They sat the gate in shifts, because Cora Jenkins did not trust hungry cattle to respect a funeral. Wade took the first watch with the rifle across his knees and the hill pale under a hard moon. The forty-eight head complained, then settled, then tested the fence at the corner where the alfalfa still showed green beyond the rails. He turned them back with his voice. Each time, he counted. Forty-eight. The number felt like a pulse he was afraid to stop checking.

Cora relieved him near midnight. She had changed nothing about herself except to pin her sleeves higher. The scattergun lay broken over her arm until she closed it with a soft, final click.

“Sleep,” she said. “If I need you, you’ll hear me. I don’t whisper at cattle.”

“You should take the cot.”

“I’ll take the chair on the porch when you get up. Go on, Callahan. Ruin can wait until morning. Dead grass can’t.”

He slept two hours and dreamed of red ink. When he came out again she was walking the fence line with a lantern low, reading the ground the way yard bosses read a chute. She did not look tired. She looked occupied, which on her seemed sturdier than rest.

At first light they went into the pasture together, cloths over their mouths, sticks instead of hands. The six carcasses had stiffened. Cora did not waste time on grief she had already spent. She opened the mouth of the nearest steer with the stick and the back of a knife, careful, professional, and nodded at the chewed stems caught in the teeth.

“Not a snake. Not a shot. They ate it.” She moved to the low patch by the ditch, where the growth was lushest and the dying had started. There, mixed through the young alfalfa so neatly a hurried man might have called it weed and kept walking, were cut stems that had not grown in place. The cuts were pale. The leaves were wrong. She lifted one on the knife blade and held it where the sun could insult it.

“Larkspur,” she said. “Fresh cut. Thrown, not sprouted. Somebody walked this ditch in the last two days and salted your mercy with it. A little won’t drop a steer this fast. A supper of it will. They grazed the low patch first because that’s where you turned the water, and that’s where the gift was thickest.”

Wade felt the morning tilt. “Who?”

“Who gains if you miss the bank date with no herd to sell?” She wrapped the stem in a scrap of flour sack without touching the leaf to skin. “I can think of a banker. I can think of a man who wants the note cheap at auction. I don’t accuse on an empty stomach. We burn this patch. We drag the dead off it and bury or burn them before the rest get curious. Then we take this stem to town and we make the foreclosure hear about it.”

“The bank doesn’t care how they died. It cares that I can’t pay.”

“The bank cares if its agent has been helping the grass along,” she said. “And a sheriff cares if poison in a pasture looks like a convenient funeral. Maybe yours won’t. We’ll know by his face.”

They worked until the heat returned to punish them. Wade hitched the mules and dragged carcasses to the cutbank. Cora kept the living herd honest and soaked a strip of the poisoned growth in lamp oil. When she set it alight, the green burned sulky and dark, more smoke than flame, and the bitter smell climbed the ridge. Wade stood upwind with his eyes watering and thought of the letter he had written east, full of creek water and a future tense. The woman who had answered it was turning his last good pasture into a black scar on purpose. He had never admired anyone more, and he did not know what to do with the admiration, so he put it into the shovel.

By afternoon they were on the road to Oak Haven with the wrapped stem in a tin and the foreclosure date in Wade’s pocket like a stone. Cora had washed, which made her look more like a wife arriving and less like a woman who had spent the night guarding a gate. She still carried the scattergun rolled in leather under the seat, within reach of her hand and out of reach of commentary.

“If you introduce me as the missus, I’ll allow it for the clerk,” she said. “We aren’t church-married. I won’t lie to a preacher. I will let a banker assume whatever keeps him polite.”

“I wasn’t going to assume it myself.”

“Good. Assumptions are how men get ruined in rooms with rugs.” She watched the dry hills go by. “In Chicago a foreman asked me to marry him because I could count a chute faster than his cousin. I told him counting wasn’t a courtship. He got angry. I got a worse shift. I answered your letter because you asked for a partner on a place, not a ornament for a porch. Don’t make me regret the distinction today.”

“I won’t.”

Oak Haven’s main street looked smaller than it had in spring, as if the drought had shrunk the buildings too. The bank sat between the mercantile and a saloon that had not yet begun to earn its keep. Wade went in with dust on his cuffs. Cora came with him. The clerk, a man named Phelps who had circled the red date with a ruler, looked up and arranged his face into sympathy that did not reach his hands.

“Mr. Callahan. We weren’t expecting you until nearer the fifteenth.”

“Six steers dead on new alfalfa. Poisoned. Larkspur cut and thrown in the ditch growth.” Wade set the tin on the desk and opened it. “I want that noted. I want the foreclosure held until the sheriff looks at the pasture. Selling me out while somebody’s killing the collateral isn’t banking. It’s assistance.”

Phelps did not touch the stem. “That’s a serious claim.”

“It’s a stem,” Cora said. “Serious arrived yesterday, bloated in the grass. I’m Cora Jenkins. I worked the Chicago yards fifteen years. I know what larkspur does to a gut, and I know a cut stem from a grown one. If your file says this herd failed of drought alone, your file is incomplete.”

