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ate at him that he’d left Pa to hold down the ranch alone.
    He spotted the first lights in Broken Wheel and found a heavy stand of cottonwoods, fronted by a thicket of mesquite and grama grass that ran along the west side of town. It took him only seconds to find the house with two lanterns burning in one window, the sign Dare had told him to watch for. Dropping back, he found a place to picket his horse. He dismounted, woman in hand.
    She opened her eyes. “Where are—?”
    “Hush!” Voices carried a long way on the night air. They were a ways off from town and being in the woods helped mute the sound, but Luke had learned caution in a hard school. “Can you stand?”
    She nodded. He lowered her feet to the ground, and she just kept sinking. Luke picked her up again and moved her away from his horse’s iron-shod hooves and eased her onto the soft leaf-covered ground to wake up at her own pace. He tied his horse, pulled a packet out of his saddlebags—more than a little surprised to see any jerky left—and snagged his canteen.
    He scooped her back into his arms and carried her to the cottonwood stand near Dare’s house. Getting closeenough to whisper was no hardship. “We need to wait until full dark before I try and go in to talk to my friend. I’ll ask him if there’s a place you can stay.”
    The woman nodded.
    “You ready yet to tell me your name?”
    Her eyes got round with fear. It looked like the little woman wasn’t kidding when she said she didn’t want to go back to her family—in the event any of them had survived, which Luke doubted.
    “Don’t tell me, then.” He looked at the springing mass of her curls and said, “I’ll just call you Rosie. Between your red hair and your sunburned skin, it suits you. You want some more to eat?”
    She nodded with far too much enthusiasm. He handed her a long skinny strip of dried venison, and she put her attention to chewing it up like she was starved half to death. Considering how much she’d already eaten got him to wondering just how long she’d been floating downstream.
    He helped himself to the scrap of meat he had left, and they passed the canteen back and forth. When she finally stopped tucking all his food down her gullet, he said, “We need to wait until the town’s gone to sleep, then we’ll slip in quiet-like. That’s my friend Dare’s house, right there in front of us. Dare will go fetch Vince and Jonas if they’ve gotten to town. They’re friends, too. Vince sent me a letter and some legal documents and told me he was setting out for Texas. I had them all signed and witnessed back in Denver and I got my will in order.”
    “A will?” She whispered nicely, which meant she was awake enough to be thinking.
    “Yep. I found my sister in Colorado. I was at Dare’s house when a letter arrived from my Pa. It told me wheremy sister had gotten to. She has herself a tough husband, and he’s from a tough family. They can hold this land if need be. I named Callie in my will, in case anything happens to me. The letter from Pa included the deed for my ranch. Pa signed it over to me before he died and got it in the mail.”
    “Your father is dead?” In the dusk, Luke saw her sympathy and it warmed him. With all the mess surrounding his father’s death and his ranch being stolen, he realized he hadn’t taken much time to grieve.
    “It happened while I was on the trail. He’s been gone a few years now. I can’t just ride into town and stake the claim to my ranch. I need to have everything in order. Then I’m going to go out to my ranch and throw that murdering coyote off my place.”
    He said it with confidence, but he knew it wasn’t going to be easy.
    “The man living there claims to have bought my pa’s ranch, but he couldn’t have. Pa didn’t own it to sell. He’d already signed the S Bar S deed over to me, had it all legally witnessed, and mailed it to me in care of the one friend I’d mentioned that Pa could find.”
    “Why do