She took the note from Hart's hands. It was written in a hand she didn't recognize, in the kind of plain block letters you use when you want to be illegible, and it said: Mercer knows about Thomas. He sent a man to Denver this morning.
The world shrank to the size of that note in her hands. Thomas. Her boy. Her twenty-year-old son in Denver, studying land law on a scholarship he'd worked three years to earn, who wrote to her every two weeks and signed his letters with the same small drawing of a mountain he'd been signing letters with since he was eight years old.
She read the note twice, three times. Then she said, in a voice that surprised her with how steady it was, "What does he want with Thomas?"
"Leverage," Nathan said, and his voice was flat in a way she hadn't heard before. "If Mercer can't pressure you directly, he applies pressure somewhere else."
"Thomas has nothing to do with this land. He has no legal standing."
"No. It doesn't have to be legal," Hart said quietly. "It just has to be threatening enough to make you stop."
She set the note down on the hitching rail. She picked it back up. She looked at it again as though it might have changed. "I need to send Thomas a wire," she said.
"Yes," Nathan said. "Now, before Mercer's man gets there." He was already moving toward the telegraph office, but then he stopped and looked back at her. "Margaret. He's going to be all right. Mercer can send a man to Denver, but he can't do anything there. It's out of his territory. It's out of his reach. The worst he can do is threaten or frighten your son."
"Thomas doesn't frighten easily," she said. But her voice broke slightly on the last word, and she hated it, and she pressed her lips together and walked fast toward the telegraph office.
She wrote the wire herself. She kept it brief: Stay at school. Do not speak with strangers about family business. All will be resolved soon. Trust me. Mother.
She paid the operator and she stood at the counter after the operator took the message, and she breathed slowly and evenly, and did not let what was happening inside her show on her face. Nathan stayed beside her—not touching, not speaking, just there.