The True Line

Harlan Voss came down out of the Sangre de Cristo foothills the second week of October, following a stage road that had gone rougher with every mile since Las Vegas, and reached the southern boundary of the tract shortly before ten in the morning. He had ridden out from town alone on a rented bay gelding that handled the broken ground better than its price suggested it would, carrying with him a folded copy of the original survey and a letter from an attorney named Whitfield who had summoned him from Denver with a good deal more urgency than the matter seemed to warrant on paper. A title dispute over several hundred acres of dry grazing land was not, on its face, worth a man's time and travel money. Harlan had accepted the acreage nine years before in settlement of a freight debt that would otherwise have gone bad, filed the deed, and given the property no more thought than he gave most of his smaller holdings. He intended to clear the question, sell the land if it was worth selling, and be back on the eastbound stage inside two weeks.

The wash that marked the property's south line ran shallow and dry between two low shoulders of broken limestone, the kind of country a rider might call worthless from a distance and never trouble to examine. Harlan had learned better than that. He drew up at the edge of the wash and sat the bay for a time, letting the animal blow while he studied the slope beyond. Juniper stood thicker in several protected folds of the higher ground, and the grass below those places carried more body than the open flats. There might be little enough water on the surface, but the country was not quite as poor as it had been described to him. Whoever had judged it worthless had either ridden it carelessly or had reason to want him thinking poorly of it.

He found the first stake perhaps twenty minutes later, working the line east according to the bearings written on Whitfield's copy. It lay on its side in the sand at the bottom of the wash, half buried, the wood gone gray and split along the grain from years of weather. That alone told him nothing. Floodwater came down these washes hard enough in a wet summer to move fence posts and small trees, and a marker down after nine years was no particular mystery. He dismounted, worked it free, and turned it over in his hands. The base was cut square and old, the lower wood showing the darker weathering of something that had once stood in the ground. So far as he could tell, the stake belonged to the original survey, or close enough to it.

The second stake, when he found it, stood upright and solid nearly thirty yards farther south, driven into ground that put a considerable strip of the disputed acreage on the far side of what should have been his line. Harlan crouched beside it and looked it over without hurrying. The wood was newer than the first marker by a good many years, though somebody had taken the trouble to darken the exposed part so the difference would not be obvious from horseback. Dry soil had been packed around the base and scattered over the disturbed ground. Floodwater had not done that.

He sat on his heels for another moment, looking north toward the line shown on the survey and then back toward the newer post. Poor surveys were common enough in country this broken. Replacement markers went in wrong when men worked from uncertain notes or landmarks that had changed since the original survey. Harlan had seen disputes begin from nothing worse than two honest crews measuring the same ground differently. But there was no honest reason he could think of for making a newer stake appear older than it was.

He mounted again and rode the supposed line east along the ridge. The old pull in his left shoulder had begun to make itself known, mild but familiar after several hours in the saddle, and he shifted the reins to favor the arm without giving it much thought. The trail he picked up near the top of the rise was neither game trail nor cattle track. Narrow wheel ruts crossed ground that had no reason to see wheeled traffic at all, not on a tract that had supposedly sat idle and unwatched for most of a decade. He followed them a short distance and found where they ended near a cut in the rock below the ridge crest.

Someone had been working the outcrop. The cut was narrow, no wider across than the spread of a man's hand, but it had been opened with care. Tool marks showed along the face where somebody had followed the same line in the stone, opening enough of it to take samples and little more. There was no abandoned camp nearby, no fire ring, no cans or broken bottles left by men who had stayed any length of time. Whoever had done the work had come prepared, taken what he wanted, and gone. Harlan swung down, let the reins fall, and walked to the cut.

He picked up a broken piece from the rubble and turned it toward the light. Quartz ran through the stone in narrow bands, with rust-colored staining along some of the edges and darker mineral showing in places. It was enough to make the rock worth an assay and not enough to tell him much beyond that. Harlan had spent too many years around mining camps, freight outfits, and men buying claims on hope to mistake an interesting hand sample for a mine. He selected two more pieces from different points along the cut, fixed their locations in his mind, and put all three into his coat pocket.

