Afterward, Wade would not be able to say exactly how long he stood there. Long enough for the owl to call three more times. Long enough for the last orange to go out of the sky. He was aware of the flake of hay still under his arm, and he set it down on the ground very carefully, as though it mattered where it went, and then he straightened up and looked at the boy.
What he felt first was not anger. It was something more like vertigo, a sense of the ground tipping, all the separate things he had been carrying for twenty-four hours suddenly sliding together into one place: the ledger, the seven thousand five hundred dollars, the cash box in his father's hiding spot, Claire's face when he'd said the word Deer Lodge in the back of the meeting room at the Yogo Inn. Six calves at about twelve hundred and fifty dollars apiece, what they'd have brought this fall if they had been at their mothers' sides all summer, if they had been run through the sale ring in Billings three days ago with the rest. He did the arithmetic without meaning to. It came out to seven thousand five hundred dollars exactly.
The anger came after that, and it came hard.
"You," Wade said.
"Yes sir."
"You came onto my place. You cut my wire." He took a step forward and the boy did not step back, though Wade could see in the dim light that he wanted to, that every part of his narrow body wanted to turn and run for the green-doored truck. "You took my calves off their mothers and hauled them off and sold them. And then you came back here. You came back onto my place, and you worked in my barn, and you sat down at my table. In my house. With my daughter."
"Yes sir."
"Stop saying yes sir."