Drake swung down. The spurs chimed once in the dust.
"Take your hand off her," he said.
Crowe did not. "You got the money to stop this, drifter?"
Drake's gaze flicked to the warrant, to the three women, to the faces that would not meet his. "I have the money."
Nora's chin lifted. "We are not livestock to be sold."
Something in Drake's face softened—not pity exactly, but recognition of a line that should never have been crossed. "I know."
He reached into the duster and brought out two heavy sand-colored coin pouches. He set them on the crate at Crowe's boots. The leather made a dull sound. Gold, or enough silver to sound like it. The crowd exhaled as one animal.
Crowe's smirk arrived on schedule. "Two pouches. You'll be broke by sundown."
"Then the sundown can keep the change," Drake said. "Call the sale stopped."
Before Crowe could answer, a man pushed through from the bank porch—brown bowler, white collar, dark vest with a pocket-watch chain that flashed when he moved. He carried a thick dark ledger clamped under one arm as if it might bite. Elias Pike, cashier of the Saddle Creek Mercantile Bank, fifty-something, face the color of a man who had run farther than his dignity preferred.
"Stop the auction!" Pike shouted. "Those notes are not ours. That lien was never cleared through this bank. Whoever stamped that paper used our forms and a dead man's name. I have the originals here. I will not have this house party to fraud."