The first thing Elias Mercer heard was the horse.

It came stumbling through the dry wash below his ranch, hooves striking stone with the desperate rhythm of an animal that had forgotten how to run. Elias was mending a hinge on the corral gate when the sound reached him. He straightened, one hand resting on the hammer, and watched a dun mare stagger into view. Her flanks were white with salt. A leather saddle hung crooked beneath a blanket darkened by blood.

There was no rider in the saddle.

Elias set the hammer down. He had lived long enough in the New Mexico Territory to know that a riderless horse could mean anything from a broken leg to an ambush. He took his rifle from the porch and walked toward the wash without hurrying. The sun was barely above the eastern ridge, but the heat already trembled over the stones.

A few yards beyond the mare, someone lay beneath a cottonwood whose roots had clawed through the bank. The figure wore a dust-colored shirt and a dark skirt split at the hem. One arm was pressed against the ribs. A narrow braid lay across the shoulder, and blood had dried in a black line from the hairline to the jaw.

Elias stopped outside arm’s reach.

“Can you hear me?”

The stranger’s eyes opened. They were dark, alert, and furious with pain.

“Water,” she whispered.

He had a canteen at his belt. The woman tried to lift herself when he crouched, then collapsed with a sharp gasp. Elias slid one hand behind her shoulders and raised the canteen to her mouth.

“Slowly. You drink too fast, you’ll lose it.”

She obeyed for three swallows, then turned her face away. Her breathing was shallow. A bullet had torn through the upper part of her arm, and the cloth around it was stiff with dried blood. Elias had treated cattle wounds, knife cuts, and one ranch hand who had tried to stop a rattlesnake with his boot. He knew enough to understand that the stranger needed more than a sip of water.

“What’s your name?”

She studied him as though the question itself might be a trap.

“Raina.”

“Elias Mercer. My place is half a mile north. Can you stand?”

“No.”

“Then we won’t ask you to.”

He fetched the mare’s reins, tied the animal in the shade, and returned with a blanket. The woman’s gaze followed every movement. When he lifted her, she stiffened and reached for a knife at her belt. Her fingers found only empty leather.

“I’m not taking you anywhere you don’t want to go,” he said. “But if you stay here, the sun will finish what the bullet started.”

She let him carry her.

The ranch house had two rooms, a kitchen, and a porch that needed replacing. Elias laid Raina on the narrow bed near the window, boiled water, and cut away the torn sleeve. She clenched her jaw so tightly that a muscle jumped near her ear. He cleaned the wound as gently as he could, then bound it with strips torn from an old linen sheet.

“Who shot you?” he asked.

“Men who think a map gives them ownership of everything it touches.”

“That sounds expensive. Most men who think that way wear clean boots.”

For the first time, something almost like amusement crossed her face. It vanished quickly.

“Did you see anyone following me?”

“No.”

“Then they will come.”

Elias glanced toward the open door. His ranch stood at the edge of a broad valley called Cinder Basin, where three creeks became one before sinking into the gravel flats. The water was unreliable, the soil mean, and the wind carried dust into every crack. People who settled here learned to recognize a threat before it reached the porch.

“Let them come after you’ve slept,” he said.

Raina’s eyes closed, though her hand remained curled around the blanket. Elias returned to the wash to examine the tracks. The mare had come from the south. Two sets of boot prints followed the trail, then separated where the ground hardened. The men had ridden past the cottonwood and turned east, toward the old stage road.

He found a brass cartridge casing in the dust.

The mark on its base was unfamiliar, but the ammunition was expensive. Whoever had fired it did not hunt for a living. Elias pocketed the casing and looked south across the basin. A line of smoke lay against the horizon, too straight to be a campfire and too dark to be cooking smoke.

By noon, Raina had awakened and demanded her clothes. Elias told her the shirt was ruined and offered one of his late sister’s blouses, which she accepted only after he placed it on a chair and turned his back. She was younger than he had first thought, perhaps twenty-five, with a small scar beneath her left eye and the calm, measuring gaze of someone accustomed to being underestimated.

“You live alone?” she asked when she emerged from the bedroom.

“I have a mule with strong opinions.”

“I meant people.”

“So did I.”

She sat at the table and inspected the bandage. “You should have left me.”

“Probably.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Elias poured coffee into two chipped cups. “I was thirsty once. Someone gave me water.”

It was not the whole truth, but it was the part he could say without opening an old wound. Raina seemed to recognize the boundary and did not push.

Near sunset, she finally explained that she had been carrying a message from a settlement west of the basin. Men employed by the Cinder Basin Development Company had seized a surveyor’s book and were searching for a second copy. The book contained old water agreements, boundary notes, and signatures that could ruin a powerful man.

“What powerful man?” Elias asked.

“Silas Rook.”

Elias’s cup stopped halfway to his mouth. Silas Rook owned freight wagons, a bank office in Mercy Crossing, and enough elected men to make a lie sound official. He had been buying dry land for years, land no sensible rancher would want. Elias had always wondered why.