The Name Her Father Feared: A Girl Alone on the Ash River, a Stranger With Half a Silver Pendant, and the Inheritance That Brought an Empire Down

Chapter 8

He meant to ride at dawn. What he did instead — what they both did, in the end, after the horses were fed and the morning chores stood done in a row like fence posts — was linger on the porch with coffee neither of them drank, finding reasons the thickness of a hair.

"The flue'll want clearing again by fall," he said.

"I know how to clear a flue."

"The barn wall beam — check it after the first snow. Snow-load on that side—"

"Mr. Mercer." June set her cup down. "You are saying goodbye to my buildings because you're afraid to say it to me."

The quiet went out over the yard and came back changed. He stood with his back to the corral, hat in hand for the third time that morning, twenty-five years old and looking suddenly no older than the boy who had thrown no pebbles because she had asked him to leave the trout in peace.

"You'd be right," he said. "Buildings are easier. Buildings don't—" He gave up on the sentence. "June. Look at me a second."

She did. She had been doing it for seven days at every opportunity her pride allowed, and now, with permission, it was different — it was a country she was allowed to stand in. He was not handsome the way storybooks meant it. He was known, which was rarer and worse. A week of him had worn a path in her days that her whole life would now have to walk around.

She stepped down off the porch into the yard — bare ground, morning sun, the smell of the river coming up off the water — because she would not say the next thing from above him like a queen dismissing a servant. "When you came, you said one night," she said. "Then three days. Then the week. Every time the count ran out, the country found a reason to extend it, and every time, Mr. Mercer, you looked like a man being sentenced and reprieved in the same hour. I've decided to stop wondering which it was. But I want it on the record of this porch that I noticed."

"Has anyone—" He stopped, and started again with the care of a man crossing thin ice. "In all your life out here. Has anyone ever kissed you, June Callahan?"

She might have lied for pride. She had lied for him the day before, smooth as glass, and could have done it again. But the question deserved the dignity of the truth, and so did she.

"No," she said. "No one has ever been allowed close enough to ask. You are the first man who ever stood on this porch and mattered more than the weather."

"I shouldn't—" he began.

"You're leaving at noon instead of dawn because you want to. I'm keeping you with coffee I won't drink because I want to. It appears we are both sinners against good sense." Her voice did not shake. She was proud of that with the last of her strength. "If you're going to do a thing you'll regret all the way to Helena, Mr. Mercer — regret it properly, so it was worth the fuel."

He came closer then, slowly, telegraphing every inch like a man approaching a wild mare, and she met him halfway because she was not a mare and had never in her life been approached like a woman and had decided — in the space of one held breath — that if the world was going to offer her exactly one of these, she was going to be awake for it. His hand came up and hovered, asking, beside her cheek. The river sounded. The mare stamped in the corral. His thumb brushed her jaw, light as a moth's landing, and June's eyes were closing, and his breath was warm and coffee-sweet against her mouth, and—

The shot came from the treeline across the river.

It took the porch post six inches from Dane's head and filled the air with splinters and the flat, enormous crack of a rifle fired in earnest. Dane moved — she would remember the speed of it all her life — not away from the shot but across her, slamming her down behind the water barrel as a second and third round shattered the morning into kindling.

"Down! Stay down— June, stay—"

"That's my porch!" she heard herself shout, furious and absurd, and then the trees across the river spoke all at once — five, six, eight rifles — and the yard erupted into a war she could not see, and Dane's rifle was in his hands as if it had grown there, and he was firing measured shots over the barrel, and between the shots he was saying her name and other things, fast and low, and the words she caught were: "They've come for me. God forgive me, June — they've come for me here."

Chapter 9

The firing settled, the way a dog settles — not finished, just saving itself. A voice came out of the cottonwoods across the river, big with distance.