She nodded, and picked up her hammer, and went back to her fence β the long fence that ran north to the hills, the fence Garrett Sloan had looked at the way a man looks at a thing he already believes is his.
Chapter 2
Cut Wire
She found the cut fence that same afternoon, because worry is a horse that walks the same trail twice, and Maren had been thinking about Sloan's parting words all through the midday chores. She rode out along the north line with her rifle in its scabbard out of habit rather than intention, and she saw the gap from a hundred yards away: two strands down, shining.
Up close it was worse than storm damage. Storms tore wire ragged and twisted it around the posts. This wire had been cut β cleanly, deliberately, with a tool, the bright ends curled like the shavings off a lathe. Four cuts. The top two strands and the bottom two, severed at the same post, the loose lengths laid down neatly on her side of the line as if whoever did it had all the time in the world and wanted her to know it.
Maren sat her horse and looked at the ground, and the ground told her plenty. Thomas had taught her to read sign the first year of their marriage, patiently, the way he taught her everything β not as a lesson but as a conversation, walking her over their own yard and asking her what the dust remembered. She had gotten good at it in a practical way: she could age a track, tell a shod horse from a barefoot one, a laden animal from a ridden one. Six horses had come down from the north that morning β not her stock, shod horses, the prints deep and unhurried. Six sets of tracks coming. They had milled around the post while the work was done; one man had dismounted, she could see his boot prints, pointed toes, a smoker's habit of little kicked-over piles of dust. The message was as plain as if Sloan had nailed up a sign: I can reach your fence any time I please.
She should have ridden straight to Sheriff Shaw. She knew that even as she sat there. But Shaw was one aging man with a tin star and a rheumatic knee, and Sloan owned the roof over the jail.
"Evidence first," she said aloud, to the horse, to the hills, to Thomas, wherever he was. "Then Shaw."
She dismounted to look at the boot prints more closely, and that was when she heard the hoofbeats coming down the draw behind her β a single horse, walking, unhurried β and her hand was on the rifle before she had decided to move. She told herself afterward that she only wanted a clearer look, but the truth was simpler and she knew it even then: her skin had crawled the moment she read the smoker's little kicked piles of dust, the spoor of a man utterly certain he would not be interrupted. Sloan's men had not been afraid of being found. They had been afraid of nothing at all, and that frightened her more than the cut wire did, because men who fear nothing on your land have usually been promised they own it.
The stranger came into view around the shoulder of the hill on a roan mare, and Maren's first thought was that he rode like a man who had nowhere he needed to be and a long practice in getting there anyway. He was tall and road-worn, somewhere in his forties, with a gray-threaded beard and a hat that had survived better decades. A rifle rode in a scabbard under his leg. He stopped a respectful distance off, close enough to speak, far enough not to crowd a woman holding a Winchester, and he touched his hat.
"Afternoon," he said. "That's a poor way to mend a fence, cutting it first."
"It was cut for me," Maren said. "This morning, by men who wanted me to find it."
"Then they got their wish." His eyes moved over the ground the way her own had, and she saw that he was reading it, really reading it, not pretending. "Six horses came down from the north," he said. "You've got that already, I expect. One man down, the smoker, by the post. You've got that too."
"Have you a point, Mr.β?"
"Stanton." He was still looking at the tracks, and something in his face changed, tightened, the way a man's face does when a pleasant day turns out to be a trap he has seen before. "Mrs. Ellison, don't turn around."
Every muscle in her body wanted to do exactly that. "Why not?"
"Because six horses came down that draw," Micah Stanton said, quietly, as if he were remarking on the weather, "and only five of them rode back out together. There's a sixth man up in those rocks behind you, and he's been lying there with a rifle since before you arrived, waiting to see what you would do about your fence."