Chapter 1

The letter came on a Tuesday, carried out from town by a rider I didn’t recognize, a boy no older than sixteen who wouldn’t meet my eyes when he handed it over. Registered mail. My name on the front in a clerk’s careful hand, and beneath it, in smaller print, the return address of the district court.

I didn’t open it on the porch. I carried it inside, set it on the table where Emmie ate her supper every night, and looked at it the way a man looks at a rattlesnake he’s found coiled under his boot — not moving, not yet, just taking its measure.

Emmie was out back with the chickens, singing some nonsense song she’d made up about a rooster who wanted to be a hawk. I could hear her through the open window, off-key and unbothered, and I sat there at the table for the better part of ten minutes before I broke the seal.

Judge Samuel J. Hawkins wrote a plainer hand than the boy who’d delivered his letter. He didn’t waste words. It had come to the court’s attention — that was the phrase, come to the court’s attention, like the knowledge had simply arrived on its own instead of being carried there by a man with a grudge — that a minor child, one Emmeline Vance, age seven, was residing in the custody of her uncle, a single man of no fixed domestic arrangement, in a household lacking a woman’s presence or guidance. The court would review the matter upon Judge Hawkins’s next circuit through Dry Creek. Given the gravity of the concern, and absent a change in the household’s circumstances, the court would be obliged to consider alternative placement for the child, including remand to the territorial orphan asylum in St. Joseph.

I read it twice. The second time didn’t make it any easier to swallow than the first.

I didn’t need to guess who’d carried the knowledge to the marshal. There was only one man in the county who stood to gain anything from seeing me lose my land, and Silas Rourke had been sniffing around my north acreage since before my brother was in the ground. He couldn’t buy me out. He couldn’t scare me out — God knew he’d tried, with his fences cut and cut back and cut again, with the dead calf we never did explain. So he’d found a different kind of pressure, one that didn’t leave tracks. A word in the marshal’s ear about a gunslinger raising a little girl alone. Nothing in it that was even a lie, which was the worst part. Just a truth aimed like a rifle.

I’d never once caught him at any of it. That was the thing about Rourke — he didn’t do his own dirty work if there was a way around it, and there was always a way around it. He’d stand at the fence line making pleasant talk about the weather while some hired man of his cut wire two pastures over, and there wasn’t a soul in the county who could prove different. This was just one more version of the same trick, dressed up in a marshal’s uniform and a judge’s letterhead instead of a pair of wire cutters. He didn’t have to touch my land to take it from me. He only had to make it look, on paper, like I wasn’t fit to keep it.

I folded the letter and put it in my coat pocket rather than leave it lying on the table, though I didn’t examine too closely why that mattered to me. Some things a man doesn’t want catching a seven-year-old’s eye.

Emmie came in a while later smelling of hay and chicken feed, her braid half undone, and asked what was for supper like there wasn’t a court letter folded up three feet from her elbow. I told her beans and salt pork, same as always, and she made a face like I’d told her something worse than that, and for a few minutes I let myself just watch her be exactly what she was — a kid, unburdened, arguing with me about whether beans counted as a real supper or just a sad excuse for one.

I didn’t sleep well that night. Judges rode the district on their own schedule, not mine, which meant I had no way of knowing if I had two weeks or two days. I only knew Hawkins was already making his rounds somewhere out past the Blue River, and that a circuit judge with three counties to cover doesn’t dawdle. He’d get to Dry Creek when he got to Dry Creek, and whenever that was, I needed to be a different kind of household than the one Rourke had described in his letter to the marshal.

There wasn’t a lot of ways around a problem like that. A ranch needs supplies regardless of what a man’s mind is wrestling with, so two mornings later I hitched the wagon and rode into town for nails, salt, flour, and salt pork, telling myself the trip was about nothing more than an empty pantry.

Dry Creek wasn’t much of a town — one real street, a scattering of buildings that leaned toward each other like old men trading gossip, a church with a bell that rang crooked. But it had two things I needed to look at plainly, whether I wanted to or not, and both of them happened to be women.