"Don't fire unless you have to. I don't want Mercer to have cause to claim you threatened his men."
"I know how to handle it, Margaret."
She heard her name in his mouth. He didn't use it often—only when he meant the thing following it to land specifically. And she said, "Wake me if anything happens. Even if you think I should sleep through it. Wake me."
"I will," he said. And because it was Nathan Cole, she believed it.
He was gone before the last of the daylight, and she ate something she couldn't have described afterward and lay down on her bed with her boots still on, and was asleep within five minutes.
She woke before dawn to the sound of a single rifle shot, very far north. She was on her feet and out the back door in less than a minute, pulling on her coat as she ran. And in the gray predawn, she could see the north pasture and the fence line, and Nathan's horse moving at speed along the treeline. And beyond the fence, two dark shapes fleeing on horseback, going hard east.
She waited at the paddock gate with her heart in her throat. Nathan came back fifteen minutes later. He dismounted and handed her the rifle without ceremony.
"Two men," he said. "They'd cut the fence and were moving the cattle through. I fired wide—not at them, just wide—and they ran." He looked toward the north. "We lost four head that got through the fence before I got there."
"Are they recoverable?"
"I know which direction they went. I can track them at first light."
She was already calculating. Four head was a loss she could absorb. It hurt, but it wasn't ruinous. "More importantly, they were seen," she said. "You can identify them."