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“Virgil couldn’t raise you. His sheep were already moving east, your cattle were stacked against the fence watching them go, so he cut a way through.”

Hank stared at him.

“Sorry. Both fences,” Mac added.

For a second, Hank didn’t say anything. He looked past Mac toward the smoke, although there was nothing to see from here but the gray-brown haze that had swallowed the western horizon.

“A hundred head on his saltbush,” he said finally. “In this drought.”

“Yeah.”

Hank’s mouth tightened. Mac knew exactly what Hank was counting now—feed, water, fence, and the years Virgil had put into that saltbush. All the things two men could spend decades arguing over that stopped mattering when cattle needed somewhere to go.

“I’ll get them back off him as soon as we can.”

Mac nodded. “Figured you would, and I’ll do what I can to help.”

His phone vibrated against his thigh. He took his phone out of his pocket and read the screen as Ben swung the trailer gate closed behind the last horse.

Kyle.

He hit speaker. “Hey, Boss.”

“Mac, is Jodie with you?”

Everything inside him stopped.

His gaze went automatically to the yard as if she might somehow be there anyway, carrying a clipboard and giving somebody directions while calculating the next task.

“No.”

Kyle paused. “She signed herself out on the board to check on Virgil. Nobody can raise her.”

Mac looked at Ben. The big man straightened to his full six-foot-seven.

“How long?”

“Thirty minutes. Willow went looking for her entry and told me. We’ve been trying to raise her on the radio.”

Mac’s hand tightened around the phone. “If she went checking on Virgil, she went to the north fence. How’d she get there?”

“Willow’s truck.”

Mac gripped the phone. “I take it Virgil hasn’t come back.”

“Negative.”

Mac looked at the open trailer, then at Hank. Every nerve in his body said go.

Get in the Ram. Get back there. Find her.

The horse on Hank’s lead tossed its head at a gust of smoke. The temperature had to be nearing a hundred. Son of a bitch.

“We’re securing Hank’s last horse and heading back. The horse panicked and it took forever to calm him down enough to get him into the trailer safely.”

“You go ahead, son,” Hank told him. “I got ’em from here.”

“I’m coming with you,” Ben added.