The Enemy's Confession

Lucas Hollister watches from a frost-covered ridge as a rider comes up the road into Star Crossing, sitting a big bay with a cavalryman's straight back, stopping at the edge of town to read the place before he enters it. Beside him, Orrie Pritchard spits tobacco into the dead grass and says there's their trouble. Orrie wants a conversation with the federal man. Orrie also wants Lucas's sister Clara, and the Hollister spread, and Lucas gone or broken enough to sell. The agent's name is Nathaniel Drummond. He has an eastern accent buried under army discipline, a limp in his left leg, and a flat answer when Lucas accuses him of using the law as a weapon. *"I don't carry a club. I carry a surveying chain and a lot of ink. That's all the weapon I need."* He says he is here to survey boundaries and check that claims are filed correctly. Lucas says that's never all, because the new fencing laws are written to let the cattle syndicates fence out everybody who stayed. Lucas has held the ranch together since his father died, through droughts and falling prices and the creeping money of the Laramie syndicate. He has kept Clara dreaming of a women's college in Denver, kept her from seeing how close the whole thing is to going under. He also has a scar on his left wrist from barbed wire when he was twelve, and his father's voice telling him he was never man enough to keep the place. Nate carries a daguerreotype wrapped in blue cloth. Isaac, three years gone, twenty-five in the picture, with a crooked grin. Nate got the scar on his knuckles the night Isaac died. Then Marshal Hiram Bledsoe, who pours rye in a filthy office and tells Nate the Hollister land is cursed, works out exactly where to press. One word about any of this, he tells Lucas, and Clara's college money dries up forever. What starts as a survey turns into evidence, a hard ride to Cheyenne, a federal judge, and two men who have both learned that wanting anything openly gets it taken away. A historical western romance between two men, set in a frontier town squeezed between fencing law and syndicate money, about a rancher who blinks first and an agent who has already lost once. The romance is closed-door.