He turned around in the dark. The moon was rising over the rimrock, painting her cheekbones in stark bone-white.
“What did you say?” he demanded.
Clara looked out over the vast, black emptiness toward the north, where the silhouette of the ridge met the starry sky. Her hand drifted to the silver medallion resting against her throat, her thumb circling its engraved face.
“I said I know this basin,” she murmured, her voice steady as the stones beneath their feet. “And before this season turns to frost, Caleb Morgan, you will learn that some debts cannot be paid in cattle, and some marriages are written long before the preacher ever opens his book.”
A chill that had nothing to do with the night wind brushed the back of Caleb’s neck. He stared at her, waiting for an explanation, but her jaw was set firm against the stars, offering nothing more. Turning back toward the dark trail ahead, Caleb pulled the horse forward into the desert night.
Dawn at the Morgan Ranch broke with a pale, amber light that washed the gray timber of the homestead in sharp relief. The house was an unadorned, two-story structure built of rough-hewn pine and squared limestone fieldstones, erected thirty years earlier by Nathaniel Morgan. It sat nestled beneath a rare grove of towering Rio Grande cottonwoods whose leaves hissed like rain in the dry wind. Beside it stood a low-roofed stone barn, an iron-rimmed corral, and a sod-roofed blacksmith shed with a cold anvil resting outside its double doors.
Caleb stepped out onto the porch before the sun cleared the eastern mesa. He hadn't slept more than two hours. His mind had spent the dark hours pacing the floorboards of his room downstairs while the light tread of Clara’s boots sounded sporadically from the upper chamber. He had offered her his late mother’s bedroom, fully expecting her to lock the door and refuse to come down until midday.
Instead, the smell of boiling coffee struck him before he reached the kitchen door.
He paused on the threshold. The hearth had been cleaned of yesterday’s ash, a fresh fire of dry mesquite roots burned with a clear, blue flame, and the cast-iron kettle was already singing. Clara stood by the dry sink, her back to him, her long braids pinned up out of the way. She had rolled the sleeves of her brown work dress past her forearms, revealing lean, corded muscle as she sliced through a salt-pork slab with his father’s heavy carbon butcher knife.
She didn't turn around, yet she spoke clearly into the quiet room. “Water in your cistern is slightly brackish. You have an iron seep upstream that needs clearing.”
Caleb blinked, leaning against the jamb. “How do you know that? You haven't been off the porch since we arrived at midnight.”
Clara laid four thick strips of pork into the smoking iron skillet. The grease spat and crackled with a savory roar. “I tasted the water when I washed my face. Iron tastes like old blood. If your seep isn't cleared before the summer heat settles in, the minerals will sour your milk and colic your weanlings.”
Caleb walked to the stove and poured himself a tin mug of black coffee. It was scalding, bitter, and brewed strong enough to float an iron nail—just the way he liked it. He took a sip, studying her over the rim. “You seem to know quite a bit about cattle operations for a merchant’s daughter from Kansas.”
Clara turned around, drying her hands on a coarse flour sack. Her dark eyes met his without blinking. “I told you my father was an engineer. He spent fifteen years mapping watersheds, mining claims, and cattle corridors across this territory before the railroad bought the right-of-way. He did not leave me books on etiquette, Mr. Morgan. He left me field notebooks.”
She set a plate of fried salt pork and dry biscuits on the oilcloth-covered table. Caleb sat down, muttered a brief, perfunctory grace out of respect for his mother’s memory, and began to eat. Clara did not join him at the table; she took her coffee and walked to the kitchen window, gazing out across the yellowing prairie toward the northern horizon where the limestone ridges cut like broken teeth into the pale sky.
“There are no cattle in your lower creek pastures,” she remarked.
“Because there's no water down there,” Caleb replied between bites of biscuit. “The creek dried down to a muddy trickle three years back. I had to push the herd up into the rocky draws near the timberline just to keep them from dying of thirst.”
“A creek with that gradient does not dry up naturally in three years,” Clara countered, her voice quiet but unyielding. “The watershed drains two hundred square miles of high plateau. Even in a dry year, the gravel strata beneath the dry bed should carry enough underflow to support cottonwoods and wild plum. Yet the trees along your northern boundary are dying from the crown down.”
Caleb set his fork down with a sharp click against the tin plate. “Look, Miss Whitmore—or whatever I'm supposed to call you—I appreciate that you can make coffee and fry meat, but I've worked this dirt since I was six years old. When the clouds don't drop rain, the creeks don't run. That’s ranching in West Texas.”
Clara didn't argue. She simply set her mug on the sill and walked out the back door.
Frowning in irritation, Caleb grabbed his hat and followed her. He found her standing by the perimeter rail of the horse corral, watching Barnaby paw at the dust. In her hand, she held a folded, yellowed parchment that she had retrieved from her leather traveling satchel.
“What is that?” he asked, stepping alongside her.
“A certified survey map from eighteen sixty-eight,” Clara said, unfolding the brittle sheet. The paper crackled in the desert wind. “Commissioned by the territorial governor’s office and countersigned by the Department of the Interior.”