Page 113 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
Grace’s hand found his knee on the wagon bench. “Logan.”
“I see it.”
The front yard looked like someone had taken a plow to it, drunk and blindfolded. Trenches cut through the ground in jagged lines—three, four feet deep in places—dirt thrown in heaps on both sides. Grace’s garden—her garden, the one she’d spent two months coaxing out of rocks and gopher holes and stubborn Colorado clay, the one she talked to every morning like the tomatoes had ears—gone. Just gone. Torn open, trellises snapped, bean poles scattered like matchsticks.
The roses, too.
Ma’s roses. The bushes Grace had knelt in the dirt and pulled weeds from—the ones with roots deep enough to survivetwo years of neglect, the ones his mother ordered special from Denver and fought three seasons to establish at altitude. Ripped out by the base and tossed aside, root balls drying in the sun like something dead and discarded.
“Mason, Thomas, check the barn and the stock pens. Pa, stay with Grace and Miriam.”
“Son—”
“Stay. With. Grace.”
He jumped off the wagon before Grace could grab his arm again. His heel caught the lip of a trench, and he stumbled forward two steps before he caught himself on the porch rail.
The front door stood open.
Inside looked worse. Someone had turned the office—his office, where he kept the ledgers, the deed, the strongbox, and every piece of paper that proved the Foster ranch existed—inside out. Pulled and dumped drawers. Scattered papers on the floor. The strongbox sat open with the lid bent, same as the gate hinge, and whatever they’d used on the lock had left gouges in the metal deep enough to catch a fingernail.
The deed sat untouched. Forty-two dollars still in the cash tin.
They hadn’t come for money.
Of course, they hadn’t. The silver nugget, the heifer in the dug-out hole, the man on the south fenceline Grace had chased and fallen off her horse for, every damn sign had pointed here, and every time he’d told himselfit’s just drifters, it’s just bad luck, it’s a coincidence,his gut had called him a liar—
Didn’t matter. Never mind what he’d told himself. What mattered stood in the front yard in trenches.
“Logan!”
Mason’s voice came from around the side of the house.
Logan came around the corner at a run and found Jonah.
He lay half-propped against the chicken coop wall with his legs splayed out in front of him, and his head tipped back against the boards. Blood caked the left side of his face from a gash above his eyebrow, already going dark and tacky in the sun. His lip had split open and swelled to twice its size, and one eye had puffed shut.
Gerald sat three feet away on his perch, watching Jonah with one beady eye, and for once in that rooster’s miserable life, he kept his beak shut.
Mason crouched beside him. “He’s breathin’. Took a hell of a beatin’.”
“Jonah.” Logan dropped to one knee. “Jonah, who did this?”
Jonah’s good eye rolled toward him, unfocused, then it sharpened. His split lip moved, and the word came out wet and mangled.
“Ace.”
“Who the hell is Ace?”
“Don’t…” Jonah tried to sit up straighter and sucked air through his teeth. “Don’t let Grace—”
Too late. Boots on the porch, then running footsteps, and Grace came around the corner with Miriam still strapped to her chest and dropped to her knees in the dirt.
“Jonah. Jonah, oh Lord, oh—”
“I’m all right, Gracie.”
“You arenotall right, you’re bleedin’ from yourhead—”
