Page 16 of Forbidden Protector

"I heard Gus."

He gets up then. He's built like the work and he's carried his share of it here since we were both old enough to be handed a rope. He comes down the steps at me and crosses his arms. Nobody on this ranch does that.

"You heard him?"

"Behind the tack room door."

"And you kept walking."

"Yes."

He stops six feet out. He's been out here without a coat long enough that he's shivering and hasn't noticed.

Past the roofline, the mountains are going black from the bottom up, while the snow on top holds the last of the light like it's being kept for somebody.

"Why?"

Because I had his father's folder under my coat and I was walking it to my truck before anybody else was up. I heard a dog behind a door and made a choice about which one of those two things I was going to be caught doing. A shut door on this place is nothing. Every morning of the world somebody shuts a door. It only turns into a fact when a man turns up dead, and by then nobody remembers who shut it.

"I didn't think about it."

"You don't have a thought you don't turn over and over." He's close enough now that I can smell the whiskey on him and under it the church. "That's the whole thing you are."

He’s not wrong. I take it standing in my driveway and don't argue any of it.

"I have known you my entire life," he says. "I learned to ride on your father's horses. I have eaten at your mother's table more nights than my own, and I live down that road in a house your family gave mine." His voice goes and he brings it back. "And somebody on this place put my father's dog behind a door so he'd ride out alone."

He got there on grief and whiskey in three days, and he is swaying in front of me holding the only true thing anybody has said out loud since Tuesday.

He thinks the man who did it is me.

Gus does not stay home. Nine years, that dog has not let Jacob get a boot in a stirrup without him. Whoever shut that door knew it and shut it anyway, because a dog on that timber road is a witness that barks.

"Yes," I say.

"Yes what?"

"Yes, somebody did."

He takes that answer and turns it over, looking for the shape of a denial in it. There isn't one, because I didn't put one there.

"My father worked thirty years for you people."

"Thirty-one."

His face comes apart. He puts it back. I stand there while he does it, because there is nobody else out here to stand there, and because I am on the list he hasn't finished writing.

He wipes his mouth with the back of his wrist and looks past me at the road. Something in his shoulders goes from fight to resignation.

"I'm going to Billings," he says. "Tomorrow. There's the truck, the equipment, and whatever he had in the bank. There's also a will nobody's read but the lawyer, and my aunt can't travel." He says it flat, an argument he has already lost somewhere else. "She's the only one of them left. Somebody has to sit at a table with her and read it out loud."

"A couple weeks?"

"Maybe four or five"

Neither of us says it. It sits out there in the cold between us with its ears up. Wyatt looks at the road some more, because looking at me is going to take the composure he just finished rebuilding.

I hear myself before I decide anything.