“You look a little worse for wear,” he said, pulling off his hat and wiping the sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt.

Will cocked his head and tried to grin, but it held little of the usual mischief and a lot of pain. “Got my clock cleaned by a city boy. It was a sorry sight to see.”

“I should think so.” He sat himself down on the tailgate of Tucker’s old H, his reins dangling down between his knees. Sarge leaned down and rubbed his nose against a foreleg, then promptly fell into a light doze. “Looks like you’ll live to fight again.”

“I’ll live,” Will said, sitting down gingerly on the other end of the tailgate. Zip came with the Frisbee and presented it with much ceremony, placing it in the dirt and looking up with contrition and hopefulness that went unrewarded. “Don’t guess I’ll fight that fight again. I pretty well blew it.”

“Samantha?”

“If she comes back to me, it’ll only be to serve me with papers or to stick a knife in my chest. Can’t say that I’d blame her either way.”

J.D. made no comment. He looked up at the house where they had been boys together and tried to imagine strangers living in it. The idea cut as sharp as glass.

“What about you and Mary Lee?” Will asked.

He moved his big shoulders, trying to shrug off the question and his brother’s scrutiny. “That’s not gonna work out.”

“Because you’re a stubborn son of a bitch?”

“Partly.”

Will sighed and picked at a scab of rust on the tailgate. “That’s a poor excuse for losing something good. I oughta know.”

J.D. said nothing. He thought Will was hardly the man to give advice on the subject, but he wouldn’t say so. He didn’t kick a man while he was down. Besides, if he cared to look, there was probably too much truth in his brother’s words, and it was just better to let this thing between him and Mary Lee die a natural death. In a week or two she would be back in California. Life would go on.

“I figured I could sign over my share of the ranch to you,” Will said. “Keep it out of divorce court. I’ll sell it to you outright if you want to make it permanent. We’ll have to get a lawyer, I suppose. Man can’t take a crap in this country without needing to have a lawyer look at it.”

J.D. said nothing. This was what he had always wanted, wasn’t it? To have the ranch to himself. He was the one who lived for it. He was the one who loved it. Sitting beside a brother he claimed he’d never wanted, that sounded pretty damn sick. He braced his hands on his knees as if to balance himself against the shifting of his world beneath him.

“What are you gonna do? Rodeo?” He heard himself ask the question and almost looked around to see if someone else had joined the conversation. From the corner of his eye he could see Tucker, fifty yards away, climbing down off his chestnut by the end of the barn.

“Naw. There’s not much of a living in it unless you’re a star. I’m not good enough to be a star,” Will said flatly and without self-pity. “It’s time to quit playing around.” He looked at J.D. sideways and flashed the grin, weary and worn around the edges. “Never thought you’d hear me say that, did you?”

He sighed and marveled at the crispness of the pain that skated along the nerve endings in his back and shoulders. “I thought I’d go up to Kalispell and get a job. Got a buddy up there gettin’ rich selling powerboats to movie stars on Flathead Lake. I figure if I kiss enough celebrity ass, I could make back that sixty-five hundred I owe at Little Purgatory in no time.”

J.D. gave him a wry look. “You don’t know spit about powerboats.”

He grinned again, flashing his dimple. “Since when have I let my general ignorance stop me from doing anything? Besides, I could sell cow pies at a bake sale and have ’em coming back for more.”

J.D.’s smile cracked into a chuckle, and he shook his head. “Pretty sure of yourself.”

All the guile went out of Will’s face, leaving him looking naked and vulnerable and young. “No. Not at all. But it’s time to grow up. It’s past time.”

They sat in silence for a moment, neither of them able to put feelings into words. J.D. felt the weight of regret on his shoulders like a pair of hands pressing down, compressing the emotions into hard knots inside him. Regrets for a brotherhood that had been tainted even before Will’s birth. Regrets for the wedge their parents drove between them for their own selfish reasons. Regrets for not seeing the worth of what they might have had before it was too late. He thought of his priorities and he knew this might be the last chance he had to change one. Kalispell was a long way from the Stars and Bars.

He looked across the way at the mountains, black and big-shouldered beneath the clouds. A red-tailed hawk held its position high in the air, as if it were pinned against the slate-gray sky. He thought of the song Mary Lee had sung while he stood in the shadows of her porch, about pride and tradition and clinging to old ways, desperation and loss and unfulfilled dreams. And he could hear the faint echo of boys’ laughter, could almost see the ghosts of their boyhood running through the high grass and scarlet Indian paintbrush. Not all the memories were bad ones.

“You’ve got a place here if you want,” he said quietly. “Some things would have to change, but our being brothers isn’t one of them.”

Will nodded slowly. He studied the backs of his skinned knuckles with uncommon interest. “Maybe after a while,” he said, his voice a little thick, a little rusty. “I think it’s best if I leave here for a time. You know, stand on my own two feet. See who I am without you to lean on or knuckle under.”

The silence descended again and they sat there, absorbing it and feeling the paths of their lives branching off, knowing that this moment was significant, a turning point, a crossroads, but having neither the words or the desire to call attention to it. It wasn’t their way.

“If you can wait a day or two, I’ll help move the herd up,” Will offered.

“That’d be fine,” J.D. murmured, his eyes on the beat-up Chevy pickup that had just broken through the trees and was rumbling up the drive, engine pinging, gears grinding, Orvis Slokum at the wheel.

SHE COULD hear the dogs baying in the distance. Thunder rumbled farther back, just clearing the mountains to the west and rolling over the Eden valley, a warning that was coming too late.

Samantha thought she should have seen a sign, a clue, some foreshadowing of this, even though a more logical part of her brain knew no normal person could have imagined the kind of madness that infected Sharon Russell. She still blamed herself for being naive and stupid. But that was pointless and she had no time to waste.

She ran through the woods, pain shooting through her with each jarring step. Her ribs and back ached from the beating she had taken the night before. Cramps knotted her shoulder muscles from the unnatural position she had been tied in, and her hands throbbed mercilessly now that the circulation had been restored. They were swollen and discolored, and fears of amputation flashed through her mind when she looked at them, but then, that was stupid, because she was probably going to die.

None of it would matter-her hands, her ragged hair, the cut that extended in a bloody throbbing red line from her right cheekbone diagonally across her face to her jaw. It wouldn’t matter what she looked like when she was dead. It wouldn’t matter if the dogs fell on her and tore her to shreds. She would have ceased to exist.

She wondered who would mourn her passing.

The notion was stunning, impossible to grasp. She had too much life ahead of her to die now. That thought compelled her to keep her feet moving and her heart pumping and her lungs working. Instinct and adrenaline spurred her to run, and she ran with no thought to pacing herself as she hurled her body between trees and through brush. Thorny brambles ripped the bare skin of her legs, lashed them with a hundred tiny cuts, and snagged the remnant of the white silk T-shirt that hung in tatters around her neck. With no shoes, her toes caught on exposed roots, and thistles and twigs bit into the soles of her feet, but she kept running. Her head felt as if it would explode, and her lungs burned until they felt like sacks of blood in her chest, but she kept running.