Phelps’s eyes flicked to the door of the inner office. “Mr. Ames isn’t in.”

“Then write anyway,” she said.

He wrote, slowly, as a man writes when he hopes the sentence will not be read. Wade signed. Cora signed under a line that called her the resident partner on the place, which was true enough to stand. Outside, the heat struck them again. The sheriff’s office was a single room that smelled of tobacco and old paper. Sheriff Lane was older than Wade wanted and less bored than he feared. He listened. He looked at the stem. He did not laugh.

“Ames’s bank holds a lot of paper in this county,” Lane said. “That doesn’t mean Ames walks ditches at night. It means if I ride out, I ride with my eyes open and my mouth shut until I see tracks. You bury the rest?”

“Cutbank,” Wade said. “Patch is burned. Herd’s on the hill.”

“Leave them there. I’ll come tomorrow.” Lane glanced at Cora. “You the bride from the train?”

“I’m the woman who got off it,” she said. “The bride part is a rumor the drought hasn’t earned.”

Lane almost smiled. “Fair. Don’t shoot anybody before I get there unless they’re shooting first. Poisoners like distance. They may not like a witness who can name a plant.”

They took on flour, salt, and a sack of oats Wade could barely afford, because forty-eight head on bare hill would break through a fence for a memory of green. At the mercantile a man in a town coat watched them load and did not offer help. Cora marked him without staring.

“Who’s that?” she asked on the wagon.

“Harlan Beecher. Runs cattle on the east section when he runs them. He’s asked twice what I’d take for the place if the bank let go.”

“Then he knows the date.”

“Everyone knows the date. Phelps doesn’t whisper.”

“Convenient,” she said, and slapped the reins.

The ride back was quieter than the ride in, but the quiet had a different spine. Wade felt her on the seat beside him not as a guest he must entertain with apology, but as a weight the wagon had accepted. Near the ridge she spoke again.

“You think I came because I had nowhere else.”

“I think you came because I asked, and the yards were done with your knees. You told me that.”

“I also came because a small place can be defended by two people, and a city mostly can’t.” She flexed one hand, the knuckles thick from years of gates and crates. “I am not gentle, Callahan. I will not powder over a hard day and call it morale. If you need a wife who weeps pretty and lets the bank narrate, say so before I waste a month saving steers that aren’t mine.”

“I need the person who got them off the grass,” he said. “The rest can stay unnamed until we both mean a name.”

She nodded, satisfied in the curt way she had, and did not thank him for the honesty. Thanks, he was learning, were not her currency. Work was.

Sheriff Lane came the next morning with a deputy who complained about the heat and then stopped complaining when he saw the cutbank. Lane walked the ditch, found a boot print in the soft mud where the water had been turned, and measured it with a piece of twine. The print was not Wade’s. Wade’s boots were cracked at the left toe. This sole was newer, town-made, with a nick in the heel.

“Beecher wears new boots to town,” Lane said, not quite accusing. “So do half the men who don’t walk for a living. It’s a start, not a noose.”

“It’s a hand in my ditch,” Wade said.

“It’s a hand. Keep your cattle off the green. If another animal dies the same way, I want to see it before anybody burns the evidence to be helpful.” He tipped his hat at Cora, who had stood through the measuring with her arms folded and her face unimpressed by badges. “Ma’am.”

“Sheriff.”

After he left, Wade and Cora repaired the corner the herd had worried, ate cold biscuits, and spoke only when speech moved the work. In the late light she paused with a staple in her palm.

“Nineteen days was yesterday’s number,” she said. “Eighteen now. We sell what we can before the date, we show the poison, we don’t let Ames call it mismanagement. And if Beecher walks this ditch again, he meets both of us, not a rumor of a bride.”

“You don’t have to make my enemy yours.”

“He poisoned feed I have to look at every morning. That’s already mine.” She drove the staple home. “I’m staying through the eighteen. After that, if the ranch is still a ranch, we talk about whether I stay as a partner with a share or as a woman passing west. I won’t be kept like a lamp you found useful in a dark month.”

“I wouldn’t keep you that way.”

“See that you don’t. Men get sentimental when the dying stops. Sentiment spends other people’s lives.” She tested the wire. It sang, tight and true. “I’ll take the gate again tonight. You sleep the whole stretch. Tomorrow we start sorting what can walk to market without falling over. Sentiment doesn’t load a car.”

Wade looked at her against the burned patch, broad-shouldered, unpretty in the way weather is unpretty, necessary in the way water is necessary. The six graves were fresh. The forty-eight still stood. The red date had not moved. Neither had she.

“Cora.”

“What.”

“I’m glad you didn’t take the train back.”

She held his look for a moment, long enough to accept the fact and refuse the ornament around it. “Drive the rest of those staples, Callahan. Glad doesn’t hold a fence.”

He drove them. Out on the hill the herd shifted, hungry and alive, and the ditch below the ridge kept its boot print like a promise somebody would be asked to explain. Eighteen days. A stranger no longer entirely strange. A method in the grass, named at last, and not yet finished with them.