Part 2 — If This Letter Is Never Read

The rest of the page was in his father’s blunt hand. A strip along the north pasture had been pledged to Harlan Mercer years ago, not to the bank, as security for a winter loan the Walkers had paid back in cattle and never gotten the paper returned. If the letter stayed hidden, Mercer could arrive with a surveyor and call the creek access his. Abigail’s father had witnessed the repayment. He had kept a copy. The bank took everything else when he died. It did not take the goats, or the notebook.

Cole set the page on the table as if it might burn. “You’ve had this since spring.”

“I had a dead father and a sheriff who likes Mercer,” Abigail said. “I needed a Walker to read it before I walked into town claiming a debt that isn’t mine. The goats were the only reason you’d let me stay long enough to show you.”

“You could have led with the letter.”

“You would have thought I forged it to keep a camp.” She nodded at the handwriting. “Now you know I didn’t.”

Bandit bleated outside, offended by the delay. Cole almost smiled, and hated that he almost did. Ten years of keeping the bank off the porch, and the real threat had been a man with a paid note and a missing release.

“Half a day still stands,” he said. “So does the fire ring. The north pasture stays empty of goats and of Mercer until I get a lawyer in Cheyenne to look at this. You don’t sell cheese in town until I say the letter’s been seen by someone who isn’t on Mercer’s porch.”

“And if he comes before then?”

“Then he talks to me, not to a woman with fifteen goats and an unloaded shotgun.” Cole folded the page back into the notebook and, after a moment, left it in her hands. “You carried it. You keep it. I’ll want it at seven tomorrow, and the day after, until it isn’t the only copy.”

Abigail’s shoulders dropped a fraction. Not trust. Relief with a job still attached. “Deal.”

He walked her as far as the cottonwoods. The creek ran clear. The Alpines drank where he had told them they could. Whispering Creek was still his father’s last thing, and still in debt, and no longer only his secret. By seven she would be at the door again. This time he would be ready for the sentence that had nearly stopped his heart, and for the man who had hoped it would never be read.