Sundown on Hollow Ridge

Dawn came in a thin strip across the low hills, a pale knife that cut dust into silver. Etta Keene worked with the steadiness of long practice: a cloth wrapped around a battered coffee tin, a hand checked the mare's flank, a quick breath to push morning into the bones. Hollow Ridge woke slow, houses throwing long shadows that the sun would take its time to swallow, the general store's sign creaking as if it had forgotten it once hung there. She had chosen this measured life because it allowed less room for the past to move. The barn smelled of hay and horse sweat; the world beyond the corral gate smelled of sage and cracked dirt. That solitude had rules she could obey. She kept to them like a promise.

A hoofbeat came from the road, hard and certain enough to disturb the crows that had been arguing on the fence. A rider approached alone, wrapped in a gray coat, a paper parcel tied to his chest with twine. He dismounted with a face weathered like old rope and handed the parcel over as if it were an ordinary farm account. Etta took the folded paper without thinking, fingers memorizing the weight of it, the way the wax seal held with a dry crack when she broke it open. The seal wore a crest she had seen on men of money and name: a crowned initial within a wreath. It was the mark of someone who bought land the way others bought shoes.

She read the words twice before the neighbor's dog began barking in alarm. The writ claimed water rights, strips of the riverbed and an undefined swath of low pasture. It spoke in law phrases—easements, claims, grant— and it named a single proprietor whose offices were two towns and one man who had grown tall by buying the beds of rivers. The paper was stamped by the territorial clerk and crossed by official signatures; it looked as if the law had rolled over every protest before Hollow Ridge had even blinked. A map folded inside the parcel showed the dry channel marked with neat, straight lines and little brass tags hammered into stakes along its length.