Martha opened the ledger and began to write. She wrote the date at the top. She wrote the time she had arrived at the ranch. She wrote the condition of the wagon as she had found it and each element of tampering in the order she had found them with as much technical specificity as she could recall. She wrote the description of the leather strip, its placement, the direction of the twist.
She wrote about the cut trace and where the cut was placed and at what angle. She wrote about the fallen tree on the road back and the two figures that Silas had tracked and the handkerchief with the initials W. See, she wrote for nearly an hour. Silas sat at the other end of the table with his coffee and did not rush her and did not hover. He read something from a shelf or appeared to and let her work.
That was the right thing to do and she noticed that it was the right thing without making a production of noticing. When she put the pencil down, he looked up. Done, he said. For tonight, she said, I want to go through my bag tomorrow. I have Henry's notebooks in there.
He kept records of every repair job we did, of every part we replaced of every client we worked for. Some of those jobs were for Crane's company. She paused. If Crane has been substituting cheap iron parts for proper steel ones across his fleet, Henry would have documented what was actually specified on the repair orders. What was specified versus what was actually installed is the difference between a design failure and an equipment failure.
Silas was quiet for a moment, looking at her. You think Crane's been doing this for years? He said, "I think three separate tamperings on your wagon in one night is not the work of a man who's afraid of being caught for one accident." Martha said, "I think he's been doing this for long enough that he knows the pattern. He knows which part to replace and where and how to make it look like something else when it fails." She looked at Silas steadily. And I think the wagon accident he blamed on Henry was not the first time he'd done it.
I think it was just the first time someone with enough knowledge looked at the failure and asked the wrong questions. Martha Silas said yes. What exactly did Crane lose when that wagon went down? She had thought about this on the road. She had been thinking about it since she found the leather strip that morning and understood that two preparations had been not one.
The accident killed a man, she said. A teamster named Robert Aldrich. His family sued. Crane settled, which cost him money. But what it really cost him was his contract with the territorial supply office.
3 years ago, he had the primary government freight contract for this region. The accident and the lawsuit, they went with another company. She held Silas's gaze. If someone could prove the accident was caused by equipment substitution rather than a design failure, the liability doesn't rest with Henry's engineering. It rests with whoever made the purchasing decisions.