Chapter 3: The Yard

Eight days later we rode into the yard at the C B. The sun was up, hard and flat, throwing bright knives across the corrals. Men were about their work, feeding, shoeing, hauling, but every head turned as we rode in. The talk died like a hand clapped over it. You could feel the ranch lean in, all of it waiting on the first sound.

Mr. de Graaf stood on the front porch, hat pulled low, cigar smoke making a blue halo around his jaw. He was gruff by nature and practice; men learned quick not to mistake that for weakness. When he saw us he came forward with that short step of a man who keeps his cattle and his debts in the same ledger.

“Where’s Moore?” he asked, not raising his voice but with a hardness that made it carry.

I slid down from my horse and left Carter in the saddle, his hand on the reins, like he was ready for any thin seam of trouble. My boots scuffed the yard stones. People edged back, a ring forming like tidewater retreating.

“Buried on a hill eight days north of here,” I said. My voice sounded strange in my own ears, flat and small and final. “After he was gunned down by Welch and Hammer’s men.”

There was a silence then that felt like waiting for a bell to toll. Mr. de Graaf’s cigar went out between his fingers as if someone had pinched it. His face didn’t change much, only the eyes did, and they got colder.

“You tell me that plain,” he said.

“Moore had the C-B’s money, so he figured he’d best get back. They killed him for it. Tracks around the body matched the same prints I’d seen from the herd we drove. Unless someone from that crew’s been here to pay you out, we’ve come to settle what’s left.

Lynch disappeared after the stampede. Once we gathered what we could find, we were about sixty-five head short. We followed sign pushing a few strays, but the Major wanted to keep the herd moving, so we had to give up the missing stock and press on.

After I rode back to the trailhead to tell Ruben what I’d found, I returned to where Moore was killed. Ruben caught up to Carter and me while we were following the sign. We found Lynch and two other men with all our missing beef. They didn’t want to talk, and they’re still lying there, thinking about their lack of judgment. We brought the beef home, they’re in the northernmost pasture, where we left them before heading here.”

A ripple moved through the onlookers. Some scowled, some whispered. The men who worked for de Graaf shifted where they stood, hands going near holsters like the motion was automatic.

Carter swung down, joining me. He kept his voice level. “We aim to do this straight,” he said. “We want the law to see the why of it first. If it don’t, we’ll take what’s left of justice ourselves.”

A low murmur, was it caution, or warning? ran through the yard. I could see boys leaning out of the hayloft, women on the porch, men tightening their belts. The C B wasn’t just a where they raised cattle; it was a place where names stuck to you like tar.

De Graaf motioned one of his men over, and the fellow swung into the saddle like a Pony Express rider. In a heartbeat he was out of the yard and headed north, likely to check our claim about the returned beef.

“Moore spoke up for you?” Mr. de Graaf said finally, like he wanted to mark the limits of what he might be required to do.

“Not much,” I answered. “But what he did was enough.”

He spat in the dirt. “Welch and Hammer ... he paused, always something wrong on that spread. Too much force, constantly pushing others. Nothing open, always in the shadows”

“We bring the truth,” I said. “We’ll tell it open. If folks choose to stand behind it, fine. If they don’t, we’ll go where we must.”

De Graaf studied me, looked past me at Carter, then around at the silent ring of men. For a long moment the yard was a pond with something heavy sinking in it; you could see the circles widen but not yet the splash.

“All right,” he said at last, slow as a gate. “You got until sundown to make your case in front of the hands.”

Carter tipped his hat. “That’s fair,” he said.

I felt a strange mixed relief, relief that something like order still held, and an ache that the order might not be enough. We had eight days of riding behind us and a grave on a hill to remember. Now we had to go do the harder work: lay out what had happened, call the ranch to its better self, and hope that memory and rightness could tip the scales.

We moved among the men then, talking soft, naming names, laying out times and places, letting the truth look its best in the light. Faces changed as they heard, some hardened, some opened, some closed. The day unrolled, and with every hour the yard thickened with people and with the kind of attention that could turn a rumor into a cause.

When sundown came the yard would either be a place where a man’s name could be honored, or a place where another man would be counted off in the dust. We stood in the sun and felt the weight of that choice settle on our shoulders like a new saddle.

