Chapter Eighteen
Grace balanced the tray on one hip and shoved the barn door open with her shoulder.
She’d loaded it heavily. Biscuits, eggs scrambled with wild onion she’d pulled from the edge of the creek bed, a jar of blackberry preserves, bacon, and coffee so strong a spoon could’ve stood upright in the pot without leaning.
“—I’m tellin’ you, a bowline’s stronger than a clove hitch for a gate tie.”
“And I’m tellin’ you, a clove hitch releases cleaner. You ever try untyin’ a bowline after a steer’s pulled on it all day?”
“No, but—”
“You need a knife and a prayer, my friend.”
Mason and Jonah squared off over a coil of rope near the tack wall, each holding an end like they planned to settle the knot debate through a tug-of-war.
Thomas sat on a hay bale behind them. Logan stood at the far end, saddling Penny with that methodical precision of his.
Checked every buckle twice, pulled every strap snug, and tested it with a tug before he moved to the next one.
He’d already saddled his own horse, a big bay gelding named Dutch, who gleamed in the morning light because Logan brushed him every morning. Not that that surprised her. The man ironed his saddle blankets.
Grace had caught him doing it last Tuesday, pressing the wool flat on the kitchen table with the iron she used for shirts, and, when she’d asked why, he’d looked at her like the question made no sense and said, “Wrinkles cause sores.”
Which, fine. Valid. But also, ironing a saddle blanket.
“Breakfast!” She lifted the tray higher. “Come and get it before it gets cold, and I mean now, not after you’ve solved whatever knot crisis this is.”
Four heads turned.
Mason dropped the rope and crossed the barn in about three strides.
Jonah followed, though he paused long enough to point at Mason and mouth bowline.
Thomas ambled over with his usual pace. Logan finished Penny’s girth strap, gave it one final tug, and joined the group at the workbench, where Grace spread the tray.
“Lord Almighty.” Mason picked up a biscuit and bit into it. “Grace, you gotta stop cookin’ like this. I’m gonna get fat, and Thomas’ll finally be the handsome one.”
“I’m already the handsome one.”
“In what world?”
“In the world where I got cheekbones, and you got a baby face that makes old ladies pinch your cheeks at church.”
“That happened once.”
“It happened three times.” Logan grabbed a biscuit. “I counted.”
Jonah grabbed two biscuits, stacked them together with a slab of bacon in between like a sandwich, and took a bite so large Grace worried briefly about his jaw hinging that wide.
“These are somethin’ else, Gracie.” He spoke around the mouthful. “You put somethin’ different in ’em today?”
“Buttermilk. Found a crock in the root cellar that Rafe forgot about.”
“How long’s it been down there?”
“I didn’t ask for a date of birth, Jonah. It smelled fine, and the biscuits rose, so.”
“Fair enough.”
The four of them ate standing up, leaning against the workbench, the stall doors, and, in Thomas’s case, the hay bale he’d dragged over. No force on this earth would separate that man from a sitting surface.
Jonah fit right in the middle of it.
Mason nudged Jonah with his elbow. “Tell ’em about the rooster.”
“Oh, the rooster.” Jonah grinned. “So, yesterday, I’m tryin’ to collect eggs like Logan showed me, right? And that big red rooster, the mean one—”
“Gerald,” Thomas said.
“—Gerald, thank you. Gerald decides I ain’t welcome in the henhouse and comes at me like I owe him money.
Full charge. Wings out, feet up, the whole show.
I’m backin’ up, holdin’ the egg basket in front of me like a shield, and this bird—I swear on Ma’s grave—this bird jumps and gets me right in the chest with both feet. ”
Mason wheezed.
“Knocked me flat on my rear in the dirt. Eggs everywhere. Gerald’s standin’ on my stomach crowin’ like he just won a war.”
“And you just laid out there.” Mason could barely get the words out. “I come around the corner and Jonah’s flat on his back with a rooster on his chest, starin’ at the sky like he’s questionin’ every decision he ever made.”
“I was questionin’ every decision I ever made!”
Thomas covered his face with one hand. Even Logan, who smiled about as often as it snowed in July, had that sideways tug at the corner of his mouth, the one Grace had learned to watch for because it meant the joke had landed somewhere past his defenses.
And Grace just…
Stood there. Holding her coffee. Watching her brother make these men laugh.
Back in New York, Jonah’s friends had been.
.. different. Harder around the edges, louder, with a sharpness underneath the jokes that never quite went away.
