She went up to the house then, and lay awake a long time, listening to the windmill and thinking about a man hiding in her rocks with a rifle, and a dead paymaster, and a marriage vow, and how a woman could live three years on a piece of land and not know it was a battlefield until the shooting started.
Chapter 5
Cuts Made for Leaving
They walked the fence at dawn, before the sun got its teeth in, Stanton on foot leading the roan and Maren leading her own gelding, with Tomás trailing behind carrying wire and tools like a man carrying instruments to a surgery.
"Now," Stanton said at the cut post, "look at the bright ends. Really look."
Maren crouched. The cut ends of the wire curled toward her, the metal shaved clean on the side facing her ranch. She had cut wire herself a hundred times; a man standing outside a fence, cutting in, left the bright bevel facing out. A man standing inside left it facing in. These faced in.
"The cuts were made from inside," she said slowly. "From my side."
"By a man standing on your land, cutting his way out." Stanton straightened up and looked at the ground with that reading gaze of his. "Now think, Mrs. Ellison. Six horses come down from the north — across your land, they'd have crossed your whole north pasture to reach this fence from inside. They ride up to your fence from within, cut it, and five ride out together. Why would men who were already inside your ranch cut your fence to leave it?"
"Because they didn't come through a gate," Tomás said, behind them, very quietly. "And didn't want seen leaving by one."
"Because they wanted you to find it," Stanton said. "And because what they were doing inside your land wasn't finished, and they expect to come back the same way — and an open cut in a fence nobody patrols is a door that doesn't squeak." He let that sit. "Men don't build doors in another man's fence for one visit."
Maren stood up and looked north across her own pasture toward the Cerros, the rocky hills that shouldered up at the far end of the Rocking E, blue in the morning. Thomas had loved those hills. Thomas had ridden up there, the last spring of his life, more often than the work explained — she had teased him about it, asked if he had a sweetheart made of stone up there, and he had laughed and said a man ought to know what he owned.
"A man ought to know what he owned," she said aloud.
Stanton glanced at her. "Ma'am?"
"Something my husband used to say. The last year, he rode the Cerros every week. I thought it was a restless streak." She turned her hat brim in her hands. "Mr. Stanton, if men have been crossing my ranch to reach those hills, then there's something in those hills worth crossing for. And Thomas knew it. And three years ago Thomas died in a ravine with a broken neck, and his horse never lame a day in its life, standing over him gentle as a nurse."
The silence that followed had a shape to it. Tomás crossed himself, once, unobtrusively.
It was Tomás who broke it, surprising all three of them. "Señora. Last spring — the spring before — I saw dust on the north road two times, early, before light, and no stock missing, and I thought it was my eyes getting old." He turned his hat in his hands. "And there was a break in this same fence in April, smaller, one strand, that I mended and did not report, because I thought the cattle had done it. The cattle had not done it. I knew when I mended it and I did not want to know." His jaw worked. "It has been going on a long time, this door. Longer than a year."
"A heavy thought to set down in the road," Stanton said at last.
"It is. And I'm not picking it up on a stranger's say-so." She picked up the wire stretcher and handed it to Tomás with decision. "We mend the fence. We mend it stronger than it was. And then, Mr. Stanton, since the ground talks to you, you and I are going to ride this ranch end to end, and you are going to tell me everything it says."
"Might take more than a day," he said.
"Then it's fortunate Mr. Sloan gave me two months."
They mended the fence together, the three of them, post and wire and sweat, and Maren drove the staples with a fury that Tomás pretended not to notice. By noon the line ran taut and unbroken to the hills again, and she stood looking at it with her hammer hanging from her wrist, and thought: a door that doesn't squeak — and felt the whole shape of her life rearrange itself around the knowledge that her home had been used, in the dark, by men who cut her fence from the inside and meant to come back.