Chapter 20
Twenty
Beau placed himself between Della and the city men.
"Who are you?"
"Oh, forgive me." The older man smiled ingratiatingly. "My name is Henry D. Jett. These here are my colleagues, Mr. Mandeville from St. Paul, and over there, Mr. Spalding, our attorney at law."
The men nodded as they were introduced, but Beau's mind was racing. He'd seen those names pieced together before now.
He pointed at the frame on the wall in the corner. "This you?"
Jett's smile widened. "Why, yes, sir." The southern drawl was warm. "That's us. I have had the honor of sitting on this bank's board for more than twenty years."
"Where's Ezra Hollis?"
The smile stayed in place. The eyes cooled considerably.
“Mr. Hollis was taken up on Thursday.”
“Taken up?” Beau frowned, vaguely aware of Della moving closer to him.
“Arrested, Mr. Hawkins,” Jett’s mouth bent. “Quite the scene. I suppose living out of town the way you do, you wouldn’t have heard about it yet.”
Beau looked past the man to the grille. Pelton had gone the color of a boiled sheet. He caught Beau's eye, and swallowed, and bobbed his head once — up and down, quick-fashion.
"No," Beau murmured. "I'd not heard. What was he arrested for?"
Jett gestured at what had been Hollis's office. "Why don't you come through? We have a good deal to talk about."
Beau hesitated.
“Talk about what?” Della asked. Jett's glance slid over her and away. "Mr. Hawkins, if you'd like to leave your wife with the clerk a while, we shan't keep you above?—"
"My wife keeps my books," Beau said.
“This is business,” Mandeville said, angling his shoulder as if trying to dismiss Della.
Beau’s eyes turned icy. “I can tell you now, she has more business experience in her little finger than the three of you do put together.”
The men exchanged a look.
“My maiden name was Warner,” Della said. “Warner the comments and the snide remarks, because that’s how he’d always been.
And because he’d done nothing when the garter snake had been put down his pants.
"So, what changed?" Beau asked.
Jett picked up a paper and held it out to him. Beau took it, and blood started to roar in his ears as he read it. He turned slowly and looked at his wife.
“That arrived at my office in Helena at the start of last month,” Jett said into the taut silence.
“Questions from a rancher's wife. A copy of every receipt her husband had been given, and an abstract, asking whether the balance stated to him could be reconciled with the sums received — because the writer had attempted it and could not.” Jett’s smile finally moved back into his eyes.
“I had two clerks check her figures, and not an error in them. Which made us start looking into the loans. I’m glad to meet the person who set us onto the right path.
We found where the money was being filtered through, thanks to you asking. ”
"How did you know?" Beau asked her. "To write at all?"
Della sighed. Wordlessly, Della reached into the canvas bag he'd carried in and drew out the green ledger he'd labored over for two years. Then the loan papers he'd fetched down for her the night before. She opened the ledger flat on the desk.
“Look. Your writing. And Duke’s,” she pointed out the columns that he’d dredged through, trying to work out why they wouldn’t add up.
“Yes,” he said, shaking his head to show he didn't follow.
“Here,” she tapped. “Four lines from spring.
I couldn't place the hand. It isn't yours, and it isn't Duke's, and I put it aside as somebody else making an entry, because it was only four lines and I had a great deal else to look at.
" She unfolded the loan papers and laid them alongside the ledger, set her finger on the page.
“Look at the sevens,” she said.
Hollis’ crossed sevens. The same as were on the bank form, sat in his columns, too.
"Hollis had your books," Della said gently. “Duke must have given them to him. Or maybe it was when you left them with Hollis to check?” She shrugged. “I don’t know. Only that those are his sevens.”
Beau shut his eyes.
Four times a year. He had carried them up those steps himself with Duke's bootlace round them, handed them across this desk, said thank you, and left them a week.
“I wrote asking for clarification on our loan payments, because they didn’t add up, with interest and everything,” Della said softly
"Mr. Mandeville," said Jett quietly. Fetch me my daybook."
It took them the best part of an hour.
Della leaned between the two of them with Spalding writing it all down, and Beau sat and watched three of the sharpest men in Montana Territory defer to his wife over a column of figures, and never said a word.
Then, when she was done, the men sat back. A chorus of sighs around the room. “That settles it,” Mandeville said.
“What’s going on?” Beau asked.
Jett turned the sheet round to face him.
"Two things, Mr. Hawkins. The first is the rate.
" He set his finger on the line. "The original paper you signed says nine per cent.
That's what we authorized, and it's what Stockmen’s Bank charges.
However, this branch's book has been carrying you at sixteen percent. "
Jett met his stare dead in the eye. "You've been meeting a payment half again the size of the one you agreed to, twice a year, for two years. That alone would break a man in a bad season."
Beau swallowed. “And the second?”
“Of the payments you made against this note, some were never credited to you at all." Jett looked up. "So you were hit with extra payments incurred because to us in Helena, it appeared you’d defaulted."
"The debt never came down," Della said slowly. "He was paying for it, and it stood still."
Beau's hands had gone cold. “I made them payments in good faith.”
“We can see that in your books, sir. And yours isn’t the first story we've heard, so we know you to speak the truth. But your debt has been going up.”
"Then there was never a crisis," she said.
Jett inclined his head.
"Take away the interest that was never owed and the payments that were never credited," she said, "and put back the cattle that were driven south and sold without you getting paid, and this ranch has been turning a profit for the last two years.
" Her voice was quite steady, and cold enough that Beau looked at her.
"Nobody ruined Silver Sage, Beau. Somebody built the ruin.
Piece by piece, for two years, and paid the men to help him do it. "
"Duke?" Beau whispered.
"Duke was taking from a ranch he'd been told was sinking.”
Jett leaned forward. “The man who told him it was sinking was the man holding it under."
"What do I owe today?" Beau asked.
Mandeville consulted the sheet.
"A little over sixteen hundred dollars, sir. And the same again in November, at which point the note is discharged in full."
Beau sat very still.
And he knew, sitting there in the banking office, in front of those men, that he had all he owed in the canvas bag by his feet. He looked at Della, at the tears standing in her eyes.
And Beau smiled.