The rock might prove worthless. Somebody else had thought it worth bringing a wagon into difficult country and cutting open the ridge to find out.

A horse moved somewhere below him on the slope, its shoes striking stone, and Harlan straightened and turned toward the sound. A rider came up from the southeast and stopped some twenty yards away, sitting a good-boned sorrel and watching Harlan with the unhurried attention of a man accustomed to taking stock of what lay in front of him. He was square through the shoulders, somewhere in his late thirties, dressed for range work, with a plain revolver worn in an ordinary holster and nothing about him that suggested he had ridden up looking for trouble. His eyes went from Harlan to the fresh cut in the rock and remained there a fraction longer than they had anywhere else.

"Private ground," the rider said. His voice was even, a man stating what he believed to be a fact rather than beginning an argument.

"That's what I've been told," Harlan said, resting one hand on the saddle horn, "though I've also been told the line runs along the ridge, and the stakes I've found this morning don't agree among themselves about where that is."

The rider considered him. "I'm Frank Miller. I run the crews for Mr. Stark. According to the survey we've been working from, you're standing well inside his line, not yours."

"Then your survey and mine don't match, which is common enough and ought to be settled by comparing the papers before anybody decides whose ground he's standing on. My name is Harlan Voss. I hold title to the tract south and west of here."

Something shifted in Frank Miller's face at the name, quick enough that another man might have missed it. Harlan did not. Whatever Miller had expected to find when he rode up the ridge that morning, Harlan thought it unlikely he had expected the owner of record to be standing beside the prospect cut.

"I was given to understand the owner was a Denver man who hadn't set foot on this ground in years," Miller said, "and that the boundary matter was being handled through attorneys."

"It is being handled through attorneys. I came out to see the ground before I let them handle much more of it."

Miller looked at him for a moment. "You planning to sell?"

"If I do, I'd like to know what I'm selling first."

Miller did not answer that directly. He looked past Harlan toward the cut in the rock again, and Harlan let the silence remain between them. Wind came down off the ridge carrying the smell of dry stone, juniper, and horse sweat. Somewhere below, a canyon wren called from the broken ground.

"That work up there was done a while back," Miller said finally, nodding toward the cut. "Before my time overseeing this section, near as I know. Couldn't tell you who did it."

"No reason you should."

Harlan meant it without accusation. He had dealt with enough foremen and overseers to know that a man responsible for today's crews did not necessarily know who had opened a prospect cut years earlier. Miller's reaction to his name had looked genuine to him, and for the present Harlan was willing to take it that way. The foreman might know more than he had said about the ridge, but there was not enough yet to decide how much more.

He had been wrong about men before. Not often, but often enough that a first impression was better kept in its proper place.

"I'll tell Mr. Stark you were out here," Miller said. "He'll likely want to talk with you himself rather than let this run through lawyers much longer. He's not a man who cares for waiting on other people's schedules."

"Tell him I'm at the hotel in town. I'd as soon talk to him myself."

Miller studied him another moment and touched his hat in a manner that was courteous without pretending friendship. Then he turned the sorrel back down the slope. Harlan watched until horse and rider dropped below the shoulder of the ridge and the sound of iron shoes on stone faded into the ordinary quiet of the hillside. Neither man had raised his voice. Neither had given ground on the boundary, either.

Harlan walked back to the cut and looked at it once more before mounting. The morning had given him enough to justify staying in New Mexico longer than he had planned. The old stake and the newer one did not belong on the same line. A light wagon had been driven onto land that supposedly had little value and no use. Somebody had opened the quartz and taken samples. None of it told him yet whether the boundary had been changed deliberately or what the rock might be worth, but it was enough to make selling the tract before he knew more a poor piece of business.

He mounted with some care for the shoulder and turned the bay toward the wash. The quartz samples rode in his coat pocket. He would have them assayed before he drew conclusions from them, and he would see the county records before deciding what to make of Stark's survey. Frank Miller could wait in the same uncertain column until Harlan had reason to put him somewhere else.

He had ridden out that morning expecting a minor property matter. By the time the road to Blackwood Creek came into sight, he had stopped thinking about the eastbound stage.