She stood at the counter with the ledger open in her hands and did the correction in her head three times until she was certain. The Callaway Ranch owed less than Eli Callaway thought it did. Not a small difference. Enough to matter. She closed the ledger and set it back exactly where she had found it.
She went back to the stove. That evening, after supper, salt pork and fried potatoes and stewed apples from a jar she had found, and the second piece of cornbread she had made in as many days because Emmett had asked her quietly if there would be more. She waited until the boys had gone and Eli Callaway was pulling on his coat to go out and check the barn. "Your ledger has an error," she said. He stopped.
"The June cattle sale was entered twice, and your interest calculation has been running on gross principal. You've overstated what you owe by nearly $40." The kitchen was very quiet. The iron stove ticked as it cooled. "You read my books," he said.
His voice had that particular quality of a man who has not yet decided between anger and something else. "It fell off the shelf. It was open. I can see numbers the way some people hear music. I do not choose to.
It simply happens." She turned back to the basin. "Do with that what you want. I only mentioned it because $40 is $40." She heard him pick up the ledger.
She heard the pages turn. She heard the silence that followed, which was a different kind of silence than the one she had cataloged in four days of living in this house. "Where did you learn accounting?" He said finally. "My father was a land agent.
I kept his books from the time I was 12." She set a clean bowl on the rack. "Supper's cleared. Good night, Mr. Callaway."
He did not say good night, but he did not leave for the barn immediately, either. She heard him standing in the kitchen for a long moment after she went up the stairs, and she did not let herself think about what that meant. The following week brought the kind of trouble she had learned to recognize by the particular way it arrived quietly. A man named Horace Dunmore came to the kitchen door on a Tuesday at noon while Eli was out with the herd. He was soft-handed and town-dressed, and he introduced himself as the holding agent for the Second Territorial Bank of Harrow Creek.