"Ma'am," the marshall tipped his hat. He was younger than she'd expected. Clean shaven with a serious set to his mouth. "Name's Deputy Marshall Cole Banister out of the territorial office in Cheyenne. I'm looking for Mrs.
Eleanor Carter. You found her. Eleanor kept her chin level. If this is about the water, my husband's out in the It's not about the water, ma'am. Not directly.
Banister hesitated, and something in his hesitation frightened her more than any threat would have. It's about Charles Whitaker. May I come in? I think you'll want to be sitting down for this. Eleanor did not sit down.
She stood in her own front room with her arms crossed. Nathaniel called in from the barn to stand beside her. And she made the marshall say whatever he'd come to say, standing up because she had learned that bad news delivered while you were seated had a way of knocking you flat, and she intended to take this one on her feet. When Judge Puit referred Whitaker's dealings to our office, Banister said, "We started pulling his records, lending contracts, land transfers, water claims going back 15 years." He turned his hat slowly in his hands.
Mrs. Carter, what we found wasn't just a man being greedy about a creek. Charles Whitaker's been running the same play across three counties. He finds families that owe him money, waits till they hit hard times, then squeezes them into selling for a fraction of what their land's worth. He's done it to at least 40 families that we can document.
Probably more we can't. Eleanor's arms tightened across her chest. 40 families at least. Some of them lost everything. A few lost more than that.
Banister's jaw worked. There's a widow near Laramie, name of Adelaide Marsh, whose husband took his own life two years back after Whitaker foreclosed on their spread. There's a family in the next county that scattered to four different states when they lost their land. This man's ruined lives across the whole territory, ma'am. And he did it careful, always just inside the law, always with a signed paper to point to.
He looked up at her. Until you stood up in that courtroom and asked one simple question. Why would a man cross a county to break up a marriage? And the answer to that question is the thread that's about to unravel the whole thing. The room had gone very quiet.