The kind of men who laughed with their mouths but kept their eyes on the door.
Grace had never liked them, never trusted the way they clapped Jonah on the back with one hand and kept the other in a pocket.
These boys clapped with both hands and didn’t have anything to hide in their pockets except maybe a stray biscuit Mason had stuffed in there for later.
Jonah caught her looking. Tipped his chin. You okay?
She nodded. Yeah. I’m good.
“So.” Mason brushed crumbs off his shirt. “Grace, you oughta come with us today.”
She blinked. “Pardon?”
“To the high pasture. We’re just movin’ the herd up for grazin’. Easy work with four hands. Even easier with five.”
“I don’t know the first thing about drivin’ cattle.”
“You don’t need to know nothin’. Just ride on the flank and holler if one of ’em wanders off. Penny’s a cow horse, she’ll do the thinkin’ for you.”
Grace looked at Logan.
She’d leave it up to him. Not like before, where his word ran final, and everybody else just swallowed their opinions, but more like… she respected that the ranch belonged to him. The cattle did too. A day trip with the herd involved his livelihood in a way that a garden or a kitchen didn’t.
Logan checked Penny’s bridle. Adjusted a buckle that probably didn’t need adjusting. Then looked up.
“Four hands on a herd this size, we’d make good time. Five makes it easy.” He shrugged, but the shrug came with that thing, that look, the one where his eyes stayed on hers a beat too long, and the pale blue of them deepened the way creek water deepened over stone. “You should come.”
You should come. Not you can come, or I suppose, or if you want. Just. You should.
So. Alright then.
***
Three hours into the drive, and ‘easy’ ranked as the most generous lie Mason Foster had ever told.
The herd numbered about forty head, which didn’t sound like much until forty cows spread across a trail, and each one developed an independent opinion about direction, speed, and whether that particular patch of grass on the side of the track deserved a twenty-minute investigation.
Grace rode Penny on the left flank, following Logan’s instructions to keep the strays from drifting downhill toward the creek.
And Penny did do the thinking. Thank God.
The mare anticipated every stray before Grace even spotted it, cutting left when a heifer broke for the tree line, blocking a young steer that tried to double back toward the ranch.
All Grace had to do was hold on and trust the horse, which, after two weeks of riding lessons, had gone from terrifying to only mildly alarming.
Logan rode point. Mason and Jonah worked the right flank together. Thomas brought up the rear, riding drag, which meant he ate more dust than anybody and complained about it. A lot.
They reached the high pasture just after noon.
The cattle fanned out into the meadow.
Logan dismounted near the tree line and loosened Dutch’s girth. “We’ll let ’em graze for a couple hours, check the fence at the north end, then head back.”
“Water break?” Mason slid off his horse. “I got about a pound of dust in my throat.”
They tied the horses in the shade and gathered near the stream bank, passing a canteen while the afternoon sun poured warm across the meadow.
Grace sat on a flat rock and pulled off her boots.
Jonah sprawled in the grass next to Mason, and both of them lay flat with their hats over their faces.
Thomas sat against a pine trunk, already scribbling in that little notebook he carried everywhere.
Logan crouched at the stream and splashed water on his face and the back of his neck. Droplets ran down his jaw and caught the light.
Grace blushed and looked away.
She dug her toes into the grass and leaned back on both hands. The rock underneath her right palm shifted, and her fingers brushed something in the dirt. Something hard. Something too smooth for a root and too… regular for a rock, and its edge caught under her fingernail.
She glanced down.
A corner of something poked out of the earth about two inches from where her hand rested. Dark, crusted with dirt, but underneath the crust—
She pinched it between her thumb and forefinger and pulled.
The ground gave it up easily, as if it’d only been holding on out of habit. A chunk about the size of her thumb. A heavy one. She’d held enough cheap metal in her life to know the difference. Tin was light and rattled hollow. Copper had a specific warmth to it.
This was dense and cool. When she rubbed her thumb across the surface, the dirt came away in a streak, and the metal underneath caught the sun in a white flash that made her squint.
Jonah lifted his hat off his face. “What’cha got?”
Grace turned the chunk over. Rubbed more dirt off. The whole surface gleamed now, with luster that pewter or nickel lacked. Grace had seen enough of those with the street vendors in New York, who polished the cheap stuff up and sold it as genuine to tourists who didn’t know better.
Grace knew better.
“I think...” She held it up. “I think this is silver.”
Four heads turned.
