"Other ranchers, other manufactured debts."
"That would be my read of it."
She looked up from the paper. The morning was bright and cold, and the meadowlarks in the north pasture were starting up, and the ordinary beauty of it hit her strange and sudden, the way it sometimes did when the world kept being lovely while the people in it were doing ugly things.
"If there are other cases," she said slowly, "then this isn't just about my land."
"No," Nathan said. "If Hart's right, this is about everything Mercer has done in this valley for the past five years, and your land is just the one that finally had someone willing to fight back."
She folded the letter with careful hands. She had known Mercer was dishonest. She had known he was cruel. She had not known, until this moment, that she might be standing at the edge of something much bigger than a dispute over one widow's ranch—that all the quiet suffering of all the small ranchers and farmers who had given up and moved on in the past five years might have an explanation, and that explanation had a name, and the name was the same man who had ordered her tied to a hitching post three days ago.
"How many people do you think?" she asked.
"I don't know. Hart will."
She looked toward the barn, toward the land that spread out behind it, toward the fence line she had been fighting to maintain with bare hands and borrowed time.
"Then we need to be ready for him when he gets here," she said. "Everything documented, everything organized, every discrepancy in order. We've got four days."
"Then we'd better use them."