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I stop with my hand on the back of my chair.

"What is this?"

Knox doesn't look up. "The roads I drove the year you were gone."

I sit down and put my finger on the circle around the Cattle Guard.

He told me he'd searched for me, and I believed him. I didn't know it was this. That whole year, in the barn and then the cellar, I thought nobody was looking.

My eyes catch on the ridge road behind Whitlock's vines, the one I climbed down to when I ran. It doesn't have a single red mark.

"You drove every road in this county," I say. "You never drove that one."

"No." He doesn't look away from the map. "I sat across Coleman Whitlock's desk once and got a deacon's smile. After that, Harlan sat on my porch and told me to stay away from Whitlock. Harlan said he'd raid my fights and lock me up if I didn't. I never went back, and I never drove his back road."

Knox draws the ridge road in with the red pencil. Then he runs the line east and south down a caliche county road past Kuhlmann's goat pens. It crosses the creek at the low-water crossing and comes out on his own county road a short way above his gate.

"I've hauled cattle across that crossing more times than I can tell you," he says. "A dually can get through it when the creek's down, and it's been down for weeks. Nobody in town sees a truck on that road. There's no stoplight, no store, and no house close enough to hear it."

"Gil hauls out of Kerrville," I say.

"That crossing is the short way from Kerrville to Whitlock's back fence. Gil could run it in the dark with his lights off." He writes STRACKBEIN in the margin beside the crossing and draws a box around the name.

Gray light is coming through the kitchen window when Knox's phone buzzes on the table. It's Jesse, and Knox puts him on speaker.

"I'm on the ridge road, right behind his back fence," Jesse says. "The pipe gate's chained and locked. A truck pulled off on the rock shoulder beside it and turned around. There are boot tracks in the caliche past the cattle guard, coming from Whitlock's side. They look fresh, but I can't swear to when they were made. There's no tire track on bare rock. I took pictures from the road. I never touched his gate."

"Take the caliche road south past Kuhlmann's goat pens to the low-water crossing," Knox says. "Look at the mud on both banks from your truck."

"On my way."

Knox hangs up and folds the map along its soft old creases.

"I'm going down to meet Torres's people," he says. "I'll be at the gate, in sight of the drive the whole time. Beckett comes up to guard the house while I'm down there."

"I'll be in the barn," I say. "The horses need feeding, and Hector's not here to do it."

His mouth goes tight. Then he nods. "Take the radio off the tack room shelf. Keep it on your belt."

He goes down the hall to the gun safe and comes back with a short-barreled revolver. "You shoot?"

"Snakes and coyotes. I taught myself on the ranches where I trained horses."

He swings the cylinder out, checks every chamber, and snaps it shut. Then he puts the gun in my hand butt first. "Anybody you don't know comes at you, you don't wait to ask what he wants."

I stand and tuck it into the back of my jeans under his shirt.

The top snap of the pearl-snap work shirt he put on me last night has come loose at my throat. Knox reaches out and closes the snap with his thumb. Then he leaves his hand there. His knuckles rest in the hollow of my throat, warm and still, and my pulse beats against them.

He looks straight at me and drops his voice low and even.

"Would you wear my collar? Not now. Someday."

His voice goes straight down my spine and settles low in my belly. It's the same voice that made a barn full of fighting men go quiet when I was nineteen and sitting on a hay bale wishing he'd turn around. My knees go loose. If he told me to kneel on his kitchen floor right now, I would.

A collar would sit right where his knuckles are. From him, it would mean 'Mine,' the way a man means it. He said it to me at the foot of his bed the night I signed my paper.

Hector is gone, and Knox hasn't slept. The map from his year of hunting for me lies on the table behind him.