"Here," he said, and knelt. "And here."
The post lay on its side in the grass. At a glance it might have passed for rot. Elias turned it over. The break showed clean and light, the wood inside sound and fragrant still. A saw had gone through it, patient and straight, more than halfway, and then the weight of the rails had done the rest.
Maren crouched beside him. "That did not fall," she said.
"No, ma'am. It was helped."
He showed her the second one, twenty paces on, and the third beyond it, where the rails had been dragged clear into the brush. The cuts were all low, near the ground, where a man kneeling after dark would not be seen from the cabin. Whoever had done it had wanted it to look like neglect, like a place giving up by itself.
Maren stood up slowly and looked toward the cabin and the graves behind it. Her jaw was tight. "How long ago?"
"Not all at once." Elias brushed dirt from his knee. "This one, maybe spring. That one newer. Somebody has been at it more than once."
For a while the only sound was the creek and a jay in the cottonwoods. He had thought she might argue. She did neither. Instead, something in her face let go of a secret she had been carrying alone, and it made her look tired more than afraid.
"There have been riders," she said at last. "Not close. Not in daylight where you could swear to a face. Up on the ridge trail, at dusk. Willa saw them first, in June. Two men, sitting their horses a long time, just watching the house. By the time I got Pa's rifle and came out, they were gone. Since then, maybe four times. Maybe more we did not see."
"Why did you not say so?"
"Would you have stayed longer for hearing it? Or ridden out sooner?" She gave a short, humorless breath. "Strangers do not thank you for handing them a trouble that is not theirs."
Elias let that stand, because it was fair. "There is more, I think."
She looked down the broken line toward the creek pasture. "Harlan Pruitt," she said. "He has an office in San Tomas. Smiles like a preacher at a christening. He came in March with a paper, and again in July, and again three weeks ago. Each time the price went up a little and the talk went darker. First it was taxes we would not meet. Then it was our title, how a claim by two women with no menfolk might be questioned if anyone chose to question it. Last time he said a place this far out could have accidents. Fires. Stock straying. He said it all sorrowful, as if warning us of the weather."
Elias felt the old anger come up in him, quiet and cold. He had heard that kind of talk before, always smooth, always deniable. "Did he threaten you outright?"
"Never outright. That is his art." Maren shifted the rifle against her shoulder. "He leaves and you wonder if you imagined the knife in it. Willa wanted to tell him where he could put his paper. I stopped her. A man like that collects insults to use later."
The wind moved through the grass. Elias looked at the cut cedar and understood the fence differently now. It was not only winter they were racing. It was a patient hand trying to make this place look already lost, so selling would seem like sense.
"Pa homesteaded this ground," Maren said. Her voice did not rise, but it hardened. "He proved it up with his own hands. He cut these posts himself, half of them. Ma is buried here. He is buried here. I am not selling what he homesteaded because a man in a clean coat knows how to smile while he threatens, and I am not being frightened off by riders who will not show themselves by day."
"I did not think you would sell," Elias said.
She studied him then, wary as ever. "Then why show me this? Why not just mend it quiet and move on, the way you planned?"
"Because a mended fence will not tell you who cut it," he said. "And because if a man is working for his meals, the people feeding him ought to know he has seen the worst of it and is still setting posts."
Something eased around her eyes. She nodded once, down at the sawn post. "Then set them deep, Mr. Vale."
"Elias," he said.
"Set them deep, Elias." She turned back toward the house, rifle steady in her arm, and he fell into step behind her, the smell of cut cedar sharp in the cold air.
Chapter 7
The Rhythm of Work