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Part 3: Someone He Does Not Pay

They did not go to Clayton.

Silas turned the wagon at the fork and took the longer track toward the county seat’s edge, where a retired surveyor named Abel Pratt kept an office above a saddlery. “He drew half the old lines out here,” Silas said. “Thorne tried to hire him once. Pratt told him a creek doesn’t move just because a rich man prefers it elsewhere.”

Mai kept the oilcloth copy against her ribs and watched the cottonwoods fall behind them. Every rise looked like a place a rider could wait. None did. That worried her more than dust on the road. A man who sent a pleasant messenger in the morning might send a quieter one after dark.

Pratt was thin, ink-stained, and unsurprised to see them. He listened without interrupting. When Mai set the copy on his table, he read the survey note, the payment, and the six words at the bottom. His mouth tightened.

“I remember this creek,” he said. “Three trees. I marked them myself, years ago, for a merchant out of Carson. He paid my fee in cash and asked me not to discuss the client. The client was not Jedediah Thorne.”

“Who was it?” Silas asked.

“The clerk Thorne later buried in the churchyard. The one your father’s book says received the money.” Pratt tapped the figure. “That sum would buy the water and the shame of hiding who bought it. If Thorne recorded the deed after the clerk died, he recorded a purchase he did not make. Your fence is not the crime. The paper in the courthouse is.”

Mai felt the room steady, which was more dangerous than panic. A fact could be used. A fact could also get a person killed before it reached a judge.

“Can you swear to the markers?” she asked.

“I can swear to my own notes. I keep them.” Pratt opened a cabinet and drew out a field book, older than her ledgers, the cottonwoods drawn in a careful hand. “This does not leave my office. I’ll write a statement today. You take your copy to the circuit clerk and have it dated. Do not give Thorne the originals. Do not give them to the marshal who rode with him. That man owes his appointment to Thorne’s friends.”

Silas nodded. “The Pell place got a notice too.”

“Pell will fold,” Pratt said. “He is old and tired. You might not be. That is why Thorne came to you with a woman in the window. He wanted a reason that was not the creek.”

On the way back the sky had brass in it. A mile from the ranch, buzzards turned over something in the brush. Silas slowed. It was not a body. It was a broken survey stake, freshly split, the kind Pratt would have recognized, thrown where a wagon would have to see it.

Mai picked it up. On the flat of the wood, someone had scratched six words in a hand nothing like her father’s.

Bring the books or burn.

She did not drop it. She wrapped it with the copy, because a threat was evidence too.

The ranch yard was empty. The door was shut. The lock on her room still held. But the kitchen window had been forced, and the deed that had lain on the table was gone. The ledgers were where she had left them, under the bed, too heavy for a man in a hurry who had expected them on the table. He had taken the official paper and missed the books that could ruin him.

Silas stood in the doorway with the rifle and said nothing for a long time.

“He wants us frightened enough to trade,” Mai said.

“He wants the creek before Pratt’s statement reaches Carson.” Silas looked at her, tired and certain. “We don’t trade. We sleep in watches. In the morning we file what we have. If he burns a fence, he burns a fence. He does not get the page.”

Night came clear and cold. Mai took the first watch at the window, her father’s knife on the sill, the ledgers locked in the chest Silas had carried in from the barn. Somewhere beyond the corrals a horse shifted. She did not wake him for that.

Near midnight a lantern flared at the south pasture, small and mean, then died. A warning, not a fire. Yet.

Mai set her palm on the chest. The name was still inside it. The number was still large enough to explain a fence, a marshal, a porch, and two sacks on a Nevada road. Thorne could steal a deed. He could not steal what her father had already written, not unless she let him.

She did not let him.