Chapter 1
The Ultimatum
The summer of 1884 came down on Dry Fork like the lid of a stove, and by the middle of June the creek that gave the town its name had shrunk to a chain of green puddles, each one guarded by dragonflies and drying a little more every day. Maren Ellison walked her fence line in the early light, before the heat stood up, with a hammer in one hand and a coil of wire over her shoulder, because a ranch does not stop needing tending just because the sky has stopped giving rain.
She was thirty-four years old and had run the Rocking E alone for three years, ever since the morning they carried Thomas down from the ravine with his neck broken and his horse standing over him, trembling. People in town still lowered their voices when they said it: such a fine man, such a senseless accident. Maren had learned to nod and keep working. Grief, she had discovered, was a luxury item, like sugar in a drought year, and she stocked very little of it.
The cattle were thin but alive. She had sold off half the herd in May, at prices that insulted her, rather than watch all of them die in August, and the wells her father-in-law had dug in better times still gave water, though the windmill creaked slower each week and the troughs had to be filled by bucket at noon. Tomás Reyes, who had worked the ranch since before her marriage, said the land was testing them. Maren said the land could get in line behind everything else.
She heard the riders before she saw them, the sound coming up the south road in a soft curtain of dust, and she knew by the number of hoofbeats that it was not neighbors. Neighbors came one or two at a time in a dry year, saving their horses. This was six horses, ridden like they were owned by a man who had more.
Garrett Sloan came through her gate without asking, the way weather comes, and his five men spread out behind him with the easy practice of men who are paid to be furniture that can shoot. Sloan was fifty-two, silver at the temples, dressed too well for the heat, and he sat his black gelding as if the animal were a chair in a bank office — which, in a manner of speaking, it was. He owned the bank. He owned a good deal else besides.
"Mrs. Ellison," he said, touching his hat brim with two fingers, a courtesy so thin you could see through it. "You're keeping the place up admirably. Your husband would be proud. He'd also be the first to tell you when a thing has run its course."
"Say what you came to say, Mr. Sloan."
"I intend to." He looked past her at the house, the barn, the windmill turning in the hot wind. "I'm consolidating the north end of the valley. Sensible men are selling. I'm prepared to pay you a fair price for the Rocking E — fairer than the land is worth with the creek dying — and I'm prepared to be patient. Two months. Sell to me by the middle of August, and you'll leave here with money instead of memories."
"And if I don't sell?"
"Then you'll sell later, cheaper, to settle your debts." He smiled, and it was almost kind, which made it worse. "The bank can't extend your note forever, Maren. Drought is an argument nobody wins."
She kept her face still. She had buried a husband and kept a ranch alive through two dry years and one wet one that tried to drown it, and she had not done any of that by showing men like Garrett Sloan where it hurt. "You've made your offer. You've made it before. The answer's the same as it was in April."
Something moved behind his eyes then, not anger exactly — more like a man noting down a number. He gathered his reins, and as the black gelding turned, Sloan looked along her fence line, the long run of posts and wire going north toward the Cerros, and he said, almost to himself, "Good fences are such a comfort. It would be a shame to wake one morning and find yours — moved."
Then they were gone in their curtain of dust, all six of them, and the yard was quiet except for the windmill and the sound of Maren's own heart, which she was annoyed to discover was beating very fast indeed.
Tomás came up from the barn with a bucket in each hand and set them down and looked at the road. "He'll be back," he said.
"Not for two months," Maren said. "He gave his word on the time, whatever his word is worth."
Tomás considered this with the gravity of a man who has buried three employers' worth of promises. "Then we'd best use the two months, señora."