“God, I love you two so much. Do you know that?” he said out loud, hugging her.

“Daddy, you’re acting weird. What do you think, is it bad?”

“You bet I’m weird.” He took the black nylon hackamore from her and walked the animal toward the barn door, watching it over his shoulder. He could see that the horse was limping. He stopped and turned the animal around. At the same time he moved down along the horse’s flank, dropping the hackamore’s single bridle onto the snow.

“Is it bad, Dad?”

Quentin moved to the rear and reached down to pick up the game hoof. He tucked it between his legs. The horse stiffened when he lifted it, then tried to pull the hoof out of Quentin’s hand, almost hitting him in the face.

“Whoa.” He used his car keys to push muck out from the hoof’s center. “He’s picked up a thorn. That’s all.” He let the hoof drop and wiped his shit-and-mud covered hand and keys on his clean jeans.

“Should we call Robin?” Robin was the new vet in Timberline, and he knew his daughter had a crush on him. She was finding any reason she could to have him up to the ranch. He was about to tell her that no, they couldn’t afford to have the vet in, but didn’t, despite the fact that Colliers had been doctoring horses since they’d come to the Sierras. He could have pulled the thorn out himself.

“Yeah, go ahead and call him. Sharon left already, I guess. I wanted to take her to school this morning,” he said. Quentin turned and walked the horse back to his daughter and handed her the bridle.

“I heard a motorcycle early,” Lacy said.

They both looked at each other. The motorcycle meant that the biker Sharon had been dating had come to the ranch. Quentin hated bikers. The foothills were full of them, having come with the meth labs. The idea that his daughter, a high school student, was seeing one appalled them both.

“She’s mad at me,” he said. “I told her she was wasting her time with those kinds of people. I think she’s doing it just to get me mad at her.”

“Probably,” Lacy said.

“I think you better go back to school,” he said. He tucked his shirt in nervously. “I think whatever reason you have for taking the semester off isn’t good enough. You worked too hard to get into medical school to leave like that. Your mother would have wanted you to go back. That’s all she talked about, you know, before.”

“Let’s talk about it later. How’d it go this morning, Romeo?” Lacy said.

“Good.”

“Did she call you tall, dark, and handsome?”

“You’ll like her,” Quentin said.

“I’m sure I will. We’re about the same age!”

“No, you aren’t,” he said. “She’s coming over tomorrow night for dinner. What should I make?”

“Oh my God!” His daughter laughed. “We said date, not bring her home. And if you marry her, I’m not going to call her mother. She’s—how old? Thirty something. It’s weird!”

“Very funny. I wanted you guys to meet her. I thought I’d cook my best dish.”

“Daddy, do me one favor, please. Do not make that woman sit through your venison stew. It’s awful. Really awful!”

It was snowing again. Little bits of snow were clinging to his daughter’s black Patagonia jacket that he’d bought her for that Christmas. Her blond hair covered the collar.

“I think Sharon needed your mom more than you did. Maybe because you were older,” Quentin said.

Lacy picked up the bridle. The horse lowered his head and munched a bit of snow. “I try to be like Mom was. I mean for Sharon. But I don’t think it’s working. She just pushes me away,” Lacy said. “She’s going out with a real low-life, I saw him this morning.  He’s so ... creepy looking.”

“Like a bucket of—” Quentin stopped himself from swearing in front of his daughter. “Why?” he asked.

“I think she’s doing it to get your attention, that’s all.”

“Well, she’s got it. Keep trying to break through, okay?” He smiled at her. “I have to go to work.”

“I’m glad you’re dating,” his daughter said unexpectedly. Lacy turned the horse around and started up the road toward the barn in the snow. She seemed completely un-crackable, completely beautiful. She had her mother’s power and confidence, he thought, watching her.

“Let’s get Sharon a new saddle for her birthday,” Quentin shouted.

His daughter turned around. She was smiling. “Good idea!” She waved. “Hey, did you see that big flash of light last night?”

He nodded.

“What was it?”

“A meth lab blew somewhere, probably.”

Lacy looked at her father as if she were going to tell him something, but decided not to. She turned around instead and led the horse back into the barn.

“You might as well stay until Founder’s Day,” he yelled. Quentin thought she’d heard him, but she hadn’t.

The Phelps ranch was an original homestead. Like the Colliers, the original Phelps had given up panning for gold and become a cattleman during the Gold Rush. Quentin closed the door to the patrol car and looked down the empty, snow-covered single-lane county road. He walked down the icy verge and stood in front of a dirt road that led into the Phelps’s property. Fifty feet down, a series of fallen trees blocked the road and made it completely impassable by car.

Quentin shook his head and smiled. He walked to the mailbox nailed to the once-white fence. It was overflowing with mail. He pulled off his gloves and emptied the box, putting the envelopes and junk mail between his gun belt and his jeans.

He heard a car horn. A new black Range Rover pulled out from the bed-and-breakfast’s private road a half-mile down. It turned toward Quentin. A hand shot out from the driver’s side of the Rover and waved as it approached. The sheriff waved back. He watched the fancy highly-polished jeep come toward him. Quentin unzipped his jacket and stuffed a parcel that had been sitting on top of Chuck’s mailbox under his jacket, then walked over to the Rover that had stopped in the middle of the road, white steam coming from its exhaust.

Quentin knew the man behind the wheel, Todd Cooley. The man was wearing one of those expensive full-length leather coats city people could afford. Cooley’s sunglasses were hanging off his neck. His black hair was greased straight back; he looked like he’d just climbed out of a barber chair. He had on a cowboy shirt from the Sun Dance catalog made for “real cowboys” that cost a hundred dollars and no real cowboy could afford.

Cooley was an accountant in San Francisco and looked it, but dressed like a cowboy when he came up to the mountains. Cooley and some wealthy partners had bought a hundred acres and built the “Country Bride Inn and Spa,” a luxury bed-and-breakfast next door to the Phelps ranch. Since the accountant had bought the property from Chuck there’d been nothing but problems between Phelps and his new neighbors.

“Sheriff, good morning. I’m glad to see you,” Cooley said.

“Good morning, Mr. Cooley.”

“I had to call A.T.F, Sheriff. I just wanted you to know. In case, well, in case there’s a problem when they come out to talk to Phelps. Maybe you should be here, too.”

Quentin heard the words A.T.F. and froze. He didn’t like Cooley, and he didn’t like federal agents much—especially the DEA, staffed by paramilitary gunslinger types, who were always heavy-handed and patronizing when it came to dealing with the locals. (He’d heard a rumor that some of the DEA in Sacramento had partnered up with the bad guys, too.) And he certainly didn’t like the idea of some Federal agents from Sacramento picking on Chuck Phelps, who was a close family friend.

Great, that’s all we need, Quentin thought.

“Why, for God’s sake?” Quentin said, unable to keep the pique out of his voice. He’d had enough of the roly-poly accountant and his pushy big-city ways. Quentin practiced controlling himself. Have to get along with the city people, he reminded himself. It was something he’d promised Marie. He counted to ten as he listened to the over-dressed businessman. More and more of them were coming up to the Sierras, and Marie had been afraid they could, one day, organize and vote him out of office.