By late afternoon the yard was full enough to sit a man in each pocket. Men leaned on posts, hats in hands; some had come out of habit, some out of curiosity, some out of a hard-sour need to see if justice would be another thing they could count on. Children were there too, silent and quick-eyed, learning which way a ranch bent when a man’s name was put on the scale.

Mr. de Graaf had set up a rough stand of crates by the house steps. He spoke once—short, plain, and asked that the hands hear the story before any gun spoke. “We’ll have no quick lynching on my ground,” he said. “Speak clear. Let the lot know what you know. If the law needs calling, it will be called. If a man’s to be held, he’ll be held. But no one shoots first on my place.”

Carter and I took the floor. I told it the way it had been: the herd, the payout, the delay with Root, the night on the ridge, the tracks. I said the names plain, Welch, Hammer, The Major. The Major’s crew staying in town for another week. How Moore was the lone C-B hand heading back to the horse herd. Where they had found him, with the money gone and his life taken.

CJ Ruben, came forward then. He’d stayed behind at the trailhead the week before; he knew the timing, the men who moved with the herd, who took the money. His voice didn’t shake. He could tell the difference between a man who’d ridden hard and a man who’d loafed, and he knew the gait of the horses that passed that night.

“Moore was with Welch when the payout was counted,” CJ said. “And the Major was there as well. His crew was staying for a week. Next day, Moore rode back to the horse herd ‘cause he couldn’t wait to get home to his girl. I seen the horse herd leave, Welch and Hammer was along. Hawkins left at first light, we were in the same room. He was back 2 mornings later, horse half dead, on fresh horses he and Carter were back on the trail within a few hours of him arriving. I seen the tracks later round the pit where they left him. Tracks weren’t no stranger’s; they was the same prints from that crew’s horses we’d been working with on the drive up.”

A murmur went through the ring. Faces that had been dull now sharpened. De Graaf watched it all like a man testing the balance of a scale. He asked a few pointed questions, then nodded. “You swears to that?” he asked CJ.

CJ squared his shoulders. “God’s my witness.”

A few other men spoke up, hands who’d been on the range and dealt with Welch and Hammer’s men. None of it was dramatic, just a steady piling of small certainties that together made a weight heavy enough to tilt a ledger.

As sundown leaned in, a dust column rose on the old road to the east, small at first, then taller, then resolved into men on horses. Two rode clean ahead of the rest. The color left a few faces; others turned their hat brims low. The two in front were plainly Welch and Hammer. They rode slow, like men who knew the ground they came to and figured to take it in hand.

They dismounted and came up the yard with hands at their sides. Welch had a jaw like a granite slab; Hammer had the restless look of a man who thought a gun was the right measure of an argument. They smiled like men trading coin.

“Well,” Welch said, voice loose. “Heard there was talk. Figured you’d want to sort it.”

“You had a hand in killing Moore?” I asked. No heat in the question, only a flatness that could split a man.

Welch shrugged, pleasant as a man ordering a drink. “Hard words for folk out of their depth. Moore was dead when we found him and no one was around. Thought Hawkins had killed him and taken out.”

“So you just left his body for the animals?” I commented. “Not even a proper burial?”

“He was dead. He wasn’t part of my crew. So no need to waste my time.” Welch replied.

The crowd hissed low. De Graaf’s face didn’t move much, but his hand closed on a post so tight the knuckles pale.

“We got proof,” Carter said. “Witnesses. Tracks. The herd’s pattern, your men rode them, and they rode them hard. You took the payout.”

Welch’s smile thinned. “You’re telling tales. You got no law here. You got no proof for a hangin’.”

“Proof’s in the track and in the mouths of men here,” CJ said, stepping forward. “And in the fact Moore had the C B money when he left for the herd.”

Hammer laughed then, a short, ugly sound. “You go pushin’ this too far, folks’ll see what a meddlin’ stranger brings.”

He looked straight at me. The air tightened. Someone in the crowd swore. A boy slapped his hand over his mouth.

Mr. de Graaf moved then, quicker than a man his size had any right to be. “You’ll go before the county if you don’t like being looked at,” he said. “You’ll stand and tell what you done, or I’ll have men put you in handcuffs and take you to where the law sit’s. That’s my ground.”

