The first was with a rancher named George Tilden, who had a land dispute with Franklin Harrington that went back four years and had never been formally resolved, but which sat in the county records like a splinter, small, quiet, and persistently uncomfortable. Amelia had found evidence of it in the Carter Ranch books because Nathaniel had briefly mediated the original dispute, and the records of his mediation were still in the files. She briefed Nathaniel on every detail she had. And he went to see Tilden on a Wednesday morning and came back by noon. He's not voting with Franklin, Nathaniel said, sitting down across from her at the kitchen table where she was waiting.
What did he say? He said he had his own opinions about what Franklin Harrington deserved. He paused. And then he told me to bring his regards to my young lady. She looked up his young lady.
His words, Nathaniel said, and the expression on his face was the one she had no word for, still warm and unmanaged. I didn't correct him. She looked back at her notes. Good, she said with a composure she was approximately 60% actually feeling. The second conversation was with a man named Orville Sandstöm, who ran the grazing committee's northern division and who had, according to Amelia's analysis of several years of supply records, a long-standing informal arrangement with the Carter ranch that had been quietly beneficial to both parties and which he had every incentive to preserve.
Nathaniel went to see him on a Friday. Orville, it turned out, had already been thinking along similar lines and needed very little persuading. He also apparently expressed some pointed opinions about Franklin Harrington's habit of using the grazing committee as a personal instrument which Nathaniel relayed with some satisfaction. Two, Amelia said two. Nathaniel confirmed the third one is harder.
She the third was a man named Henry Marsh, the father of the young woman from the post office Edith who had talked to Amelia at the celebration. Henry Marsh had no particular dispute with Franklin Harrington and no especially strong incentive to defy him. What he had, according to Amelia's read of the records, was a quiet and ongoing interest in maintaining relationships with multiple powerful parties rather than committing strongly to any one of them. He was, she had concluded, after considerable analysis, the kind of man who responded to being made to feel important. She told Nathaniel this.
Nathaniel considered it. That's not a conversation I can have, he said. I know, she said. I think I should have it. He looked at her.
You think he'll talk to you? His daughter talked to me at the celebration, she said. She asked me about the accounting work. She was genuinely interested. She keeps the post office books and she's clearly been taught to do it one way and suspects there are better ways.
I could offer to look at them. She paused and through that I could talk to Henry. That's very calculated, Nathaniel said. Yes, she said. It is.