Lem had not wanted to work it. Lem had wanted the mountains, the way boys in Kansas wanted the mountains in those years, because the newspapers were full of Leadville and the silver that came up out of the ground in carbonate the color of a dirty saddle and men who had been mucking stables in March were buying opera houses by September. He had gone at seventeen with forty dollars and a pistol that did not shoot straight and their mother's blessing, given weeping, and he had written four letters in the first year, each shorter than the last.
"The fourth one came from Fairplay," Tallis said. "He'd hired on with an outfit hauling ore. He said he was well and the work was steady and he'd send money in the spring." He turned the cup. "That was the last we had from him. The next thing we had was a deputy from Park County who came all the way to Marion on the cars to ask our mother if her son was hiding in the house."
"What had he done?"
"Taken a horse." Tallis was quiet a moment. "I won't make it better than it was. He'd fallen out with the man he hauled for. Man named Cutbill. Lem said afterward, or I believe he'd have said, that he was owed two months' wages and Cutbill wouldn't pay, and so he took the best horse in the corral and rode off on it and called it square. I expect that's true. I expect it's also true that the horse was worth four times the wages. Lem never could do arithmetic when he was angry." He set the cup down. "So there was a warrant. And a reward, fifty dollars, which isn't much but is enough to make a certain kind of man keep his eyes open. And then there was nothing. Not a word. Not to us, not to anyone."
He had waited a year, he said. He had told himself that Lem was hiding, that Lem was ashamed, that Lem would write when the trouble blew over. Their mother had stopped sleeping. She would sit up in the kitchen with the lamp turned low and the door unbarred, in case he came in the night. In the second autumn, after the wheat was in, Tallis had left the farm with a neighbor and gone west to look.
"I didn't know what I was doing," he said. "I'm a farmer. I went to Fairplay and asked at the livery and the saloons and the post office. I went to Cutbill, who told me that if I found my brother I could tell him from Cutbill that there was a rope in Park County with his name on it. I went to Leadville and asked at every boarding house on Harrison Avenue and half of the ones that weren't on Harrison Avenue, and at the hospital, and at the county jail, and at the undertakers. There's a great many undertakers in Leadville. I went home in the spring with nothing. I went out again the next fall."
"Two years and four months," Sabra said.
"Yes, ma'am."
"And in October you found him."