Rancher Bought a Ghost Town for $100 — And Found a Family Still Living There
PART 2
Inside, the general store had become something between a home and a sickroom, and neither version of it was built to last.
Zara Whitmore couldn’t have weighed seventy pounds. Boon had seen calves in worse pasture carry more weight than that child did on her own small frame. Her skin had gone the color of old snow, and every breath dragged out of her like it cost something she didn’t have to spare.
“Fever’s worse,” Dorothy said, pressing a hand to the girl’s forehead. She didn’t look up. “She needs a real doctor. Not the herbs I’ve been scraping together out there.”
The nearest doctor was two days’ ride, in a town called Milfield — the same town, it turned out, that housed the bank that had taken Dorothy’s farm, forged her husband’s name onto papers he never touched, and nearly cost her granddaughter her life in the process.
“We had money once,” Dorothy said, not to him exactly, more like she needed to say it out loud to someone who wasn’t Zara. “A wagon. Horses. Everything. Bank said my husband defaulted on a loan he never signed. Convenient, since he was already six weeks in the ground and couldn’t say otherwise.”
Boon was still working out what to say — something that wasn’t get out and wasn’t quite a promise either — when the sound of horses came up fast behind him. Multiple riders. Moving with purpose.
Dorothy went rigid in a way that had nothing to do with the rifle she’d already dropped.
“They found us,” she said, and for the first time, Boon heard something in her voice that wasn’t defiance. It was fear, plain and old, the kind that comes from being hunted before.
Three men rode into what used to be a dead town like they already owned every inch of it — because an hour ago, as far as they knew, they had.
At the front of them, a badge caught the morning sun, and a thin man with cold eyes and a voice made for delivering bad news like it was good business swung down off his horse and looked at Dorothy the way a man looks at a debt he intends to collect in full.
“Well, well,” he said. “Dorothy Whitmore. You’ve led us quite a chase.”
His eyes cut to Boon next, cataloguing the smoke, the garden, everything that hadn’t been here on his last ride through. “And you’d be the fool who bought this worthless pile of rocks from the county.”
“I have legal ownership,” Boon said. “Deed’s clear.”
“The county may have sold you the town,” the sheriff said, almost bored by having to explain it. “That’s not what I’m here for. Mrs. Whitmore’s got an outstanding debt with Milfield Bank, and she’s been hiding on land that isn’t hers to hide on. I’m not here to argue your deed. I’m here for her.”
Boon didn’t know the man’s name yet — Crow, he’d learn soon enough. He didn’t know the number about to come out of Crow’s mouth, or what the words the bank always recovers its investments were going to mean once he understood exactly what kind of recovery Crow had in mind for a sick child and her grandmother.
He only knew one thing for certain, standing between a locked door and a rifle already down in the dirt:
He was not getting back on his horse and riding away from this.
