not see me coming because he was bent over the horse’s right hind leg, back to me as he compared the shape of the shoe to the shape of the hoof. Several nails were clenched between his teeth.
“Harper,” I said.
He turned his head. For a moment he made no further movement, then he shook his head once and looked back at the hoof and shoe. “Figured you’d be down to complain about yesterday.” The words were distorted by the nails, but the tone was clear enough.
“It’s Nathan,” I said, and saw a miraculous transformation.
He spread his legs, let the hoof drop down, threw the shoe toward the tack room and pulled the nails from his mouth, shedding them across the ground. He didn’t even bother to grab his hat, which hung on the end of the rail. He just ran. So did I.
Cass was with her uncle in a large bedroom. She had him seated on the edge of a giant brass bed. He continued to clutch the hat, twisting the brim into a caricature of a proper cowboy hat, and his shoulders were slumped. His grayish pallor had improved somewhat, but he was still far from recovered. I doubted he was able to distinguish the sense in Cass’s words.
Harper went down on one knee before the man. “What is it? I can help. Just tell me what it is.”
Nathan shook his head, still swinging it slowly from side to side in denial of himself more than anything else.
Harper reached out and placed a firm brown hand on Nathan’s knee. “Talk to me, Nathan. ”
Nathan took a shuddering breath and abruptly dropped the hat. Harper picked it up, brushed it off and returned it to the searching hands. He asked again, still as gently, but with a quiet force of command that at last drew an answer.
Nathan sighed. “It’s gone. All of it. Gone. There just isn’t any more.”
“What’s gone?” Harper asked.
Life welled back into Nathan’s eyes as he peered at the kneeling wrangler before him. “There isn’t any more. Nothing left. Everything—gone.” The breath was heavy and the exhalation loud. “All the money…”
I thought at once of Smoketree. Of the accidents. Of the land developers who stood to make such a profit. And Harper. I looked at him, but his face was perfectly blank.
He turned toward me. “There’s a list of emergency numbers by the phone. On it is a Dr. Willis. Call him.”
Brandon met me as I came out of the private quarters and went directly to the phone. I told him what I could as I dialed the number, then spoke to a nurse who said the doctor would be on his way.
I hung up. “A doctor who still makes house calls,” I said to Brandon in disbelief.
He smiled. “Must be an idealistic man.”
I sighed and tucked my hair behind my ears. “Maybe you’d better tell everyone what’s going on. I don’t know if there’s anything we can do, except stay out of the way. But I’m sure Nathan doesn’t want pity or sympathy right now.”
“I’ll clear them out,” he promised, and went to do just that.
A few hours later Cass came out on the porch. I sat in the swing, contemplating the charred skeleton of the barn. She stared at it too, but I doubted she saw much. Rigid fingers combed her hair out of her face, and then she glanced down at me. “Thanks for calling the doctor.”
“How is Nathan?”
“Sleeping, for now. Dr. Willis gave him something.” She hooked one boot around the iron frame of the orange sling chair and dragged it over. She dropped into it heavily. “I guess he’ll be okay in a couple of days. But he hates being sick.”
“Is he sick? Or is it something else?”
She tilted her head back, eyes closed. The strain leached her young face of its vitality and put circles beneath her eyes. “I guess it was mostly the pressure, and the shock. You know what’s been going on around here. The news about the money really shook him up. He’s got a heart problem—nothing really serious, but he’s not young anymore. The doctor called it a spasm, but he wants Uncle Nathan in for a complete workup. All those expensive tests. Electro-this, echo-that.” She shook her head and rubbed at the lines in her brow.
“If you don’t mind my asking, what was it that went so bad?”
“From what Harper got out of him, he invested a lot of money—for him—in a land deal. Some planned