Wild West

The first cold drop hits the back of my neck like a warning tap, and the mountains answer with thunder.

I’ve been watching that particular bank of cloud all morning, the one that looks bruised even in daylight. Up here, storms don’t roll in gentle. They drop straight down through the passes and make the rivers climb out of their own beds. I taste metal on my tongue, and that’s not poetry. It’s weather.

The herd feels it too. Two hundred head packed in the high valley, their hides dark with sweat and dust, hooves worrying the ground into a churned-up stink. They keep bunching toward the spruce line, away from the open slope, as if trees are an idea they can hide behind. I ride the edge and try to keep my seat quiet because a nervous horse makes nervous cattle, and nervous cattle make a man poor.

Walt Mercer rides up on my left, lifting his pocket watch like it can shame the sky into slowing down. The crystal is cracked; it’s been cracked since spring. He checks it anyway.

“We’re burning daylight, Tom,” he says. “That river’s already talking loud.”

Down-valley, the water does have a voice. Not the lazy chuckle it had yesterday. Today it’s got teeth in it. The smell reaches us even here, sharp with torn roots and cold stone, and a pine branch spins past in the current below, needles stripped clean like something already chewed it.

“I hear it,” I say, because saying anything else doesn’t help.

What I don’t say is: the bank will hear it too. Not the river, the late payment. The note comes due at the rail stop in three days. If I don’t deliver the cattle to the buyer on time, the ranch isn’t mine anymore. I don’t get to be proud about that. Pride doesn’t keep a roof up through winter.

The herd shifts again, a wave running through them, and I follow the direction of their attention before I mean to. A rider breaks out of the timber on the far side of the valley, moving fast, horse stepping careful over rock. For a second I only catch the red slash at the saddle—cloth wrapped around a rifle scabbard, bright as a fresh cut.

Maeve Kincaid.

Her name lands in my chest the way thunder does when it’s close enough to rattle your ribs. I haven’t seen her since last fall, since the argument that ended with both of us saying the wrong thing and meaning it. She rides like she’s late for a fire, hat brim low, auburn braid darkened by mist. When she gets near, I see the smear on the knot of that red cloth. Not mud. Too dark, too slick.

She pulls up a few yards out, gives my herd a quick assessment like counting is something she does without moving her lips. Then she looks straight at me, steel-gray eyes not blinking, and for a half second I feel the old, stupid urge to step closer just to see if she’ll step closer too.

“You’re pushing them toward the ford,” she says. Not a question. “If you do that once the hail starts, you’ll lose twenty head to the river. Maybe more.”

Walt makes a sound like a cough swallowed wrong. “We don’t need—”

Maeve doesn’t look at him. “My cattle are two miles behind yours, Tom. If your herd jams that crossing, mine go nowhere. So this is me being neighborly. Or selfish. Pick whichever makes you less prickly.”

The wind shifts. Another drop hits my collarbone, colder, heavier. The cloud bank has moved, and the light in the valley turns the color of old tin.

Maeve’s horse steps forward until we’re close enough that I can smell wet wool from her coat and the sharp edge of gun oil. Close enough that if I reached out, I could catch her sleeve and feel whether she’d pull away. Close enough that the wrong choice could cost cattle, money, and whatever chance we might still have of not ending this the way we started.

She tips her chin toward the canyon trail that cuts along the rock face, the Devil’s Stitch, narrow and mean but higher than the river. Then she tips it back toward the ford, quicker if it holds.

“We don’t have time for you to hate me,” she says softly, like that’s the part that matters. “We have time for one plan.”