The Renegade's Property

Forty-three head where there were ninety-two in the spring, and the bones of the others bleaching along the south pasture where the creek shrank to a muddy thread and then to nothing. Dust hangs in the afternoon light, each mote a small accusation. Rose McAllister pulls her bandana down from her mouth and counts again. Forty-three. She marks the number in the leather notebook her father used before her, the pages soft as cloth from years of thumbing. Forty-three will not pay the note due Friday. Forty-three will not feed Tommy through the winter or cover the taxes that Corbett has been quietly buying up around them. *Rose.* She turns. Tommy stands at the corral gate with his straw-blond hair hanging in his eyes and news she is not going to want. The man who turns up at the hayloft that night is supposed to have died in a mine collapse in another state a year ago, according to a marshal who was lying at the time. Corbett has offered for the place twice, politely, with a witness present, and the third offer arrives with two men and no witness at all. By then there is somebody sleeping in the hayloft who has his own reasons for objecting. What follows: a debt of dust, a ghost in a hayloft, the price of a name, a broken stall, a saloon keeper's vouching, a marshal's shadow, a confession in a line shack, and an offer made by a man who is described by everybody in that valley as a wolf. *Said you'd been killed in a mine collapse.* *Marshal lied.* *They always do.* He kissed her like he was memorising the shape of her mouth. The cost is not shared evenly. Rose loses the last thing her father left that was not land, which is the family's reputation for paying what it owes. Cole loses the death that has been keeping him alive, and he gives it up in a courthouse, in front of a man who will use it.