Page 87 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
“I checked it!”
“Alright, alright.” Pa waved them off. “Go on. Get.”
Logan clicked his tongue. The horses leaned into the harness. The wagon lurched forward, and Grace leaned into his shoulder for a second—just long enough for the warmth of her to press through his sleeve and settle somewhere in his chest. Then, she straightened and started pointing things out to Miriam, who could not possibly have cared less about the landscape but seemed to enjoy the sound of Grace’s voice describing it.
They made it about four hundred yards past the barn.
“Logan! Logan, hold up!” Jonah’s voice cut from behind as he… ran up to the… wagon?
When did he even jump off?
Logan pulled the reins. “When did you—Why did you—Jonah… why?”
“The south pasture.” Jonah wheezed next to the wagon. “I… when we passed the ridge just now, I looked down and… one of the heifers. She’s in a hole. A big one. I can see her from the road.”
“A hole.”
“A hole, Logan. Not a gopher hole. Something dug. Deep. She’s in it up to her chest and she ain’t movin’ right.”
Logan’s hands tightened on the reins. The leather bit into his palms.
“Mason, Thomas. With me. Now.”
Both brothers vaulted off the wagon before he finished the sentence. Logan handed the reins to Grace, swung down, and followed Jonah at a run toward the ridge.
About two hundred yards from the fence line, a dark gouge tore through the grass. Too square and too even at the edges for a sinkhole. No, someone had cut into the earth with shovels, six feet long and maybe four feet deep, and left the pile of dirt mounded along one side like a scar.
The heifer—a two-year-old red angus, one of the best in the herd—lay at the bottom. Her front legs had gone in first. The left hind leg angled wrong below the knee, and the bone pressed against the skin without breaking through.
Logan’s stomach dropped.
“Damn it.” He scrambled down the slope and knelt at the edge as the heifer lowed. “Damn it, damn it—”
“How bad?” Mason slid down beside him.
“Left hind’s broken. Below the hock.” Logan leaned in. “Clean break, maybe. But she can’t stand. She can’t—”
“Can we splint it?”
“Mason, she’s eight hundred pounds.”
“So? We can—”
“You splint that, she puts weight on it the second she stands, and it snaps again. Or it heals crooked and she can’t walk. She just suffers for months before—”
He swallowed. The heifer looked at him. Her breath came in short, wet huffs, and her nostrils flared with each one.
“Mason. Get my rifle.”
“Logan—”
“Get my rifle.”
Mason went.
Soon enough, Mason brought the rifle, and Logan did the deed. He’d had to. Some things a man did because the alternative meant cruelty, and cruelty toward an animal ranked low enough to shame the devil himself. Logan did it quick. One shot, straight to the head. The light left the poor thing’s eyes before the echo came back off the ridge.
Logan stood there. Rifle at his side. The smell of gunpowder mixing with grass and fresh-turned earth.
