She reached for the first envelope.
"Coffee improves."
"No. We'll see."
He went to the stove.
Hannah worked until nearly midnight.
Nathan sat across the room, repairing a bridle strap under the lamp, making no attempt to watch her and somehow noticing every time she stopped.
Most of the records were exactly what she expected from a man who trusted memory more than paper.
Receipts without dates, figures written on feed sacks, sale notes folded into coat pockets until the ink nearly rubbed away.
But underneath the disorder, something else began to appear.
Hannah found a cattle receipt from April.
Thirty-two had sold.
She found Nathan's handwritten tally from the same week.
Thirty-eight.
Six animals missing from the payment.
She set it aside.
Then another.
September.
Twenty-four steers delivered.
Payment for 21.
A third showed a freight fee charged twice.
Hannah frowned.
"Nathan."
He looked up from the bridle.
"When you sold to the territorial buyer in April, how many cattle went?"
He did not hesitate.
"38."
"You sure?"
"I counted them into the holding pen myself."
She held up the receipt.
"You were paid for 32."
His chair scraped softly.
He came to the table.
Hannah placed the September slip beside it.
"And here you delivered 24."
"Yes. They paid for 21."
His face became very still.
She drew out the third paper.
"And this freight charge appears twice."
Nathan picked up the receipts.
The room was quiet except for the stove ticking as it cooled.
Hannah looked at the pile still waiting to be sorted.
"This isn't bad bookkeeping," she said.
Nathan raised his eyes.
"No."
She shook her head.
"No."
"Bad bookkeeping makes random mistakes."
Her finger rested on the three slips.
"These all make the same kind."
Nathan looked back down.
Someone had been taking pieces of Black Pine Ranch so small that a man who trusted his memory and hated paper might never notice.
Hannah closed the ledger.
"Tomorrow," she said, "we start finding out who."
Nathan looked at the three receipts spread across his table.
Then he looked at her.
"You always talk like that."
"Like what?"
"Like trouble is a chore somebody forgot to finish."
Hannah stacked the papers neatly.
"Trouble usually is."
By breakfast the next morning, snow covered the yard in a thin white sheet.
Nathan was already outside before first light.
Hannah heard the barn door roll open, then the muffled thud of hooves and the clang of a bucket against a trough.
She dressed in a dark wool skirt, buttoned her coat, and went to the kitchen.
The coffee was waiting.
It was still terrible.
She drank it anyway.
By 7, Nathan came in stamping snow from his boots.
Hannah had arranged the previous year's receipts into four piles.
Cattle, feed, freight, everything else.
Nathan stood by the stove, warming his hands.
"How bad?"
"You want the answer before breakfast?"
"Yes."
"Then pretty bad."
He grunted.
Hannah handed him a page.
"You bought 60 sacks of winter grain from Hollis Supply in September. I remember."
"You paid for 60."
"That sounds right."
"You also paid for the same 60 again in October."
Nathan frowned.
"No."