Josephine took the knife and cut the stitches, one by one. She folded back the flap of leather. Underneath, set flush into the wooden tree where somebody had bored a little pilot hole to start it straight, was the flat head of the nail.
On purpose. Somebody had sat with an awl and a file and a gimlet and taken their time.
"He meant for Amos to die," Ab said, and his voice had gone strange and high, an old man's voice. "He meant it. He just sat there and—and sewed it up. And then he went and made everybody ride that poor animal in it. Every man that got throwed. He was making him into a killer. A little at a time."
"So nobody would ever look at his back," said Josephine. "So he'd be shot and drug off to the coulee for the coyotes, and the hole would go with him, and that would be the end of it." She looked down at her own hand, at the blood drying in the creases of her palm. "He'd have made Mr. Tillery ride him in it tomorrow. In front of the deputy. And then he'd have shot him himself, and been thanked for it."
Ab set the lantern down on the ground. He reached inside his shirt with his one hand and brought out something on a bootlace around his neck, and pulled the lace over his head, and held it out to her. It was a little leather-bound memorandum book, the kind they sold at the drugstore in Rawlins for a dime, swelled with sweat and curved to the shape of a man's chest.
"He give me that the night before he rode out," Ab said. "Amos did. He said, Ab, if anything happens to me, you give this to the one comes asking the right questions. I said, How'll I know which one? He said, You'll know." Ab's mouth worked. "I can't read, Mrs. Hale. Never could. I didn't know what was in it. I didn't know if it was anything at all. And I didn't know you. I'm sorry. I ought to have give it to you the first night."
"You've given it to me now," she said, and took it.
The pages were filled with the same careful pencil as the tally books. Most of it was weather and prices. But toward the back, in July and August, it changed.
July 9. Rode the upper springs. Should be 200 head on that grass, cows & calves. Counted 131.
July 22. Counted again. 126. No carcasses. No sign of wolf.
Aug. 4. L.B. says he will take the upper range himself this summer, says the boys are lazy. He has never wanted the upper range before.