After that, Bo stopped believing in goodness. He believed in contracts and ledgers, in the cold clarity of numbers that didn't lie or betray. He built his empire on iron rules. Pay your debts or lose your land. It made him wealthy.
It made him powerful. It made him respected and deeply alone. But Bo told himself alone was better. Alone was safer. The Bishop homestead came into view as they crested a low rise.
Bo's practiced eye took in the details automatically. House badly in need of paint, roof patched with mismatched boards, fences leaning like drunks after Saturday night. But the fields, the fields surprised him. Golden wheat planted late but grown thick and healthy, bent and swayed in the breeze like an inland ocean, a month from harvest, maybe less.
"That's decent wheat," Miller observed. "Better than decent." It was. Samuel Bishop might have been a drunk and a fool, but he'd known good land when he'd claimed it.
This 160 acres sat on the gentlest slope in the valley, with a spring-fed creek running through it year-round. Perfect farming land, or perfect grazing for the cattle Bo planned to run here once he owned it. As they approached, Bo noticed other details. A kitchen garden, carefully tended, thick with vegetables. Chickens scratching in a well-maintained coop, a milk cow in the barn looking fat and healthy.
Clothes hanging on a line, all of them clean but worn thin and carefully patched. The place was poor, but it wasn't neglected. "Somebody's working hard here," Jack muttered. Bo didn't answer. He swung down from his saddle and handed the reins to Miller.
"You boys wait here. This won't take long." He walked toward the house, his boots kicking up small clouds of dust. The front door stood open to catch the breeze, and through the entrance Bo could see a rough wooden table, mismatched chairs, and walls bare of decoration except for a single faded daguerreotype. "Mrs. Bishop," Bo called out. "It's Bo Callahan. I need a word."
For a moment, nothing. Then movement in the doorway, and Bo Callahan, who prided himself on being unsurprised by anything, felt something shift in his chest. The woman who stepped into the sunlight was not what he'd expected. Kelly May Bishop couldn't have been more than 26 or 27, though her eyes held the weariness of someone twice that age.
She was small, couldn't have weighed more than 100 pounds soaking wet, with dark hair pulled back in a braid that hung past her shoulders. Her dress was faded calico, patched at the elbows and hem, and her feet were bare, dusty from the dry earth. But it was her eyes that caught Bo off guard. Hazel green, shot through with gold, they blazed with an intensity that made him take an involuntary step back.
This was not the broken, pleading widow he'd imagined. This was a woman who'd looked at hardship and spit in its eye. "Mr. Callahan," she said, her voice steady despite the way her hands clenched the doorframe. "I've been expecting you." Behind her, Bo caught movement, children peeking around the furniture, five pairs of wide eyes and thin, hungry faces.
The oldest couldn't have been more than eight. The youngest was still in swaddling. Bo removed his hat, old habits of frontier courtesy too ingrained to abandon even now. "Mrs. Bishop, I've come about the matter of your late husband's debt." "Samuel's debt," she corrected, and there was iron in those two words. "Not mine."
"The debt transfers with the land, ma'am. When your husband borrowed that money, he signed over the collateral. I'm sure you understand." "I understand that my husband was a fool." Kelly's voice cut through his practiced speech like a knife through butter.
"I understand that he borrowed money without telling me, drank away half of it at Miller's Saloon, and planted the other half so late the wheat barely made it before the first frost. I understand all of that, Mr. Callahan. What I don't understand is why you'd come to collect from a woman with five children and a husband barely cold in his grave." "It's been two months." "Eight weeks and three days," Kelly said. "But who's counting?"