Welch’s lip curled. He spat. “You gonna pack us off? We got friends on the road.”

“You got the law and you got the town,” de Graaf said. “I run this spread. Make your choice.”

No gun spoke. For a long beat the world was a held breath. Then Hammer’s hand dipped under his coat, fingers finding the edge of a grip, but before steel cleared leather, Carter’s hand was there, fast and final. He didn’t draw. Just twisted Hammer’s wrist like turning a rusted valve. That was enough.

“Put ‘em up,” Carter said, and his voice had that steadiness which pulls other men to it. “If you got proof for yourselves, step up and show it in the light. If you got nothin’, ride back the way you came.”

Welch looked to his men. They were younger folk, not yet full of the hurt that makes a man certain. Faces that had been set to follow softened, then hardened again. Welch cursed, spat in the dirt, and on the word “friends” he made his own choice. He swung his saddle leg and left at a trot. Hammer followed a moment later.

They rode away with a dust cloud and a bitter wind. The hands watched them leave until the dust braided into the distant plain and the last line of them was gone.

When the furor eased, men spoke in quieter tones. De Graaf looked at me then, and for the first time that day something like respect passed across his face.

“You didn’t run in, hot-headed,” he said. “You came and you spoke how a man ought to. You got a witness, and that carried more weight than a pistol. Don’t make me glad of it, but I trust you boys a sight more than that pack of coyotes.”

I felt the relief settle like rain. It wasn’t justice finished, Welch and Hammer might yet show their colors somewhere else, but the C-B had done what it could: it had heard the truth and had not let the first shadow decide a man’s fate.

We stayed that night at the C B. There were letters to be written, tracks to be followed, and a plan to ride the line to see if Welch and Hammer would surface again.

The grave on the hill had no stone, but word had passed through this ranch, and sometimes that’s all a man leaves: a name folks say with a little silence after.

Under the wide dark, with the lanterns lit and the corral gates creaking in the wind, Carter and I sat the porch and drank from a tin cup. We didn’t trade many words. The world was a little straighter than it had been that morning, and that was enough for the night.

The next morning broke thin, all gray sky and wind sharp enough to taste. Carter came up from the lower pasture leading a lame roan, and I was at the corral with Ruben when he rode in.

He swung down slow, face set hard. “They found her,” he said.

Ruben stopped mid-motion, the brush hanging loose in his hand. “Where?”

“Up in the canyon country. North of the flats. A week ago, maybe more.”

I didn’t have to ask who. None of us did.

The de Graaf girl.

She’d gone missing before the herd left, and half the hands stayed back to look for her, riding the gullies, turning rocks, calling her name until the echoes quit answering. The rest of us took the drive north, figuring she’d wandered, or maybe run off.

But nobody said what we were all thinking.

Now we didn’t have to.

Carter’s voice was low. “They say she had a knife wound. Throat punctured straight.”

Ruben let out a slow breath, long and steady. “God help her.”

“No sign of who did it,” Carter went on. “No tracks. No prints. Just her, laid out under a cedar shelf. Sheriff said maybe drifters.”

“Always drifters,” Ruben said.

I didn’t say anything. Just stood there, watching the wind curl dust through the yard. The corral boards creaked soft, and the horses shifted, uneasy.

A week after we left. That meant whoever did it was close when we were here. Maybe even closer.

Moore lying in a grave on a hill, and Root was still at the trailhead healing up. The yard was quiet except for the wind.

Carter finally spoke again. “They’re sending men up there. Sheriff’s got no leads.”

“Never does,” Ruben muttered.

I looked toward the north ridge, where the hills broke into pale rock and scattered cedar. The canyon country lay beyond that, rough land, easy to hide in.

No sign. No tracks. No idea what happened.

Just another ghost in a country already full of them.

And somewhere out there, Cal Darrant was still riding.

“I need to talk to the boss,” I said. “I’ll be heading up to where they found the girl.”

Both of them looked up quick as I turned toward the ranch house.

I stepped onto the porch and knocked. Hat in hand, head down.

When Mrs. de Graaf opened the door, she looked at me questioningly.

“Ma’am,” I said, “we just heard about your daughter. I need to speak with you and your husband.”