"He was forging Henry's handwriting," Margaret said.
"Yes." Agnes looked at her lap. "I backed out and went home, and I didn't say anything because I didn't know what to do. And three days later, he called me in and told me my services were no longer required, and gave me a month's wages, and told me that in his experience, women who saw things they shouldn't see were best served by relocating to somewhere quieter." She looked up. Her eyes were steady now—done with being quiet about this. "I was afraid. I am still afraid. But I am also sixty-two years old and I have lived in this valley my whole life, and I cannot keep watching what he does to people while I stay silent about what I know."
"Will you testify?" Margaret asked.
"Yes," Agnes Carver said. "I will testify."
Margaret reached across the table and put her hand over Agnes's still hands, briefly, firmly. "Thank you," she said.
They rode back to Red Hollow with Agnes Carver in a wagon her sister lent them, and the road felt different than it had that morning. Everything felt different than it had that morning.
Hart received the news of Agnes Carver's existence with the controlled intensity of a man who has just been handed the final piece of a structure he'd been building in the dark. He interviewed her for two hours. He took a sworn statement. He sent a copy of it by special rider to the territorial court in Laramie, with a cover letter requesting that the original civil hearing be expanded in scope to include criminal fraud charges.
Thomas sat in on the interview. He didn't speak; he watched Hart work with the concentrated attention of someone who is not just learning, but consuming, storing it for later, for the work that was his own work waiting for him down the road.
That night, after Agnes had been settled in the bunkhouse—she would stay until the hearing, at Margaret's insistence, where she could be neither pressured nor isolated—Margaret sat at the kitchen table in the particular quiet that descends after a long day of consequential events. Nathan sat across from her. Thomas had gone to bed. Hart was still writing, as Hart always was.
"Agnes Carver changes everything," she said.
"Yes," Nathan said.