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"New float went in Monday."

"Good." He drinks a swallow and sets the bottle down. "You get all the bulls out?"

"Last one Tuesday. Red Angus put me into a panel."

"He'd do that." He turns his bottle a quarter and leaves it. "Yearlings are up two cents this week. Video board out of Torrington."

"Saw it."

"Might hold to shipping. Might not."

"Might not."

We go on like that for a while, the tank and the bulls and the market. He drinks about a third of his beer the whole time, and I match him without meaning to. Outside, the light goes flat and orange over his corrals.

Then he sets the bottle down and doesn't pick it up again. "You can't run this place from Florida, son."

I don't say anything.

"And you can't be their dad from here. I know you're trying to be in two places at once."

I keep still. He isn't building to anything. He's setting it out post by post, and I let him get to the end of the line.

"I'll tear the paper up and give you back every dollar you've put in, to the cent, if you've changed your mind." He looks at me plain. "Fella out of Lusk has been after me to sell him my dirt for two years. He runs cows and wouldn't cut an acre of it for development. I'm pretty sure he'd be interested in both if we present it."

I turn my own bottle. It's sweating a ring onto the wood, but I don't answer him.

"You'd leave here with money in your hand instead of a note around your neck." He lets that sit. "You can't have both, Carson."

"That's not the plan."

"I know what the plan was."

"I'll figure it out."

I know he's right, though. I've known it since I stepped onto the ranch that first morning. I've just kept working like I could prove it wrong.

Dutch looks at me a moment longer, and nothing in his face changes.

"All right."

He stands, takes both bottles off the table, mine still a third full, and carries them to the sink. He dumps them both and water runs over the glass. His back is to me, and that's the end of it. He said it once, and he won't say it again.

I get up. At the door, he hands me the paper bag. I put it in the inside pocket of my vest.

"Vera made fried chicken last night. That stuff will stick to your ribs and keep you full all day."

"I appreciate it, Dutch. This will beat ramen any day."

"That dog of Wade's whelped seven. He'll try to give you one."

"I know it."

It's eleven minutes of gravel from his gate to mine.

The road runs washboard the last stretch before the county line, and Mercy trudges over it like it's as smooth as butter. The darkness closes in around us. A jackrabbit crosses our path but doesn't slow Mercy down.

My fence line comes up on the right where the road bends, new wire tight on the corners I set last week. I left the old cedar posts because they're still sound. It runs alongside me a quarter mile and falls back.