Page 20 of Inventions of the Heart

CHAPTER

SIX

ALOUD RUSTLING IN THE TREESmade Zane surge to his feet and draw his pistol.

“Don’t shoot. It’s me,” Jilly said.

Zane almost fell over backward. Almost shooting a woman shook him badly enough he missed his holster when he tried to shove his pistol into it.

“I made noise deliberately, afraid you’d be jumpy.” Jilly came in. Her red hair glowed against the green leaves. Her eyes were so green it was like the trees had shared their color.

She led the pinto gelding she seemed partial to.

“What are you doing up here?” Zane heard the snap in his voice. That wasn’t fair.

“Wow, that’s a rich vein of gold.” Jilly barely glanced at Michelle or Zane. He noticed she only had eyes for the gold, and who could blame her?

Michelle gave Zane one very sassy glance, then went to walk with Jilly to study the gold.

“I estimate we’ve found around three thousand dollars’ worth of gold this morning.”

Jilly picked up one of the rocks Zane had busted the quartz off of. She studied it, turning it in her hand. “I’d say more like four thousand five hundred.”

Michelle picked up a rock. “Really? What makes you say that?”

“It’s just a guess.”

Zane snorted.

Jilly and Michelle both turned to look, then they grinned at him.

“Jilly is the mathematician in the family,” Michelle said. “If she says four thousand five hundred, I’d bet she’s right to within a hundred dollars.”

“You can’t know that.”

“Well, I don’t know.” Jilly grinned again. “But I can estimate, deduce, round to the next highest factor, multiply by the price of gold, which is steady on the commodity market as a rule, and, you know, guess.”

Zane held back the next snort.

Barely.

“By the way,” Jilly continued, “you have ten thousand seven hundred and, oh, I’d say about fifty head of cattle.”

Zane arched a brow, but neither woman looked at him this time. “I keep a tally book. You must’ve seen it.”

“No, but I’ve ridden out to two of your meadows. The largest and one your cowhand called a regular-sized one. I counted the number of cows in one section of the large meadow. They were spread quite evenly, so I felt able to extrapolatethe number of cattle. Then I judged the size of the meadow and multiplied to get a total. Your hand said you have five regular-sized meadows, the big one, and three small ones. I assumed—and that can be dangerous in mathematics—you spread your cattle evenly between the pastures. So beyond extrapolating, I multiplied, corrected for meadow acreage, rounded down to the nearest fifty, and so on.”

“And so on? There’s more to it?”

“Well, what I really did was take into consideration some geographical anomalies in your pastures, assumed the land was generally the same, and then I created an equation, solved for the nearest—”

“Stop.” Zane cut her off. “You don’t need to tell me how you did it. You’re within ten of the number I have in my tally book.” He tugged it out of his breast pocket so she could see the book but shoved it back in. “I get this number by actually counting the cattle.”

“You count to ten thousand? Every day?”

“Not every day. But we don’t ride out to each pasture every day.”

“I honestly figured about ten higher, but to be so exact is just showing off.”

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