Chapter 12

They rode hard, Coulter and Cosay and Will Fairchild stretched out across the rain-soaked ground, the horses throwing mud and the morning sky still heavy and gray overhead. The land looked different after a night of that kind of rain — colors deeper, edges sharper, the dry scrub holding the water it had been waiting months to receive.

Cosay rode slightly ahead, not from impatience but from knowledge. She knew this ground the way she knew everything out here — by memory and by feel, the creek’s behavior in flood conditions as familiar to her as the inside of her own hands. She took them on a line that avoided the worst of the soft ground without being asked, and Coulter followed her lead without comment.

Will rode beside him, the boy’s jaw tight and his eyes forward. “Pa tried to cross at first light,” he said. “Current took his horse’s feet out from under him. Got him back to shore but it was close.”

“How many head?”

“Eighty, maybe ninety. The ones we got in before the storm are fine. It’s the ones he was moving to the south pasture when it hit.” He paused. “We can’t lose them, Mr. Vane. Not this many.”

“We won’t,” Coulter said, and hoped he was right.

They heard the creek before they saw it — a low sustained roar that didn’t belong to the landscape, the sound of water doing things it wasn’t supposed to do. Then they came over a low rise and Coulter pulled up and looked at what the night had made.

The creek that normally ran tame and shallow between its cut banks had become something else entirely. Brown and churning, it had swallowed its banks and reached thirty feet beyond them on either side, moving fast and carrying everything it had picked up along the way — brush, branches, a section of wooden fence rolling end over end in the current. Where the bridge had been there was nothing but the stumps of the support posts, the structure itself gone downstream sometime in the night.

On the far bank Tom Fairchild stood with his two younger sons and the better part of his herd, the cattle bunched and restless, moving in the aimless anxious way of animals that could smell danger and didn’t know which direction to run from it. Tom raised his hand when he saw them.

“How deep?” Coulter called across.

“Chest high in the middle!” Tom called back. “Maybe deeper! Current’s the problem more than the depth!”

Cosay had already dismounted and was walking the near bank, reading the water the way she read everything — without urgency, without drama, her eyes moving across the surface and the far bank and back again. She crouched at one point and looked at the current’s angle, then moved twenty yards upstream and looked again.

“There,” she said when Coulter reached her. She pointed to a place where the creek bent slightly and the far bank was lower. “The bend slows it some. Not much, but enough.” She stood. “We need a rope across.”

“Tom!” Coulter shouted. “Can you get a rope to us?”