“Two someones.”
“Gideon.”
“They threw rocks at you.”
“Violence won’t solve this.”
“No,” he said. “But it made one of them apologize.”
She tried not to smile.
Failed.
The next morning, a wagon arrived loaded with hay.
The driver was an older rancher named Amos Reed, a blunt man with a white beard and a coat patched in six places.
Gideon stepped outside, wary.
“We didn’t order hay.”
“Good thing,” Amos said. “I didn’t ask.”
“How much?”
“Market rate. Pay when you can.”
Gideon stared at him.
“Why?”
Amos glanced toward Clara, who had come onto the porch.
“I heard Miss Bell struck Adeline Crowe.”
Clara stiffened.
Amos grinned.
“Been waiting fifteen years for someone to do that. Consider the hay my contribution to public morale.”
He handed Gideon a bill of sale and climbed back on the wagon before anyone could refuse.
When he left, Gideon looked at Clara.
“Seems you’re becoming popular.”
“With the wrong people.”
“Maybe the right ones were just quieter.”
But Adeline was not acting alone.
That truth arrived after four cattle died in the south pasture.
Foam at the mouth.
Glazed eyes.
Poison.
Gideon knelt in the snow beside the animals, one hand on the stiff neck of a cow he had raised from a calf.
Clara watched his face.
Not anger this time.
Despair.
“If this keeps happening,” he said, “I lose the ranch.”
Silas overheard.
That night, the boy came downstairs after bedtime.
“Is Mrs. Crowe doing this because of Miss Clara?”
Gideon looked at him for a long moment.
“We don’t have proof.”
“That isn’t no.”
Clara sat across from him.
“Listen to me, Silas. If someone hurts you to make another person run, the blame belongs to the person doing the hurting.”
The boy’s eyes burned.
“Then we make her stop.”
“We will try.”
“No,” Silas said. “We make her stop.”
The next clue came from a neighbor.
A rancher named Owen Fletcher rode in before dawn, his horse lathered from speed. He pulled Gideon aside, but Clara saw enough from the kitchen window to know the news was bad.
When Gideon returned, his face had changed.
“Owen says Adeline’s cousin works for Malcolm Voss.”
Clara frowned.
“The cattle baron?”
“Land speculator. Calls himself a cattle baron. Owns property across three territories.”
“And?”
“He’s been buying struggling ranches in Cedar Valley. Cheap. Every ranch had trouble before selling. Fires. Sick animals. Poisoned wells.”