"Yes," Elias said, watching the empty ford and the splintered post standing white-wounded beside it. "Now he knows the place is defended. That's a kind of safety, and a kind of danger both. He can't pretend anymore that you'll just walk away."
Maren lowered her rifle. Her hands were steady. Only her voice shook, a little, with anger rather than fear.
"Let him come knowing, then," she said.
Chapter 22
The Marshal's Trail
Two counties north, where the road to Fort Stanton cut through a country of red earth and broken mesas, Marshal Tom Reyes knelt in the dust beside a burned wagon and read the ground the way another man might read a letter he did not want to finish.
The Hale place had been hit two nights before. No one killed, which Reyes counted as mercy and as information both. The raiders had taken eleven horses, a strongbox with the month's wages for the Hale hands, two rifles, and β strangely, at first β a set of survey maps from Hale's study. They had left the family tied in their kitchen, alive, with water within reach. Men who meant only theft did not trouble themselves with maps. Men who meant to take land did.
"Marshal." Deputy Cole Brandt came around the wagon leading his bay, his hat in his hand for the family still standing stunned by the corral. Brandt was twenty-six, broad, earnest, and still angry in the clean way of a man who had not yet learned how long justice could take. "Whitlock's found the trail where they left the road."
Sam Whitlock waited at the arroyo's mouth, sitting his gray with the stillness of a man who had tracked for the army before he pinned on a deputy's badge. He was forty, lean as wire, and he spoke about sign rarely and with conviction.
"Eleven stolen, eight ridden," he said, without preamble. "They bunched the herd here and drove it south through the arroyo so the dust wouldn't show from the road. Clever, for thieves." He pointed with his chin. "But one of the stolen mares is pigeon-toed. See there? She throws her print out, every stride. You could follow her in the dark by the feel of her."
Reyes swung into his saddle. He was fifty, gray at the temples, with a face weather and disappointment had made kind rather than hard, and he had hunted Rafe Donner, on and off, for three years. He knew the gang's habits: their love of other men's horses, their way of frightening a place soft before they emptied it, the scar-faced man at their head who had learned how much a deed could be worth when its owner got scared enough to sign it away cheap.
They followed the pigeon-toed mare south all that day.
The trail told its story in pieces. Here the herd had been watered at a seep and held while the riders ate cold beans from a tin one of them had dropped. There it had split β two riders peeling off east, toward San Tomas, Reyes reckoned, while the herd went on with the rest. There, at a crossing of pale stone, Whitlock dismounted and stood a long time looking at a print half-hidden under a stolen horse's track.
"Donner," he said at last. "That's his bay. Long shoe, nail clinched high on the near side. Same as at the Wilcox pens in August."
Reyes felt the old familiar tightening in his chest, part anger, part something nearer to grief. In August they had arrived at the Wilcox place a day too late and found an old man weeping in an empty corral. He did not intend to be late again.
By the second evening the trail had bent in a way that made Whitlock ride ahead, come back, and say nothing for a full mile.
"Say it," Reyes said finally.
"The herd ain't going to the border, Tom." Whitlock only called him Tom when the news was bad. "And it ain't going to any railhead I know. It's bending southwest, into the Cottonwood Creek valley. There's nothing in that valley worth eleven horses β except water on the old pass route, and one ranch sitting square on it."
Reyes knew the place by report: the Ellery ranch, two sisters alone since their father died, refusing every offer a smooth land agent named Pruitt had carried out to them from San Tomas. Pruitt, whose name kept surfacing at the edge of other men's troubles and never quite in the middle where a charge could hold. Pruitt, who had asked questions at the land office in August about the Ellery title.
"They're not driving the herd to the ranch," Reyes said slowly, working it out as he rode. "They're gathering. The herd's their remounts and their profit both, held somewhere in the foothills. And the ranch is the errand they've been paid to finish on the way."
"How long do we have?" Brandt asked.
"Less than the ride," Reyes said.