"Could be he just never told her," Sundance said. It wasn't agreement, only the other possibility laid out plainly, which was his habit.
"Could be," Butch said. "Or it could be somebody found it convenient that David Hargrove wasn't around anymore to say whether he signed anything at all."
"So we go looking," Curry said, not quite a question.
"We go looking," Butch said. "But I'd like to know which it is before I decide anything more than that."
Carver had been quiet, chewing on a strip of jerky and thinking about something else entirely. "There's a county clerk's office in Buffalo where a deed like that would have been recorded, and a land office not far from it besides. Deed books don't lie about when a page was added, even if the ink on the deed itself does. And I read a piece in the Buffalo paper not three weeks back about the Anglo Wyoming outfit buying up parcels along the Powder River all spring and summer. Four, maybe five, all quiet, all quick."
"You read everything," Ben said.
"Somebody has to to what's being said about us," Carver said, not entirely joking.
Butch looked around the fire at the four of them: Curry sharpening his knife like he wanted an excuse, Sundance watching the dark tree line out of habit, then running a thumb along a fence post he'd pulled up and brought back to camp, turning it in the firelight, studying the wood grain like it might testify.
"This post is new cut," Ben said. "Six weeks, maybe less. Whoever moved that fence line did it recent, around the same time as that deed was recorded, I'd wager. And well before any court had finished ruling on it."