Whitcomb looked at her as if surprised she had a voice that belonged in his office. "Ma'am, starts are what this county is made of. Finishes cost more."
By dusk the riders had taken rooms at the other end of town—two men, dark coats, one with the scar that interrupted his left eyebrow, the other younger and too careful with his hat. They did not hide. Hiding would have been a confession. They smoked on the boardwalk and watched the Pine Bench the way accountants watch columns.
Evelyn ate stew in the dining room and discovered she was starving. The stew was beef and potato and a stubbornness of pepper. Thomas ate enough to keep upright. Mrs. Orth set cornbread down as if it were a vote.
A drummer at the next table talked too loudly about ore prices. A miner with white dust in his hair slept sitting up. Galena Crossing performed its evening without consulting them.
"You can take the Eastbound tomorrow," Thomas said again, quieter.
"I heard you the first time."
"Hearing isn't deciding."
Evelyn looked at her gloves beside the plate. "If I leave, the seal still exists. The story still exists. You still have a claim someone wants badly enough to invent a wife. Leaving doesn't unmake the machine. It only removes one witness who can say she never met the man who wrote the letter—because that man never wrote it."
"Witnesses get hurt."
"So do people who run alone," she said. "I already ran once. It put me on your platform."
After supper Mrs. Orth brought a basin of warm water to Evelyn's room and a pair of thick wool stockings that had belonged to a niece in Leadville. Evelyn washed her face and felt the mountain cold retreat an inch from her skin. She hung the burgundy dress with care. The brooch on the hat winked once in the lamplight and then went dull. She slept in a borrowed shift that smelled of soap and cedar. She woke twice—once to hoofbeats that turned out to be nothing, once to her own heart arguing with the letter under her pillow.
Morning brought pale light and a reply from Denver ahead of schedule: the assay office confirmed Thomas Reed's known signature differed from the proposal's hand in three consistent ways—the slope of the T, the closed loop of the e, the pressure on terminal strokes. Cubb delivered the wire personally, cheeks pink from the cold, pride mixed with nerves.
An hour later the solicitor in Philadelphia wired that a travel voucher in Evelyn Calder's name had been purchased through a Denver intermediary listed as H. Rourke Interests, care of a clerk named Pettigrew.
Thomas read both wires at the breakfast table and folded them into his vest.