“Your Translator is Lying!” — Widow’s Daughter Warns Millionaire Cowboy in Fluent German Before Deal

Chapter 4

The old clock took up its beating again, and Duncan Hale used the sound to think.

He was not a patient man by nature. Twenty years of drought, rustlers, and price-fixing railroads had taught him to move fast and trust nothing. But he had also learned that a man who cannot wait for the truth is a man who will be lied to forever. So he waited. He looked at the child.

She was small enough that the table came up past her ribs. Her white cotton apron had been washed so many times it had gone soft as felt, and her blonde braids had been tied so tight they pulled at the corners of her eyes. She was shaking — he could see the tremor running through her shoulders — but her chin was up, and her eyes, wide and dark, were not looking at the floor the way a scolded dog’s eyes should.

Your translator is lying to you.

An hour ago, Duncan would have laughed. He had built his empire — half a million acres of the best grazing land between the Powder River and the low hills — by trusting exactly three people: his horse, his own gut, and the men he had grown old beside. Silas Thorne was none of those things. Thorne had arrived in Wolf Canyon a year ago with a city accent and a suitcase full of recommendations, and Duncan, cursed with being right about men more often than he wanted to be, had hired him because the cattle contracts with Chicago were growing too complicated for a rancher’s arithmetic.

He had never liked the man. He liked him even less now.

But he was fair. Even the snake gets its day in the sun before the boot comes down.

“Child,” Duncan said, and his voice came out gentler than he had intended, “do you speak German?”

The girl was nodding before the words finished leaving his mouth. “My father was from the old country. He spoke it to me every night.” She paused, and something complicated moved across her small face. “My grandfather was Colonel Frederick Marsh of the Fourth Pennsylvania Cavalry. He taught me that a citizen protects the truth. I could not… I could not stand here and let this man steal from you both, sir.”

Colonel Marsh.

Duncan’s hand went still on the table.

He knew that name. Every man in the territory who had fought in the war knew that name. Marsh’s Ford, they still called it — the night crossing where a Pennsylvania colonel had walked his cavalry through gunfire and broken ice to turn a rout into a rescue. Duncan had been a boy of sixteen with dysentery and a borrowed rifle, watching from the far bank as the blue line held and broke and held again, and he had never forgotten the sight of a tall man in a streaming coat riding into the bullets to pull a drowning private out of the river.

That was the grandfather. That was the blood in this shaking child’s veins.

Duncan looked across the table. Hinrich Weber — Werner Brandt, the heavy-jowled German industrialist with the pale blue eyes and the broadcloth suit that must have been roasting him alive — was watching the little scene with furious confusion. He did not understand a word being said. He understood only that his business was slipping sideways into a river he could not see.

The translator — Vincent Pryce, Duncan’s own hired man, the man whose wages came from Duncan’s own pocket — was speaking now in a high, cracking voice.

“Mr. Hale, this is absurd. This is a child. A hotel child. She probably doesn’t know three words of the language — she wants attention, she wants a coin, she — ”

“Quiet,” Duncan said.

The single word fell on the table like a dropped rail.

“Go on,” Duncan said to the girl. “Tell me exactly what you heard. Every word.”

And Hazel Hart, with her mother’s dying lungs somewhere below her feet and her father’s language on her tongue, told him everything.

She told him how the German had objected to the water rights clause — the one that would have given the syndicate the river — and how Pryce had turned the objection into approval. She told him how the German had asked about the railroad costs, the shipping costs they had supposedly agreed to share, and how Pryce had made it a joke about a train ride. She told him that Pryce had told the German, in his clumsy accented German, that Duncan Hale was demanding a signature, that there would be no further discussion — a demand that had turned Werner Brandt’s face a furious red and sent him to his feet.

And then she told him the worst of it.

“Mr. Brandt said he would not be threatened,” Hazel said, and her small voice was steady now, steadier than Duncan’s hands had been when he carried his first dead man. “He said if this is how Mr. Hale does business, he was leaving. And Mr. Pryce told you that he was happy. He told you he was ready to sign.”

The room went very quiet.

Duncan did not look at Vincent Pryce. He looked at the contract lying open on the table, and for the first time he saw it for what it was: not a piece of paper but a cage. Four hands of ink and watermark, and somewhere in that cage a clause he had not read carefully and another clause he had taken on trust, and the whole beautiful murder engineered to run through a man he had paid to guard his back.

“Is this true?” Werner Brandt demanded, looking wildly between them. “What is happening? What is she saying?”

Duncan stood up. Very slowly. The chair did not scrape — he moved it back with one hand, the way a man moves a chair when he is deciding whether to draw.