Page 89 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
The new iron grate blocked the culvert. Well, it would’ve had Jonah not set up hinges to open it. The fact that all the Fosters trusted him enough not to check the doggone grate only made bile rise at the back of his throat.
He followed the creek south for about a mile, past the property line, through a stand of aspens that glowed bone-white in the dark, and up the ridge to the old prospector’s cabin that sat half-collapsed in a clearing nobody visited because nobody had a reason to.
Ace Pike sat on an overturned crate, cleaning his fingernails with a knife.
Five-five on a good day with his boots on, and he made up for every missing inch with meanness. Red, blotchy face from the drink. Three missing teeth on the left side gave his smile a lopsided, jack-o’-lantern quality. Greasy hair shoved under a bowler hat that he’d probably stolen off some poor bastard on the Bowery ten years ago and never cleaned since.
The man looked like something you’d scrape off the bottom of a dock piling. And he ran a crew of thirty pickpockets, half of them kids, with the organizational precision of a bank president.
“You’re late.” Ace pointed the knife at him, then went back to his nails. “Sit down.”
“I’ll stand.”
“I said sit.”
There was no crate to sit on besides the one Ace occupied, which meant the floor. Wet, warped boards that gave under pressure and probably housed about six kinds of fungus. Jonah lowered himself onto a section near the wall that looked marginally less disgusting than the rest, bracing his back against the planks.
“So.” Ace folded the knife. “You wanna tell me about the cow?”
“Heifer.”
“What?”
“It’s a heifer. A cow had a calf. A heifer hasn’t. There’s a—” Jonah caught the look on Ace’s face. “Never mind. What about it?”
“What about it?” Ace leaned forward on the crate. “What about it, he says. Like he didn’t dig a hole in the middle of a pasture where eight hundred pounds of beef could walk into itand break its leg and get every man on that ranch ridin’ fences with rifles.”
“I dug at night. In the dark. With a shovel I had to carry—”
“And you didn’t fill it in.”
Jonah’s mouth shut.
“You dug a hole. You didn’t find nothin’. And then you just... left it. Open. In acow field.”
“I was gonna go back and—”
“When? After they found it? After that tight-ass rancher of yours put two and two together and started checkin’ every square foot of his property?”
“Ace—”
“I told you, dig at night, fill it in before dawn. Simple instructions, Jonah. A child could follow ’em.” Ace stood up. “I know, ‘cause I’ve had actual children follow ’em.”
“I ran out of time. The sun came up faster than—”
“Thesun.” Ace stared at him. “The sun came up faster than you expected. The sun. Which has been risin’ at roughlythe same time every mornin’ since the Almighty invented mornings.”
“Look, I made a mistake and—”
“You made a disaster. I had two boys sittin’ in those trees south of the creek ready to come in tonight and dig the west section, and now they can’t get within a mile of the place without runnin’ into some fool on horseback with a Winchester.”
Ace paced the cabin. The floorboards groaned under him, which, given that Ace weighed about as much as a wet cat, said more about the floor than the man.
“How much ground you covered so far?”
“The north pasture, most of it.” Jonah rubbed his chin. “The section between the barn and the tree line. And the spot in the south field where the… where the heifer thing happened.”
“And?”
