His new wife looked sharply toward her husband. “You wrote to her?”
The mountain man shook his head. “I wrote to the messenger after the first warning arrived. I told him I had married, and I couldn't conceal that when he found her.”
The first wife lowered her eyes. “Then I'm sorry our past has reached into your home.”
“It reached my home when it was kept from me,” the woman in blue said, more sharply than she intended. After a moment, she softened her voice. “But you aren't the person who made that decision.”
The other woman looked relieved. The sheriff helped her into a chair beside the little stove while the guide checked the stable. Hot tea and bread were brought in, and she began her account.
She described the fire in detail. The supervisor had ordered her to deliver the genuine transfer register to a locked archive. When she arrived, two men seized her. One had a cloth over his face. The other carried her husband's coat. They took her through a side entrance before the fire spread and forced her into a covered wagon.
She was told her husband had been killed resisting arrest. Later, she learned he had survived, but letters she attempted to send vanished. Years passed in isolated houses and guarded workrooms, where she was compelled to copy records for the very men who had stolen the land.
“Why not simply destroy the evidence?” the sheriff asked.
“Because the original survey measurements were needed whenever buyers discovered the forged maps didn't match the ground. They needed me to reconcile the contradictions without letting anyone outside see the real figures.”
She held up her injured wrist. “When the lead financier became ill, the men began quarreling about who owned which parcels. Their arguments gave me the chance to take copies and leave.”
The woman in blue unfolded her notes. “These entries claim a debt secured against one hundred and forty acres. But the original assessment is for one hundred and four. They use the extra thirty-six acres to justify taking the creek crossing.”
The first wife stared at her. “How did you find that?”
“I kept business accounts for years. Bad additions bother me.”
To everyone's surprise, the former clerk gave a brief, tired laugh. Then she began pointing to other false entries. Together the two women compared page after page, one familiar with the transactions, the other skilled at finding where figures had been changed. Their work revealed a trail of invented penalties and altered boundaries that matched the confiscated land.