“Will was in Little Purgatory last night?” J.D. asked, his voice as dead calm as the air before a storm.

Grusin’s jowly face dropped a little, and he swallowed hard as he realized his slip.

“How much did he lose?”

Grusin made a face, his eyes dodging around the room as if he were afraid the sheriff might overhear and suddenly decide to shut down the illegal gambling that had been going on in the basement of the Hell and Gone for the last two decades. “Don’t worry about it, J.D. He’ll win it back. He’s been on a bad streak and he’s in the hole a little now, but-”

J.D. stepped a little closer in front of Red and stared at him hard. “How much?” he whispered.

The older man’s mouth worked as if he were chewing a mouthful of chalk. “Sixty-five hundred,” he mumbled. “Don’t worry about it, J.D.” His gaze scanned the room frantically for anyone near enough to rescue him, landing on Harry Rex Monroe from the Feed and Read. Relief brightened his face like a man having a vision. “Hey there, Harry Rex!”

J.D. just stood with his hands on his hips, staring at the floor and breathing slowly through his mouth. Sixty-five hundred dollars. Will did not have sixty-five hundred dollars. The bank held the mortgages on everything they owned, practically down to their underwear, and Will was whiling away his nights in Little Purgatory, throwing money down a rat hole after busted poker hands.

“I heard talk of a ski resort on Irish peak…”

“… Some developer wants to put up condos north of town.”

“They’ll turn the place into another goddamn Aspen with cappuccino bars and prissy Swiss chalets and rents so high, everyone who works here will have to drive in from someplace else…”

Random lines of conversation penetrated the fog. J.D. forced himself to pay attention, forced his brain to function. He had come here for a reason. Will could be dealt with later.

$6,500. He felt ill, but damned if he would show it.

Lyle Watkins, who was his neighbor to the south of the Stars and Bars, stood staring down into his coffee cup. He looked thin and miserable, as if worry had been eating away at him beneath his skin. “Yeah, well,” he snapped suddenly, breaking in on the antidevelopment talk of his fellow ranchers. “You can’t feed your kids on pride and scenery.”

“Can’t feed them at all if these damned actors bring in buffalo and elk herds infected with brucellosis and TB,” J.D. said calmly.

Lyle dodged his gaze, rubbing his fingertips against his coffee cup as if it were a worry stone. “Ain’t nobody proved Bryce’s herds are infected.”

“I don’t want the proof to be my cattle dropping over. Do you, Lyle?”

Watkins tightened his lips and said nothing. The silence curled like a fist of foreboding in J.D.’s chest. He swore softly under his breath. “You’re selling out.”

The words were barely more than a whisper. Lyle flinched as if they struck him with the force of hammer blows.

“Deal’s not done yet,” he mumbled. He stared down at the toes of his boots, his head hanging with the weight of his shame. He had been one of the first and the loudest to decry the buyout of ranchers by people who wanted the land for their own private playgrounds, and now he was giving in, giving up, betraying his neighbor.

“I can’t afford not to, J.D.,” he said miserably. “You know what the market’s been like. And I got Debbie and the kids to think of.”

“Jesus, Lyle,” J.D. said, desperation running through him like a sword. He felt as if he was standing on a narrow ledge and another piece had just crumbled out from under his boots. “How long has your family been on the place? Seventy-eighty years?”

“Long enough.”

“Who?”

Watkins shook his head a little and started to move with the rest of the crowd toward the chairs as Jim Ed Wilcox began blowing into the microphone at the podium. J.D. grabbed him roughly by the arm, ignoring the stares the others directed his way.

“Dammit, Lyle, I asked who,” he demanded through his teeth.

The fact that Watkins didn’t want to answer was answer enough. J.D. felt as if he’d had the wind knocked out of him. He stared hard at this man he had known all his life, the neighbor he had worked with side by side at brandings and roundups, and felt as if a member of his own family had turned on him.

“Bryce.” He growled the name in disgust.

Lyle Watkins looked up at him, his tired eyes soft with apology. “I’m sorry, J.D.,” he whispered. “He’s got more money than God. Me, I don’t have two nickels left to rub together.” He lowered his voice another decibel, his eyes cutting from side to side to make certain no one else could hear his confession. “I sell the place to him, or it goes to the bank. That’s all there is to it.”

“The hell it is.”

Watkins pulled away and headed for a chair, not looking back. J.D. stared after him, furious, stunned, frustrated. He didn’t even hear the opening remarks of the chairman. He just stood there behind the last row of chairs, his mind spinning, his eyes on Evan Bryce, who sat at the table up front with all the local indignitaries, as J.D. called them. If Lyle Watkins sold the Flying K, Bryce would own everything from Irish Peak south to the edge of Yellowstone-everything except the Stars and Bars and the little chunk of property that had belonged to Lucy MacAdam.

Bryce sat up there in his faded denim work shirt with the sleeves rolled up to reveal his tan forearms. Christ, the man had probably never done an honest day’s work in his life. Nobody was even sure where all his money had come from. Or where he had come from, for that matter. Hollywood was all anyone knew for sure, and God knew big money didn’t get made down there by the sweat of any man’s brow.

He has more money than God. God was exactly the role Bryce wanted to play here, J.D. thought bitterly. Bryce fielded questions from the audience with all the aplomb and paternal benevolence of a supreme being, telling them everything would be wonderful, their financial cups would runneth over, and all would be bliss in Eden.

To the credit of the citizens of New Eden, not everyone bought the routine. People rose readily to debate the issues. When one person pointed out that development would bring jobs to the valley, another countered that the jobs would be low-paying service occupations. When one charged that the influx of tourists was a disruption to a way of life, another argued that the town would die without those tourist dollars. Cattlemen spoke out angrily about the political clout wielded by radical left-wing environmentalists who owned second homes here and were fighting to stop everything from grazing on federal land to eating red meat. Environmentalists fought back, slamming the cattle industry for overgrazing and destroying wildlife habitat.

Jim Ed Wilcox, chairman of the committee, cut in as the debate edged toward an exchange of blows. He broke in again when a new argument heated up between a Mormon rancher from over on Bitter Creek and the owner of the New Age rock shop, or whatever the hell it was-a tall, fierce-looking woman named M.E. who was some kind of Broadway actress when she wasn’t playing around in Montana. The rancher accused her of practicing witchcraft. She accused him of having a negative energy field and a constipated mind. Wilcox shouted them both down and, when order had been restored, introduced another of the people at the front table.

Colleen Bentsen was a squarely built woman with a cap of soft brown curls and large tortoiseshell glasses. She was dressed in a blue silk tunic and slacks with a wildly patterned scarf swathed around her shoulders and pinned in place with what looked to J.D. like a chunk of welder’s solder. She took her place behind the podium as two men carried a draped object in from a side door and set it on the table beside her.

“Good evening, everyone,” she said so softly that Jim Ed got up and bent the neck of the microphone down, making it screech in protest. A blush bloomed on the woman’s cheeks. She cleared her throat demurely and started again. “As many of you know, I am a sculptor. I came to New Eden two years ago and made this my permanent home. It troubles me to see so much dissention over the issue of new people coming here. I feel what we all need is a spirit of cooperation. As a symbol of that spirit, I have decided to donate to the town a sculpture that embodies the theme of cooperation and blends harmoniously the rough elements of the ranching community with the influx of sophisticated and artistic qualities from the outside.”