The rancher thanked him. The bride did too, then watched the attorney preserve the records carefully. She understood the man's courage. He was not a powerful figure with a fortune behind him. He was a clerk who believed an old note might matter and had decided to bring it forward despite the discomfort it could cause.
As they traveled back toward the mountains, the bride held her husband's hand and thought of all the people whose ordinary honesty made justice possible. She had purchased a mortgage with money. That was straightforward enough. But protecting the ranch would require something money could not purchase reliably: the willingness of others to tell the truth.
They returned to the ranch beneath a sky so clear that the high peaks appeared close enough to touch. The orchards were beginning to bear fruit, the pastures had recovered from the flood, and the foreman greeted them with a list of ordinary troubles: one sick calf, a broken harness, a delay in the flour shipment, and a pair of workers disputing whose turn it was to repair the eastern fence. The bride almost laughed with relief. After weeks of lawyers and ledgers, ordinary troubles felt like a kind of welcome.
She had barely unpacked when an elegant carriage arrived bearing her aunt, the relative who once insisted the workshop needed a man to run it. The aunt wore expensive traveling clothes and a small expression of permanent disapproval. She descended, surveyed the wooden house and the ranch yard, and looked at her niece as if she'd arrived at the wrong address.
"Good heavens," she said. "You really intend to live here?"
The bride smiled with some effort. "Good afternoon to you too."
Her aunt looked toward the mountains. "I assumed the whole business would settle down once the wedding excitement passed. There was talk in the city that your husband is deeply in debt."
The bride invited her inside. It would have been satisfying to shut the door, but the aunt had traveled a long way and deserved the opportunity to behave better than expected. She did not take it. While accepting tea, she commented on the bride's size, criticized the ranch house, and suggested that a handsome man like the rancher must have been unusually generous to marry a woman with so few conventional advantages.