The afternoon went very still. Somewhere a hawk cried, far off, indifferent. Maren kept her eyes on Stanton's face and her breathing steady, and she understood, with a clarity that surprised her, that the cut wire had never been the message.
She was.
Chapter 3
The Sixth Man
"Keep looking at me," Stanton said. "Laugh, if you can manage it. A man watching through a rifle sight gets nervous when the people he's watching get quiet."
Maren produced something that might have been a laugh. "And what do we do?"
"We give him a decision he doesn't want to make." Stanton shifted in his saddle, slow and natural, and let his right hand come to rest on his thigh, near nothing in particular. "When I nod, you step left, behind your horse. Horses make poor shields but excellent doubts."
She stepped when he nodded β and the world cracked open. She never saw Stanton draw. There was simply the roar of his pistol, very close, and a spurt of rock dust on the slope above and behind her, and then a young man's voice yelping in pain and outrage, and a rifle clattering down the rocks. A boy β he could not have been more than twenty-six β came half-sliding down the draw with his right hand clutched to his chest, blood coming between his fingers, his face white with the discovery that he had been shot through the hand by a man who had meant to do exactly that and no more.
"Could've been your head," Stanton told him, conversational. "I chose the hand because I didn't know whose fool errand you were running. Run one for me now: go tell your employer the fence stays, the lady stays, and the next man he hides in her rocks had better be right with God first."
The boy β Fenn, she'd hear later, a sometime hand of Sloan's β got his horse caught and got on it one-handed, and rode north without looking back, hunched over his ruined hand.
Maren let out a breath she had been holding since the nod. "You knew," she said. "From the tracks."
"Six in, five out, and one set of prints circling wide to the rocks. It isn't a hard sum." He holstered the pistol with the unshowy economy of a man putting a tool back in its box. "I'm obliged for you not turning around. Most folks do. It's how the trick works β you're supposed to look, and while you're looking, whatever happens looks like an accident of your own making."
Her mouth was dry. "An accident. Like a woman shot by a hidden man while examining her own fence would look likeβ"
"Like she startled somebody. Like a tragedy of the times." He shook his head once, slowly. "I've seen that arrangement before, Mrs. Ellison, in other valleys, with other names on the gate. A widow, a dry year, a rich man being patient. It generally ends with the rich man at the graveside offering his condolences and his checkbook in the same hand." He dismounted then, and led the roan a few steps, and for the first time he looked at her directly, and she saw that his eyes were tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. "Micah Stanton. I used to wear a deputy marshal's badge, a long time gone. Nowadays I mostly just ride through places. I'd have ridden through yours by dark if your fence hadn't been confessing."
"Confessing."
"Ground talks, Mrs. Ellison. Yours is talking plenty." He gestured at the cut wire. "Those cuts weren't made by men sneaking in. Look at the bright ends again in the morning, when you're calm, and think about which side of the wire a man stands on to make a cut like that. Then ask yourself what men were doing on the inside of your land that they needed to leave in a hurry β through your fence, in daylight, when a gate stands open a half-mile off."
Maren looked north, toward the Cerros, blue and heat-shimmered, where her land ran up into the rocks. Three years she had ridden this ranch and thought she knew every acre of it the way she knew her own hands.
"Mr. Stanton," she said slowly, "I believe I'd like to buy you supper."
"I believe I'd like to be bought supper," he said. "But I'll warn you fair, because you seem to value plain dealing: men who sit at my table have a habit of ending up in my business, and my business, where Garrett Sloan is concerned, is twenty years old and not finished."
"Good," said Maren, surprising herself. "Because I believe he just started some business of mine."
They rode down to the ranch house together, the roan falling in beside her gelding as if the two horses had already settled the matter between themselves, and Maren found her hands had stopped shaking somewhere on the way down the draw. Fear, she thought, was a thing that fed on stillness. Motion starved it. She had a man hidden in her rocks, a fence cut like a signature, and a stranger beside her who shot like the wrath of God and spoke like a schoolmaster, and somehow the sum of all that danger felt more manageable than the quiet two months Garrett Sloan had so generously laid before her that morning.