Chapter 16
The ledger on Trunk Palmer's desk was thick enough to double as a doorstop, and he'd been working through it since breakfast, running his finger down columns of names that meant nothing to him yet but would, by the time he finished, mean a great deal to somebody.
"How many left?" he asked, without looking up.
His assistant, a thin young man named Wexler, consulted his own copy. "Eleven, Mr. Palmer. The claim had more names attached to it than anybody realized."
"That's what happens when a claim sits worthless for twenty years. Men stop keeping careful track of who owns what, because nobody figured it'd ever matter." Trunk turned the page. "Read me the next one."
"Hollis Pruitt. Already notified, sir, he's the one that started the whole fuss."
"Next."
"Grady Fenn. Notified Tuesday."
"Next."
"Samson Tolliver."
Trunk stopped, his finger still resting on the page. "Tolliver. That name's familiar."
"Ought to be, sir. He's kin to a family in town.
Married to Ella Canning's sister… or he was, rather, the sister passed a few years back.
" Wexler flipped through his own notes. "The claim's an old one, goes back to before Tolliver married into the Canning family.
Small stake, never worth troubling over, till now. "
"Where's he live?"
"Arizona, from what I can remember. Some small town out past Flagstaff way."
Trunk sat back in his chair, turning that over. A man out in Arizona, sitting on a claim he likely hadn't thought about in years, about to find out he was rich as any banker in Denver. "And the Canning woman? The sister? She still in town?"
"She left last week. Packed up and gone, sudden as anything, and nobody's seen hide nor hair of her since."
"Gone where?"
"Nobody knows. She worked for Mrs. Terrance at the dress shop, and by all accounts she just up and left in the middle of an afternoon, said she had an errand, and never came back for her wages nor her notice. Left Mrs. Terrance shorthanded and none too pleased about it."
Trunk frowned, something uneasy settling in him that he couldn't quite name yet. "Left the very week the claim came in."
"Yes, sir. Same day."
"That's a strange sort of coincidence."
"It is, sir." Wexler hesitated. “But that’s probably all it is. No more’n a handful had been notified at the time. They were making a bit of noise, but it was far from common knowledge.”
"Yeah." Trunk didn't sound convinced. His own memory of that day differed, and he sat with the thought a moment longer before setting it aside, because it wasn't his business to chase after a runaway shop girl, whatever her reasons.
His business was the claim, and the claim belonged to a man in Arizona who likely had no idea what had just landed in his lap.
"Well. Somebody's got to go tell Tolliver he's rich, and I'd rather it be done proper, by a man with the paperwork in hand, than have him hear it secondhand and think it's some kind of swindle. "
"You mean to go yourself, sir?"
"I do. There's a few other stakeholders scattered through that country besides him, so it's worth the trip regardless." Trunk closed the ledger and stood, already thinking through the journey ahead. "What's the name of the town he's living in?"
Wexler checked his notes once more. "Mason's Clear, sir. If memory serves it’s his hometown. Came from there, married the Canning sister, went back again.”
Trunk nodded, filing the name away, and reached for his coat, already half a mind toward the trip ahead and the look on a stranger's face when he learned his fortune had found him after all this time, in a claim he'd likely forgotten he ever owned.