He told himself it was the dust. The cattle-yard grit that crawled into a man’s throat and made his lungs feel like burlap. He told himself it was the heat, too, because July in the Wyoming Territory had a way of sitting on your shoulders like a mean, heavy hand.
But he knew the truth.
It was the sound of laughter.
Not the good kind, not the kind you heard after a long day when someone finally found the coffee pot. This laughter had teeth. It rolled across the auction yard in Rawlins like a gust full of grit, and it stuck to everything it touched.
Silas stood at the rail with his hat pulled low and his last coins stacked in his pocket like a prayer he didn’t fully believe in. He didn’t want to be here. He’d said that on the ride in. He’d said it again as he tied his mare near the loading pens. He’d said it a third time when he saw Virgil Creed lounging by the whiskey barrel, grinning like a man who never paid for what he broke.
And none of it mattered.
The ranch needed horses.
Two had gone lame in the same week, and a man couldn’t run cattle on hope and stories, no matter how stubborn his mother’s blood ran in his veins.
