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“You really okay?” She looked up at him through her lashes.

“No, yeah, Ranch Girl. I’m fine.”

This time she looked like she believed him.

Someone called her name from the staging table. Jodie looked over her shoulder.

“Go,” he said. Jodie nodded and started toward the staging table.

“I love you, Ranch Girl.”

She stopped, and when she turned, she had the most beautiful smile on her face.

“I love you, too.”

She pulled her bandana up, then hurried away. He drank the rest of his water.

Ten minutes later, he was back beside the trailers as another load pulled out through the smoke. Virgil came through staging carrying fencing pliers. Mac noticed because the man wasn’t carrying anything else. No radio, no clipboard, no lead rope. Just a battered pair of pliers in one hand as he headed toward his truck.

Mac stepped away from the trailer he’d been checking. “Virgil! Where you headed?”

Virgil glanced at him. “North fence.”

Mac jutted his chin at the pliers. “Problem?”

“My boys have most of the sheep moved onto the east pasture. One of them just came over the radio. Says Hank’s cattle are stacked up against his fence across from mine, watching the sheep go by like they’re thinking that looks like a pretty good idea.”

Mac looked toward the west. Smoke had swallowed the horizon completely now. He couldn’t see the fire, but the wind was now bringing ash with every gust.

“You raise Hank?”

Virgil shook his head. “Tried twice. Nothing. He’s probably moving his horses.”

He would be. Ten sanctuary horses, two trailers, and a ranch full of things a man might still be trying to save.

“So you’re really going to cut his fence?”

Virgil gave him an impatient look. “Cut his and mine.”

Mac glanced toward the road. “Take them through your place?”

“Road goes all the way around. Fence is right there. One of my boys is coming back once the sheep are settled. We’ll push Hank’s cattle through and take them east.”

A hundred head. Mac pictured the ground he’d seen on Virgil’s place. Sheep country, already stretched by drought. The saltbush Virgil had spent years establishing. Grass that had to last because there wasn’t enough water to grow more just because somebody needed it.

“You’re putting a hundred cattle on your pasture.”

Virgil ignored him and started toward his truck.

Mac followed him. “That’s a lot of hooves going through dry ground.”

Virgil stopped and turned. “You worried about my grass, Canuck?”

“I grew up on a ranch. I know what a hundred strange cattle can do to it.”

They could tear up a gate opening in minutes if they bunched. They’d trample that saltbush Virgil had been cultivating for his own stock, push through water points, mix with whatever sheep were still nearby. Then, if everybody survived this, he’d get the pleasure of sorting somebody else’s cattle back out and rebuilding the fence he was about to destroy himself.

In a third dry year.