Part 1
The two men who came into the Sulphur Springs express office on Tuesday asked a great many questions, and Cordelia Pike answered them all politely.
It was September 1875, in Nevada, on the stage road between the silver camps of the Reese River country and the Central Pacific railroad at Battle Mountain. Sulphur Springs was a stage station and not much more. A stone station house, a corral, a blacksmith's forge, a well, and a little frame office with a sign over the door that said WELLS, FARGO & CO. EXPRESS.
Cordelia was sixty. A widow. Her husband, Amos, had been the express agent at Sulphur Springs for six years, and when his heart failed in 1873, the company had given the job to her. She had kept it for two years. She handled the mail, the freight, the passengers' tickets, and the green-painted iron strongbox that went through her office twice a week on the stage, full of silver bullion and coin from the mines.
Wells Fargo had hired women as agents in a good many small offices. They were honest, the company said, and careful, and they stayed put. Cordelia was all three.
The two men said they were cattle buyers. They had come in on horseback from the south.
One was big and fair and slow, with a broken nose. The other was small and dark and quick, and did all the talking. He leaned on her counter and smiled and asked about the stage. When did it come through? Tuesdays and Fridays? Going north or south? How many guards? Did the strongbox stay overnight, when the stage was late? Where did she keep it?
Cordelia told him the times of the stage, which were posted on the wall anyway. She told him she did not discuss the company's business. She sold them two tins of peaches and a box of cartridges, and gave them their change.
They thanked her and went out. Through the window, she watched them stand in the yard and look at the office, at the door, at the one window. The small one said something, and the big one laughed.
The wind was blowing toward her. She heard what he said.
"No guard on the office at night. Nobody but her." The small man spat. "It's just a woman."
Cordelia stood behind her counter and watched the dust of their horses settle.
She thought about it carefully, because she was a careful woman.
The stage came through on Friday afternoon, northbound, from Austin. It would carry the strongbox from the Austin mines, with a shotgun messenger riding beside the driver. Usually it stopped at Sulphur Springs for an hour to change horses, and went on to Battle Mountain before dark.
But this week was different. The superintendent at Austin had wired her on Monday. There was a big shipment going north on Friday, bullion and coin, nearly eleven thousand dollars. And the bridge at Willow Creek was out. The stage would have to go around by the old road, and it would reach Sulphur Springs late, after dark. So the strongbox would stay the night in her office, locked in the station safe, with the messenger asleep in the station house, and go on at dawn.
The two cattle buyers had not known any of that. But they knew stages were late. And they had asked.
She could have wired the superintendent. She thought about it.
But she knew what he would say. He would say she was a woman alone and a nervous one, and she had seen two cattle buyers and imagined the rest. He would send no one. Or he would send a man from Austin to sit in her office and treat her like a child. And either way, the two men would simply watch, and wait, and come another week.
She thought about Amos. Amos had kept this office for six years and never lost a dollar. Amos had a saying. "The box is only iron, Cordie. It's what's in it that counts. And a thief can't see through iron."
Cordelia Pike went into the back room and looked at the second strongbox.
It was an old one, green-painted iron, battered and dented, with the company's name in faded letters on the lid. The company had replaced it two years ago, and it had sat in the corner of the back room ever since, empty, with a broken hasp.
She ran her hand over the dented lid. Then she went to find the blacksmith.
Old Moses Harlan had kept the forge at Sulphur Springs since the station opened. He was seventy, deaf in one ear, and the only other soul who lived at the station all year besides the hostler and the station keeper's family. Cordelia had known him eight years. She trusted him with her life.
"Moses," she said, "I need you to mend a hasp. Tonight. And I need you not to ask me why."
Moses looked at her, and at the old strongbox, and put down his hammer.
"Mrs. Pike," he said, "I haven't asked a woman why since 1840. I don't aim to start now."
On Friday, the stage came in at nine o'clock at night, two hours late, with its lamps lit and the horses blowing. The messenger, a tired young man named Coombs, carried the strongbox into the express office, and Cordelia signed for it. Eleven thousand, two hundred dollars. He watched her lock it in the station safe. Then he went across to the station house, yawning, to get some sleep.
At eleven, the station was dark.
At a quarter past one in the morning, Cordelia Pike, sitting in her chair behind the counter of the express office in the dark, fully dressed, with her hands in her lap and her feet on a little footstool under a rag rug, heard a horse whicker out in the sagebrush beyond the corral.
Then the soft scrape of boots on the step.
Then someone began, very quietly, to work at the lock of her door.