years ago. It was well past noon, the sun arcing toward the western mountains. Well past noon and cool out, rain on the way, clouds boiling up ahead of them to the northeast, rolling on down from Canada.
Steph, on Malomar, her hat down her back and her pigtails tied with green ribbons, was babbling away about how much she hated school. Grant rode along in silence, almost wishing he was twelve again like the mouthy kid beside him. Twelve. Oh, yeah, with years of the school she so despised ahead of him.
He’d graduated from UM the year before. He was a rancher full-time now. And he had an ache inside him, an ache that got worse every day. He missed the excitement and challenge of being out among other people more, of rubbing elbows with the rest of the world.
Steph stopped babbling long enough that he turned to look at her.
“You didn’t hear a word I said,” she accused.
“Sure I did.”
“Repeat it to me.”
“Don’t be a snot. I got your meaning. It’s not like I haven’t heard it a hundred times before. You hate school, but your dad and mom want you to go, to be with other kids, get yourself a little social interaction, learn to get along with different folks. But you’d rather be driving the yearlings to market. You’d eat dust, working the drag gladly, if only your folks would give you a break and your mom would homeschool you, so you could spend more time on a horse.”
“I’m not a snot.” She laid on the preteen nobility good and heavy. “And I am so sorry to bore you.”
“Steph. Don’t sulk, okay?”
“Oh, fine.” She was a good-natured kid at heart and couldn’t ever hold on to a pout all that long. She flipped a braid back over her shoulder and sent him a grin. “And okay. I guess you were listening. Pretty much.” She pointed at the rising black clouds. “Storm coming.”
“Oh, yeah.” The wind held that metallic smell of bad weather on the way.
Ahead, erupting from the rolling prairie, a series of sharp outcroppings appeared: the Callister Breaks, a kind of minibadlands, an ancient fault area of sharp-faced low cliffs, dry ravines and gullies. The Breaks lay half on Clifton’s Pride and half on the Triple J.
“Wonder what they’re up to?” Steph asked no one in particular. “They should have been home hours ago…”
Their dads had headed out together at daybreak from the Clifton place to check on the mineral barrels in the most distant pastures. They took one of the Clifton pickups, the bed packed with halved fifty-gallon drums filled with a molasses-sweetened mineral supplement that the cattle lapped up.
The two men had said they’d be back at the Clifton house by noon. It was almost three now…
Grant and Steph rode on as the sky grew darker.
“We don’t come up on them soon,” Grant said as they crested a rise, “we’ll have to head back or take cover.”
And that was when Steph pointed. “Look…”
Down there in the next ravine was the pickup, half the full barrels traded out for empty ones, both cab doors hanging open.
Grant’s heart lurched up and lodged in his throat. “Stay here,” he told her.
But she didn’t. She urged Malomar to a gallop and down they went. They raced to the abandoned pickup, and past it, up the next rise, as lightning split the sky and thunder rolled across the land.
Below, they saw two familiar figures, tied together, heads drooping, not moving…
And the tire tracks of pickups and trailers and even an abandoned panel from a portable chute.
“Rustlers!” Steph cried.
The sky opened up and the rain poured down.
“Wait here,” he commanded. Even from that distance, he could see the blood.
But she no more obeyed him that time than she had the time before. The rain beat at their faces, soaking them to the skin in an instant, as they raced toward the two still figures on the wet ground below.
After that, the dream had no coherence—just as the rest of that day, when it happened, had none.
It was all brutal images.
Two dead men who had once been their fathers, tied together, the blood on the ground mixing with the pelting rain, so the mud ran rusty. He dismounted first and went to them.
Steph cried silently, tears running down soft cheeks already soaked with rain. “Daddy…” She whispered the word, but it echoed in his head, raw and ragged, gaining volume until it was loud as a shout. “Oh, Daddy, oh, no…”
And she was off Malomar before he could order her to stay in the saddle. She knelt in the mud and the blood, taking her dad’s hanging head in her arms, pulling him close so his blood smeared her shirt.
Grant left her there. He took his rifle from his saddle holster, mounted up and went hunting. He didn’t go far. Out of that ravine, and into the next one.
Just over the rise from where their fathers sat, murdered, bleeding out on the muddy ground, he found a man. Gutshot. Dying. John Clifton and Andre Julen hadn’t gone easily. They’d taken at least one of their murderers down with them.
Grant knelt in the driving rain, took the dying man’s head in his lap.
“Names. I want names,” he commanded. “They left you here, didn’t they, to die? Tell me who they are and you get even, at least. You get to know you died doing one thing right.”
And the man whispered. Two names.
Grant left him there, moaning, pleading for help that was bound to be too long in coming, for rescue that would only happen too late. He checked out that ravine, found no one else. In his head was a roaring sound, louder than the thunder that rolled across the land—a roaring, and one word, repeating, over and over in an endless loop.
No, no, no, no….
He saw himself returning to Steph, to the bodies that once had been fine men.
She’d cut the ropes that bound his father to hers. She sat between them, there in the mud, holding one up on either side of her, her braids soaked through, caked with mud and the dead men’s blood, one green ribbon gone, the other no more than a straggling wet string.
“I didn’t want them tied,” she told him, eyes wild as the storm that raged around them. “They would hate that, being tied. But they were falling over. They shouldn’t be left to lie there in the mud…”
He knew he should dismount, get down to her, where he could pull her free of death, and hold her. That he needed to tell her some nice lies, to reassure her that it would be all right. Because that was what a man did at a time like this, he looked after the young ones and the females. And Steph was both.
But as he sat there astride his horse, looking down at her in the mud, before he could act on what he knew he should do, she looked up at him and she said, “Get the pickup. I’ll
