The wind in the Wyoming territory did not just blow. It hunted. It scoured the high plains with a grit that could sand the varnish off a wagon wheel or the hope out of a man on the southern ridge of the concaid range. The wind was the only thing speaking. It hissed through the dry needle grass and rattled the thorns of the msquite.
A ceaseless lonely monologue that Eli Conincaid had listened to for all of his 30 years. Eli pulled his hat brim lower, shielding his eyes from the glare of the noon sun. He was a man built of long lines and hard angles, terrified of taking up too much space in a world that seemed determined to crush him. He checked the barbed wire fencing, his gloved hands moving with a practiced rhythmic competence that betrayed none of the anxiety that churned in his gut whenever he had to speak to another human being. Here, alone with the red dust and the stubborn cattle, he was steady.
Here, he was safe. But the safety was an illusion, dissolving like mist under the heat. He straightened, wiping sweat from his neck with a blue kirchief, and looked north. The dust cloud on the horizon was not a storm. It was cattle, thousands of them, branded with the heavy pee of Harland Pike, the baron of the basin.
Pike was moving his herds closer to the creek that marked the disputed boundary between his empire and Eli's struggling homestead. Eli knew the math of it, and the numbers were ugly. His father, a man whose temper had been as sudden and destructive as a summer flash flood, had left him the land. But he had also left a mountain of debt. There was an unpaid note at the bank in town, a sum of $400 that felt as heavy as a tombstone.
Pike held the leverage on that note now, having bought the debt quietly, like a snake sliding into a warm boot. The lawyer from Cheyenne had explained it to Eli a month ago, using words that felt like blows. They called him unfit. They called him a bachelor with no legacy, a man squatting on prime water rights with no family to hold it. If Eli could not prove he was building a stable household.
If he could not show the court that the concaid claim was a home and not just a bachelor's camp, the land courts would likely side with the syndicate, Pike would swallow the creek, the grazing land, and the only place Eli had ever known. Eli mounted his horse, a ran mare named Bess, and turned her away from the encroaching dust. He rode with his head down. He avoided the town of Red Rock whenever he could, but today the stage coach was due. He reached into his vest pocket and touched the corner of the folded letter.
It was sweat stained now, the ink likely blurring, but he had memorized the words. It was a contract, cold and precise, a marriage by proxy. He had sent the money he could barely spare to a service in Tucson, a desperate gamble made in the deep silence of a winter night. He needed a wife. The law required a household.
The shame of it burned him hotter than the sun. He was a man who could gentle a wild colt without a rope, who could track a stray steer through three days of hard shale. Yet the thought of speaking to a woman made his throat close up. He flinched at raised voices. He walked into the general store sideways, trying to make himself invisible.
And now he was riding to meet a stranger who had agreed to marry him for a ticket out of the borderlands. By the time the roofs of red rock broke the horizon, the sky had turned on him. The relentless sun was swallowed by a bruised purple bank of clouds rolling in from the mountains. The temperature dropped 20° in the span of 10 minutes. The wind shifted, carrying the scent of wet slate and ozone.
Eli tied Bess at the hitching rail outside the station office, keeping his eyes on his boots. The town was busy. Men shouted over the rising wind, securing loose shutters. A few cowboys from the Pike outfit louned on the porch of the saloon across the street, their laughter sharp and jagged. Eli felt their eyes on him.
Or perhaps he only imagined it. He felt branded by his own awkwardness. "Storm's coming. Concaid! " the station master shouted from the doorway. He was a round man with a face like a dried apple.