CHAPTER 1 — MARKED GROUND
He saw the stakes before he came down off the porch.
There were six of them. They ran in a line along the south edge of the field he had broken three years back, and they were spaced too even to have been put down by a man working without a chain. The wood was new. Whoever had cut and driven them had done it in the last day. Some of them did not have the dirt settled yet around the base.
Thomas Reddick stood on the boards a while looking at them.
He was forty-four. He had come up to this country nine years earlier with a wife and a wagon and a Henry rifle, and the wife had been dead four years and the wagon had gone to firewood the winter after she died, and the rifle was in the house behind him and had been cleaned the night before. The country was the country he had taken when he had it to take. He had paid the federal land office in Cheyenne what they had asked and had a paper in a tin box under the floor of the kitchen that said the section was his.
Reddick stepped down off the porch and walked out into the field.
The morning was dry and the wind was not yet up. His boots made the small dry sound a man's boots made on ground that had been worked and that had not seen rain in a week. He walked the first two hundred yards without hurrying. He had walked this ground in every season for nine years and did not need to look at where his feet went.
He came up to the first stake and stopped beside it.
It was cut clean. The top had been beveled. The wood was pine, and the pine had not come from this country. Someone had brought the stakes in already cut.
He squatted down and put his hand on the dirt at the base of the stake.
The dirt was loose. It had been turned over within the last day.
He stood up and looked along the line. The stakes ran south to where the field gave way to broken ground at the lip of a draw, and beyond the draw they kept going, and he could see a seventh and an eighth stake against the rise of the land beyond the draw. The line did not stop where his land stopped. The line ran on across what had been Carter's field on the south fork. He had not known until that moment that they had staked Carter too.
* * *
Behind him a man stepped down from the boards.
"You were a long time looking at it."
"I counted them. Six on my ground."
The man came up beside him and stood looking at the stake the way Reddick had been looking at it. He was not as tall as Reddick. He was narrower in the shoulders and he had a Sharps in his right hand and he had carried it down from the porch without thinking about carrying it. His name was Jonas Reeve. He had been Reddick's neighbor for six years and had a place a mile and a half east. He had ridden over before light because he had heard from a man at the freight office in Red Hollow yesterday that there had been riders in the country, and he had wanted to come up and tell Reddick himself before any rider got there.
He had got there ahead of them by about an hour.
"They put them in last night."
"Sometime after the moon went down. The dirt at the base is still loose."
"I came up the road and I saw them from the rise. I figured you had not been out yet."
"I just came out."
"You see Carter's place."
"I see two of them past the draw. I figure they go on past that."
"They go to the creek. They go up the creek to the road."
"You been down there."
"I rode it before I came up here."
Reddick looked at him.
"How far."
"Far as I needed to. They have stakes on three sections that I rode. They might have more."
"Who."
Reeve did not answer right away. He shifted the Sharps to his other hand and looked down the line of stakes and out at the draw and at the country beyond.
"Wagon at the freight office last night that had a railroad mark on the side of it."
Reddick let it sit.
"You see anyone with the wagon."
"Two men. They went into the freight office and they came back out and they slept in the wagon."
"They still there."
"They were when I rode out."
Reddick looked at the stake.
"All right. Then they are still in town when we ride in."
"You want to pull them up."
"No. Leave them where they are."
"They take that as agreement."
"They take it however they take it. Pulling them up does not make them stop. They put them back in by sundown. I leave them and we ride into town."
"They are going to ride out here."
"Then we ride out before they ride in."
Reeve nodded slow.
"All right. Though it sits wrong, leaving them standing."
* * *
They went back to the house. Reddick got a box of cartridges and a coat. He put coffee on the stove and drank a cup standing at the table and ate a piece of bread that had gone stale in the night. He did not sit down. Reeve stood at the door and watched the field through the open square of it. The stakes were too far off to see from the door but Reeve looked anyway.
"Thomas."
"Say it."
"You think they kill a man over this."
Reddick set the cup down.
"I think they have done it before."
"Seems that way. A man does not stake another man's field gentle."
"That does not mean we go expecting it."
"No. A man keeps his eyes open all the same."
"But we do not ride into that town without our rifles."
"No. The Sharps stays in my hands."
Reddick took down the rifle from the pegs above the door and put on his coat and put the cartridges in the coat pocket. He looked once around the kitchen. The kitchen was clean. He had cleaned it after supper the night before, the way he had cleaned it after supper every night for the four years since his wife had been gone. The coffee pot sat on the stove. The cup he had drunk from sat on the table. He left them where they were and went out and saddled the bay.
Reeve had tied his horse at the fence by the porch. He brought it out and they rode together up the lane and out onto the wagon road that ran south to Red Hollow.
* * *
They rode without talking for the first half mile. Then Reeve said, "Carter."
"I know. Carter has not signed."
"He is going to want to know."
"He will know if he has not already."
"You think they been out to him."
"I think they been everywhere on the south fork."
"That does not tell us why now."
"No. Something set them moving this season and not last."
The road bent. Beyond the bend the country opened out and they could see the smoke of Red Hollow against the gray of the morning sky. The town sat in a shallow saucer of land at the meeting of two creeks. It had two streets. It had been there longer than Reddick had been in the country, but not by much. He had seen it grow from a freight stop to a town with a post office and a church. Reeve was looking at it too.
"They picked it because it is small."
"Small towns do not send for help. They counted on it."
"Because there is not enough of us to push back."
"It looks as if it was the plan."
"That is not going to change just because we ride in there."
"No. They will know we came, though. That is something."
They rode another stretch.
"What are you going to say to them."
Reddick thought about it.
"I am going to tell them the land is mine, that I have paper that says so, and that they can ride back to wherever they came from."
"And when they do not."
Reddick did not answer right away. The road came down off the last rise and ran along the edge of the creek bed toward the first buildings. A man in a wagon coming the other way lifted his hand to them as they passed and they lifted theirs and that was all.
"Then we know where we stand."
"That is all a man gets, some days."
They rode into Red Hollow.