"No. " Jacob's voice was firm. "I need you here. If something happens to me, this family still has to function. " Emily looked at Jacob. "Then I'll come. " Both he and Ethan looked at her. "You'll come? " Jacob said slowly, like he was testing whether the words made sense.
"I know how to ride. " She said. "And two sets of eyes are better than one, especially in dark country. " She paused. "And I know what I'm looking for. " Jacob looked at Ethan. Ethan, to his credit, did not argue and did not look alarmed on her behalf. He looked instead like he was revising something he'd believed about Emily Carter Walker.
They went out after supper, when the boys were settled, Ethan in charge and fully aware of it in the way that made Emily trust him completely with the responsibility. She and Jacob rode south without lamps. Lamps would be seen moving by the half moon that gave enough light to navigate and not enough to reveal. The South Creek Crossing was quiet. They dismounted and walked the fence line, and she saw immediately what Ethan had meant about the low ground.
It was perfect cover, a natural channel through which a herd could be pushed in near silence if you knew what you were doing. Then Jacob stopped. He crouched. She crouched beside him. The ground near the fence post was disturbed.
Not recently, two or three days ago, but the shape of it was clear. Cattle had been held here. Milling the way cattle mill when they're waiting, when they're being bunched before a drive. The trampled circle was maybe 20 ft across. They held them here.
Jacob said quietly. Bunch them on our side of the fence before pushing through to Harlan's pasture. So the tracks Harlan followed started on your land, she said. But the cattle were never ours, he said. They were already stolen before they crossed my fence line.
This is just the staging area. He stood up. His voice was controlled, but underneath it was something that had been building for weeks. The slow grinding anger of a man who'd been made to look guilty for something he hadn't done in front of neighbors he'd known for years. Then Emily saw it.
Tucked in the fork of the fence post so deliberate it couldn't be accidental, a strip of cloth. Blue faded, the kind of cloth that came from work shirts. She pulled it free. Jacob, she said. He looked at it.
Someone left this, she said. Either as a marker for their own people, this is the right post, this is the right crossing, or as evidence planted. He looked at the cloth. Or both, he said. A marker that also serves as evidence if someone finds it and asks questions about where it came from.
She turned the cloth over in her hands. There's mud on one side, she said. Fresh mud. From the creek bank, not from this side. She held it up so the moonlight hit it.
Whoever left this waded the creek. They came from the other side. Jacob stood very still. The other side of that creek, he said quietly, is Deacon Marsh's property. The name landed in the silence like a stone in still water.
She didn't know the name, but the way Jacob said it, the specific quiet of it, the weight told her everything she needed to know about what it meant. Who is Deacon Marsh? She said. Jacob looked across the dark creek. He's the man who's been trying to buy this ranch for two years, he said.
And every rancher in this valley whose land I've just described to you, Harlan Pruitt Caldwell, their properties all border mine. Their land and mine together. He stopped. Together, it's the largest contiguous parcel in this part of Montana. The railroad's been surveying for a new corridor, northern route.
Whoever owns that block of land when the survey's done, controls the right of way, Emily said. And the price that goes with it, he said. She turned the strip of cloth in her hands. The creek murmured in the dark beside them. Somewhere behind them, her horse shifted.
He's not just trying to buy you out, she said. He's trying to make sure you can't refuse to sell. Make you a suspect. Isolate you from your neighbors. Squeeze you from every side until selling is the only option left.
Jacob looked at her. In the moonlight, his face had an expression she hadn't seen on it before. Not the closed endurance she'd known since she arrived. Not the careful blankness. Something raw and harder.
He came to my door 6 months ago, Jacob said. Offered me a fair price. I told him this land was my son's inheritance and it wasn't for sale at any price. And 2 months after that, she said, the cattle started disappearing. She folded the cloth carefully and put it in her coat pocket.
This is evidence, she said. Circumstantial, but it's a start. Tomorrow at that meeting, you are not going in as a suspect. You're going in as a rancher who has been targeted exactly like everyone else. She looked at him.
But we need more. One piece of cloth and a staging ground proves you're not guilty. It doesn't prove who is. No, he said. Then we need to find out who the tall man with the rope burn scar reports to, she said.
And we need to know who else in this valley has been approached to sell and whether the offers came before or after the trouble started. Jacob Walker looked at his wife in the dark beside the South Creek crossing. And whatever he had thought about her when a woman from Boston arrived at his door with a suitcase and a marriage certificate, whatever that had been, was no longer what he thought. Emily, he said. We should get back, she said.
She was already turning to our horse. The boys will be awake. He stood for a moment where she'd left him. Then he followed. And as they rode back across the dark ranch land, neither of them spoke.
But the silence between them was entirely different from the silence of 9 days ago. It was the silence of two people who had without ceremony or declaration become something to each other that neither one had expected. Behind them across the dark creek, a lamp moved through the window of a distant house, lit then extinguished like a signal or a warning. The Caldwell barn meeting started at 7:00 and turned ugly by 7:15. Emily sat beside Jacob at the long table they'd set up between the stalls, and she counted 11 ranchers plus their eldest sons, which meant the whole valley had come, which meant the whole valley was frightened, which meant whatever happened in the next 2 hours would set the direction of everything that followed.
Harlan spoke first. He always spoke first, she was learning, not because he was the leader, but because he was the loudest, and nobody had ever stopped him from going first. "I'll say plain what most of us are thinking," Harlan said, standing at the head of the table with his hat in his hands. "We've lost cattle, all of us. And every time we follow the sign, it runs through Walker land or along Walker fence line or across Walker Creek crossing.
Now, I'm not saying Jacob Walker is a thief. I'm saying the evidence keeps pointing the same direction and we can't keep pretending it doesn't. " Murmur around the table. Agreement from some, discomfort from others. Jacob started to stand. Emily put her hand on his arm.
He looked at her. She shook her head once, very slightly. "Not yet. Let them finish. Let them say the whole of it. " Because if he stood up now and defended himself against Harlan, this became a fight between two men, and fights between two men in a room full of frightened people always spread sideways and burned everything.
Pruitt spoke next. He laid out the timeline, 6 weeks, how many head from which ranch, the discovery at the Caldwell place, the burned leather mark. He was careful and methodical, and when he was done, the room was quieter. Then old Caldwell himself spoke. He was 72 and had been in this valley longer than anyone at the table, and he spoke slowly and with the particular weight of a man who knew that the words of old men were still heard even when younger men thought they'd already decided.
"I knew Jacob Walker's father," Caldwell said. "I knew Eleanor Walker. I watched Jacob raise six boys on a piece of land that would have broken most men. I'm not ready to call him a thief based on fence cuts and tracks that any man could arrange to fall where he pleased. " He looked around the table. "The question I want answered is this, who benefits from us fighting each other? " Silence.