that ledger and so did I, and he is sitting tonight in the city jail on Larimer Street because someone in your company sent a wire that said a colored man had a gun."
"I didn't send any wire."
"No," she said. "You never do."
That struck him. She saw it go in. He sat down at last, on the hard leather sofa across from her, and put his big hands on his knees, and for a while he looked at the carpet.
"What will you do?" he asked.
"I've done it. The book is with Mr. Pettibone. I have a receipt."
"Then it's done." He laughed, a short dry sound with nothing in it. "Then it's done, and the bondholders will have the road by Easter, and I'll be in the papers from here to Boston. Is that what you want?"