Mason scrambled up from the grass so fast his hat flew off. Jonah rolled onto his knees. Thomas closed his notebook. Logan straightened from the stream and crossed to her in three strides.
She held it out on her open palm.
“Well, I’ll be damned.” Mason picked it up and turned it over, tested the weight in his own hand, then bit the edge—actually bit it—and pulled back with wide eyes. “Soft. It’s soft. That’s silver, alright.”
“Lemme see.” Jonah took it from Mason and held it up to the light. “Heavy little thing. How much you reckon?”
“Hard to say without a scale.” Mason rubbed his chin. “Couple of ounces, maybe? Two, three?”
“What’s silver goin’ for these days?” Thomas had abandoned his tree trunk and joined the huddle. “Dollar an ounce? Dollar and change?”
“More’n that.” Mason’s voice picked up speed, the way it did when numbers got involved, because Mason Foster had a head for figures that none of his brothers came close to matching.
“Silver’s been runnin’ about a dollar-fifteen per troy ounce out of Leadville.
If that chunk’s two ounces, that’s two dollars and change. If it’s closer to three—”
“Three dollars?” Jonah whistled. “For a rock she pulled out of the ground?”
“It ain’t a rock, Jonah. It’s ore. Well, not ore exactly—it’s a nugget. Native silver. Just sittin’ there in the dirt as if God dropped it out of His pocket.”
“Pitkin started as a mining town.” Thomas crossed his arms. “Half the claims in the county ran silver before the big mines played out. This probably broke off a vein near the surface, and the creek washed it down.”
“So, there could be more?” Mason’s eyes went wide. “If the creek brought this one down—”
“Don’t start.” Logan shook his head. “Nobody’s startin’ a minin’ operation in the high pasture.”
“I ain’t sayin’ a minin’ operation, I’m sayin’ we could look—”
“Mason.”
“Just a little look—”
“It’s Grace’s.”
That shut everybody up.
Logan took the nugget from Jonah and set it back on Grace’s palm. His fingers brushed hers during the transfer, just barely, enough that she registered the calluses and the warmth and the way he curved his hand around the silver like he wanted to make sure it landed safely.
“She found it. It’s hers.” He looked at his brothers. Then at Jonah. Then back at Grace. “Finders keepers. Whatever she wants to do with it, that’s her call.”
Mason opened his mouth.
“Her call, Mason.”
Mason closed his mouth.
Grace looked down at the silver in her hand.
Two dollars. Three, maybe. Back in New York, three dollars covered a month of candles and soap.
Two weeks of bread. The difference between eating on Saturday and going hungry until Monday.
She and Jonah had fought over pennies, literal pennies, counting them out on the kitchen table every Sunday night to figure out which bills got paid and which ones got an apology and a promise.
Yet the money shouldn’t matter anymore. The ranch provided. Logan provided. She ate three meals a day and slept in a bed with clean sheets.
But twelve years of counting pennies didn’t just stop because the counting stopped.
Three dollars. Saved. Set aside. Tucked away for the day when everything fell apart because everything always fell apart. That was the one lesson poverty taught better than any other. Good times ended, and the only question that mattered concerned what you’d stored up before they did.
Rainy day money.
Her mother’s phrase. Whispered over the kitchen table in the hut, pressing coins into a tin box hidden under a loose floorboard. Always keep something back, Gracie. For the rain.
It had rained a lot after Ma died. Poured, actually. And the tin box had gone empty inside of two months.
“I wanna save it.” She closed her fingers around the nugget. The metal dug cool into her palm. “Put it away somewhere safe. For... you know. Just in case.”
Logan knelt beside the rock where she sat. Eye level now. Close enough that she caught the cedar smell of the soap he used.
“When we get back, I’ll put it in the strongbox in the study. Same place I keep the deed and the cash reserves.” He held her gaze. “It’ll be there whenever you want it.”
“You sure? In with your important things?”
“Grace.” He smiled. “It is an important thing.”
She slipped the nugget into her apron pocket. Right next to the folded harvest-fair flyer and the handkerchief that still smelled faint of brandy from the day Rafe had taught her about teething.
Three keepsakes now. All earned. All hers.
“Alright.” Logan stood up and offered her his hand. “Let’s check that north fence before we lose the light.”
She took his hand. He pulled her up. She didn’t let go right away, and he didn’t pull back right away, and the second stretched the way seconds kept stretching between them. Then Mason cleared his throat, Jonah coughed, and Thomas muttered something about poetry and walked away.