Nell had rented the two men their rooms before she learned what the rooms were for.
Harlan wanted the east window. Beck wanted a door that faced the street. Each paid for one night, and neither paid the stable bill. At noon they sent boys to order cartridges. By three, everyone in Sunset Valley knew they meant to meet at six.
Nell went upstairs with the stable ledger under her arm.
“You owe me four dollars,” she told Harlan.
He stood at his window, turning his brother’s watch over in his hands. “Take it from what I leave behind.”
“I don’t want what you leave behind. Especially if it’s bloody.”
He laid the watch on the sill. “Then ask him.”
She found Beck packing his spare shirt. He owed three dollars.
“I’d hoped to leave before breakfast,” he said.
“You can still do that.”
“Not while he’s saying I left his brother to die.”
Nell knew the broad story. Three years before, a freight wagon had broken a wheel on the road west of town. Harlan’s brother Tom had been pinned beneath it. Beck, his partner, had ridden away. Tom was dead when help reached the wagon.
The finer points had changed with every telling. In Harlan’s account, Beck rode straight past town with the partnership money. In Beck’s, he did everything any man could have done.
Nell remembered a third account. She had written part of it herself.
She opened the cupboard beneath her desk and fetched an old bundle of receipts. At the bottom was the bill for a wagon wheel, paid by Beck Rowan on the day Tom died. Nell had sold it for her father. She remembered Beck trying to lift it across his saddle, then hiring a man with a cart.
Her father was gone, but the man with the cart, Ellis, still worked behind the blacksmith’s shop.
“I took him as far as Dry Fork,” Ellis said when she found him. “He said that was where the wagon lay. Took us most of the afternoon.”
“Would you tell Harlan?”
Ellis rubbed a hand over his bald head. “He ought to have asked before buying the cartridges.”
At five, Nell brought both men into the empty dining room. She set the receipt between them. Ellis stood by the stove.
Beck reached for the paper. “There. That settles it.”
Harlan caught his wrist.
“It settles whether he came to town,” Nell said. “It doesn’t settle anything else.”
Ellis described the wheel, the hired cart and the journey back. Harlan listened without letting go.
“Why didn’t you ride back ahead of the cart?” he asked Beck.
Beck looked at the table. “I thought the wheel was what we needed.”
“Tom needed somebody beside him.”
“I know.”
“You don’t get to say that like it fixes it.”
Beck pulled his hand free, slowly. “It doesn’t.”
Outside, a boy was ringing a small bell to draw a crowd for the duel. Nell shut the dining-room window. The bell still reached them.
Harlan took a folded letter from his coat. Its creases were worn white.
“This is what I sent my mother. I told her Tom died at Willow Fork. She put it in the family Bible.” He looked at Ellis. “You said Dry Fork.”
“That’s where the wagon was.”
Harlan turned to Beck. “Which side of the road?”
“South. Beside the split cottonwood.”
“There’s no cottonwood at Willow Fork.”
“No.”
The bell rang again. Harlan’s gun lay in its holster against the chair. He put his hand on it, and Nell kept her own hands flat on the ledger.
“Can you find the place now?” Harlan asked.
Beck nodded.
“Then you’re taking me.”
Harlan unbuckled the gun belt and laid it on the table before the boy rang six. Beck laid his belt beside it.
Nell went outside herself. “No appointment today,” she told the crowd.
Someone complained that he’d walked a mile.
“So walk another. It’s good weather.”
Before the men left, she held out her ledger. Harlan paid four dollars. Beck counted out three. Neither smiled at her, which was fine. She had not asked them to.
They came back after dark. Beck stopped at the gate while Harlan went upstairs. Soon a strip of light showed beneath Harlan’s door. Nell heard his pen scrape, pause, then scrape again.
Beck waited on the step with his hat in his hands.
“Are you coming in?” she asked.
“He said to give him a while.”
Nell brought him a chair. She couldn’t mend three years with a wheel receipt. She could keep a man from having to stand all night.
Upstairs, Harlan tore the old letter into two pieces. He began the new one with the right name of the fork.
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