Yes, sir, he regretted that J.D. had worked him too hard and then fired him for screwing up the irrigation dams-which was not his fault. He hadn’t cared so much about losing that job when Mr. Bryce had hired him fresh out of the penitentiary. Mr. Bryce paid real good and there wasn’t that much work to be done on his place, which allowed a man that all-important latitude. Orvis had thought himself pretty smart at the time. Just out of the can and getting hired on at the biggest spread for miles around to do hardly anything for twice what he would have earned elsewhere. That had to make him pretty darn smart, didn’t it?

But things were turning sour on him. Bryce’s people treated him like he was dog shit on a stick. The ranchers and hands around New Eden all hated Evan Bryce and extended that dislike freely to the people who worked for him. And there were jobs here he didn’t much like doing. Jobs that made him feel a little sick at his stomach sometimes.

The hunting dogs were part of his job-feeding them, keeping them fit, seeing to them on the hunt. Seemed simple enough, but he’d found out quick that Bryce and his snooty friends weren’t sportsmen and the animals they hunted were never in season in Montana. Lions and leopards and all kinds of exotic creatures he’d never seen anywhere but on “Wild Kingdom.”

Bryce bought them from some shady middleman who bought them as excess zoo stock. They were trucked in onto Bryce’s land by back roads in the dead of night and were sometimes kept for days in cages not much bigger than they were. The animals were never given much of a chance in the hunt. Oftentimes they were drugged and could barely make it out of the cage before the dogs were on them or one of Bryce’s guests shot them in order to have them stuffed and stuck in their dens, where they could lie to their friends about the dangerous safari they went on and how they risked their lives and all in order to kill this tiger or panther or whatever.

Orvis told himself it didn’t matter, that the animals were no different from livestock and a man had the right to do as he pleased with his livestock. But he couldn’t seem to make that excuse sit very well in his belly when he watched those people laugh and smile after they’d shot some poor drugged animal or when they made him do the dressing out.

More and more he caught himself thinking about what J.D. had said to him that day at the Stars and Bars. There’s more important things in this world than money, Orvis.

Sad to see you come to this, Orvis. He was feeling a little sad himself.

He didn’t like Bryce’s people. He especially didn’t like Mr. Bryce’s cousin, who looked like a female impersonator. Because he occasionally liked to steal a peek through windows, he’d seen her do some things that just plain turned his stomach. Sex with other women. Sex with two or three men at once. Unnatural things. It had made him ashamed to see it.

She had done some twisted things with Kendall Morton too. He knew, ’cause Morton had told him, snickering the whole time. Orvis couldn’t imagine any woman with Morton. The smell alone should have driven them off. But he didn’t doubt that it was true. Miz Russell had come asking for Morton to do this job, but he had gone to the Hell and Gone last night and had yet to return. And so Miz Russell had told Orvis to truck a pair of dogs up to a hunting shack northwest of the Five-Mile creek and leave them, and she’d paid him a hundred dollars cash money to keep his mouth shut about it. He was supposed to get lost and come back in the morning and never say boo to anybody-especially Bryce. She’d see he was fired if he screwed up, and if he didn’t have a job, he’d lose his parole. She told him she had arranged a little hunt for herself and she didn’t want anybody horning in.

Orvis had followed orders. What was it to him if Sharon Russell wanted to go hunting on her own? If they were all lucky, maybe she would be eaten by a grizzly. But he had a feeling she wasn’t alone. Just to remind himself why he didn’t like her, he parked the truck out of sight on the old logging trail and looped back around through the trees to take a quick gander in the back window of the cabin.

The dogs, a pair of big African something-or-others, barked at him, but they were chained to a tree and they never quit barking anyway, so it was hardly an alarm. Orvis was unconcerned with getting caught as he sidled up to the window.

Sure enough, she was with a woman. He had a bad angle on the bed, and the window was so dirty, it was like looking through a glass of milk, but he could tell a few things without any trouble-they were both stark naked and the other one was tied to the bed. Damned queer. Sick stuff, really, he thought, somehow managing to detach his conscience from his body as arousal stirred his pecker like a swizzle stick in his Wranglers. He could make out black hair and dark skin on the woman Sharon was doing things to. He couldn’t see her face, but the only woman around Bryce’s crowd lately who fit that description was Sam Rafferty, Will’s wife.

Now Orvis sat in his pickup, wondering what to do. He had a pretty good idea Will didn’t know his wife had gone lesbo on him. But then, he couldn’t quite accept that image himself. Sam was a nice girl. Orvis knew all the Neill kids, and aside from Ryder, who was mean and drunk much of the time, they were all real nice. He couldn’t figure out what Sam was doing hanging around with Bryce’s people to begin with. He sure couldn’t picture her taking up with the dragon lady.

The ropes bothered him, though he knew there were folks who went for that kind of thing. He rubbed his scrubby little chin and sucked on his crooked teeth. His ferret’s face screwed up into a look of supreme concentration, and he bounced on the seat of the truck as though he had to pee. He didn’t want to do the wrong thing. He didn’t want to go to Will Rafferty and tell him his wife was getting naked with another woman and get himself punched in the mouth for no reason. On the other hand, if there was something kinky going on here…

Sad to see you come to this, Orvis…

The dilemma wrestled around inside him like a pair of wildcats in a cotton sack. He started the truck and put it in gear and let it start rolling down the grade.

Sure wished he automatically knew the right thing to do, like J.D. always did.

Damned sorry he usually did the wrong thing… not that it was his fault.

AND SO I said to Harry Rex, why would I want her? She’s got so many wrinkles, she’s gotta screw her hat on to go to church.” Tucker shook his head in disgust, leaned to the left in his saddle, and spit a stream of tobacco juice that sent a marmot scuttling for cover. “Well, Harry Rex, he just laughs like the big old jackass he is. I swear, he’s about as useless as a dog barking at a knothole. If brains were ink, he couldn’t dot an I.”

J.D. let the old man ramble on, tuning himself out of the conversation. Tucker and Harry Rex Monroe of Monroe’s Feed and Read had been buddies since God was a child. They bickered and goaded each other like a pair of old hens. He could remember when he was a kid, Tucker and Harry Rex and their ongoing competitions of thumb wrestling, wrist wrestling, arm wrestling, tobacco spitting, watermelon-seed spitting, cherry-pit spitting. They went from one challenge to the next, neither willing to let the other have the final victory or the final word. The prattle was familiar and unimportant. J.D.’s thoughts were elsewhere.

Down the hill, to be precise. On Mary Lee. She had certainly told him what-for. Twice. At least. He felt like a bull that had to get knocked on the head over and over before he took the hint to quit pushing on the fence. For so long now his focus had been on the ranch. The ranch was everything. The ranch took everything-his energy, his money, his heart, his soul, his integrity. He didn’t like thinking about what he had become in the guise of knighthood to the Stars and Bars. A martyr. A hypocrite. A mercenary. A liar. He had spent years creating the image of the noble rancher only to find out there was nothing behind it but fear. Fear of losing the ranch. Fear of letting anyone too close. Fear of losing himself. The irony was that there wasn’t that much to lose; he’d given it all away… to the ranch.