Chapter 5

The road broke open on Thursday.

Three days of snow, then a hard blue morning that would let a horse through.

Alva had the bay and a sled horse saddled before the hens were off the roost.

"Long Fork," she said. "The recorder keeps the brand book."

"If that B was ever filed, it's in his book. If it wasn't, I've a thief to name."

She said nothing about the iron Shay had wrapped and hid again.

She said nothing about the gray cloth door.

Tacy rode the sled horse and kept her mouth shut.

The ring rode in Alva's apron the whole eighteen miles.

The recorder's office sat over the land office on the one street in town.

A man in sleeve garters brought the brand ledger to the counter.

Alva turned the wide pages herself.

"D-Bar," she said, and set her finger on the line.

"Filed by Eldred Deighton, spring of fifty-nine. Mine by my husband's will."

"Now show me a B filed anywhere in this county."

The recorder leafed back through the marks.

He went year by year, running his thumb down the columns.

"No B on bar," he said. "Nothing near it. Never recorded."

Alva shut the book.

"Then it's a stolen mark," she said. "Not a man's lawful brand."

It made the mark a thief's, not a brand. It left Shay holding the iron that made it.

Tacy waited for the ease of that, and it didn't come.

Her mother's letter sat in her bag, tied, and it said a child had lived.

She waited until Alva stepped to the window to watch the street.

"The old deaths," Tacy said low to the recorder. "Back to sixty-two. Do you keep those?"

He brought a thin register, foxed at the edges.

Tacy turned to February of 1862 with cold fingers.

The entry was short and in a cramped hand.

Deighton. Infant daughter. Died February the third, 1862.

Attended, it said, by a midwife.

Dollie. No surname set down after it.

Tacy's breath went tight.

A grave the county swore to. A letter that swore the baby breathed.

Both could not stand.

She felt Alva come up at her shoulder before she heard her.

Alva looked down at the line that named her own loss.

Her jaw set, but she said not one word.

She reached past Tacy and closed the register with the flat of her hand.

A clerk at the front counter called over the rail,

"Deighton - your sale's posted and confirmed. Saturday, twelve noon sharp."