The trail narrowed between the two rocky hills until it was hardly wider than a wagon bed, and Elias Ward rode it the way he rode everything in those years: steady, unhurried, and already half gone.
The hills rose on either side like the shoulders of some old animal gone to stone, ochre and gray, patched with dry grass and the dark green of juniper. The sun stood high and white over the valley beyond, and the air smelled of dust and hot rock and pine resin carried down from higher ground. Ranger, his dark bay stallion, picked his way over loose stone with the patient care of a horse that had learned its rider's moods. Nine years old now, Ranger was restless the way Elias was restless, ears turning at every sound, but he trusted the hand on the rein, and he went where it told him to go.
Elias had been riding for ten years. He told himself that was freedom. He had crossed deserts where the heat shivered off the sand until the horizon looked like water, and mountain passes where the wind cut through his coat and the snow stayed in the shadows even in summer, and river valleys green enough to make a man want to stop and plant something. He never had. He slept under bright stars and lay awake beside dying fires, because darkness made him remember, and memory was faster than any horse he had ever ridden.
What he saw, as the trail opened out into the valley, stopped him.
The valley was small and green in a way that late summer seldom allowed, a cup of grass and garden held between the hills, with a shallow creek running bright past a log cabin beneath a cluster of tall pines. A weathered barn stood behind the cabin, and a woodpile, and a corral where six horses grazed. It was a cared-for place. You could tell at a glance: the garden rows were straight, the cabin roof was patched but sound, the wood was stacked with a careful hand. Someone loved this ground and worked it hard.
But the fence was ruined.
It ran along the mouth of the valley and out along the creek pasture, and for a long stretch it was simply gone. Posts had been ripped out of the earth and lay like broken teeth. Rails were scattered, some snapped clean, some thrown yards from the line. The gate hung banging on a single hinge, creaking in the wind, a sound like a loose tooth in a jaw. Ranger snorted and tossed his head at it. Elias sat still in the saddle and read the ground the way other men read newspapers.
This was no storm. A storm scattered things in one direction, and it left its own kind of sense. This was different. The earth at the post holes was churned, and there were hoofprints cut deep and wild, too many and too close together, and the rails were not weather-broken but wrenched. Someone had driven stock through this fence on purpose, hard and fast, in the dark most likely, to frighten and to break. He could see where the herd had come through and where it had gone out again, and he could see the smaller prints of horses standing off to the side, watching, driving. Men had done this. Men who knew fences and knew fear.
He rode forward slowly, Ranger's hooves loud on the hard earth, and came around the side of the barn to find them.
Two women were struggling with a cedar beam. It was a thick thing, meant for a barn upright or a corral post, and it had slipped off the sawhorses and pinned itself at an angle against the barn wall. The older woman had her shoulder under one end and her hands braced, her dark hair tied back at the nape of her neck, her sleeves rolled above her elbows, her forearms marked with calluses and small scars. The younger one, light brown hair coming loose around her face, freckles standing out in the sun, had hold of the other end and was trying to lever it with her knee and swear at it under her breath, though she stopped swearing when she heard the horse.
They both looked up.
Elias took off his hat.
The older woman straightened slowly. She did not drop her end of the beam, but she shifted her grip so she could face him squarely, and her eyes went over him in one long, measuring look: the worn coat, the scarred hands, the gray at his temples, the horse, the saddlebag, the revolver at his hip. She was tall and strong and steady, and her face gave away nothing at all, which told him a great deal. She was the kind of woman who had learned to look first and decide second, and who did not frighten easily, though she had plainly been frightened lately, by something that had come in the night and broken her fence.
Afternoon, Elias said.
Afternoon, she said. Her voice was plain and dry, with few words in it, but every word meant. "You lost?"
No, ma'am, Elias said. "I was riding the trail and found your fence down. Thought I'd come and see if the place it belonged to was still standing."
The younger woman laughed, a quick, startled sound, and then caught herself, as if laughing at a stranger were a luxury she had not budgeted for. "Standing, yes," she said. "Just barely, some days. I'm June. This is my sister Mara."