"They were going to take the gold," Haggerty said slowly, "and burn the rest."
"They were going to take the gold," Gabriel said, "so your company could tell the insurers it had been stolen. And they were going to burn the rest so that nobody would ever know what it said."
He opened the tin box with his good hand. The lid stuck, then gave. Inside, the folded contracts lay in their bundles, each tied with a red ribbon by a man named Lindqvist who had been a clerk in the Pueblo land office until April. The topmost bundles were scorched brown at the edges. The bottom of the box had held. But in the left-hand corner, where the paint had burned through and the heat had come in, a stack of documents had gone black and soft and fell to ash when he touched them.
He counted what was left. He counted twice.
Thirty-four.
He sat back on his heels in the grass with the ash on his burned fingers and said nothing for a long time. Louisa sat beside him with the ledger in her ruined skirt. Neither of them spoke. The smoke went up into the enormous blue sky, and the mountains stood at the end of the world, white and indifferent, and somewhere south of them a man on a grey horse was still riding.
V.
They laid the wounded in the baggage car on mail sacks and folded tarpaulins: Billy Ochs with a belt cinched above the hole in his thigh, the short rider with his shoulder packed in a torn petticoat, and Amos Snell, whose leg Pruett had splinted with two lengths of lath from the ruined coach. Dutch Rennick lay at the far end under a grey wool blanket. The woman in the brown dress, whose name was Mrs. Oberlin and who was traveling to see a new grandchild in Golden, went from one to another with a canteen and a face like a closed door, and when she came to Gabriel she took his burned hands in hers without asking and began to wrap them in strips of linen soaked in the cold tea from the drummer's flask.
"My husband was a surgeon's steward at Shiloh," she said. "Tea draws the fire. Hold still."
He held still.
Louisa sat on a trunk under the one lamp with the ledger open on her knees. It was a receiving book, the kind every land office kept, ruled in red and blue. Down the left ran dates; then names; then sums. She turned the pages slowly. Her gloves were ruined, and she had taken them off, and her fingers on the paper were very white.
"Bly, Hester," she read. "March fourth, 1881. Eleven dollars. Received, A. Lindqvist." She turned a page. "Bly, Hester. July the ninth. Eleven dollars." She turned more pages. "Every quarter. Every family. In some hand or other, every payment."
"The company's notice said that forty-one families missed their payments in the winter of '81," Gabriel said. "That was the drought winter. Hard on everyone. Plenty of white farmers on railroad land missed. Your company carried them over, as it should. Us it marked in default. But we hadn't missed. We'd sold our seed wheat to pay it. Lindqvist took it in and wrote it here, and then somebody in Denver made a second book that said otherwise, and that was the book they showed the county."
"And Mr. Lindqvist?"
"Dismissed in April. For drink, they said. He doesn't drink. He came out to Freedom Creek on a rented mule and sat in my sister's kitchen and told us this book existed. He's in Kansas City now, keeping books for a dry-goods house, and he is afraid of his own shadow, and he will testify if we can pay his fare." Gabriel looked at the ledger. "Without this, it's his word against a railroad's."