Free The Devil You Know by Jo Goodman Page B

respectable rancher, Obie was initially in favor of the fence. That lasted until he learned Ezra was not going to let him through to take his cattle to market, and as the route was the most direct, Obie could either pay for the right to travel over Ezra’s land or he could go around. It was never a real choice for her grandfather.
    He went around Ezra’s land, and then he went around Ezra.
    The plan for the Union Pacific spur from Denver had been to lay track to Wheaton. That would have been another advantage to Ezra, but Obie got to the surveyors first and made a convincing case for Jupiter. They accepted his proposal—in no small part because it came with a substantial bribe—and set the rails to Jupiter. It was then that Ezra tried to move his fence line, though the attempt was made more out of sheer cussedness than for any substantial benefit.
    The government surveyors sided with Obadiah. The ones that Ezra hired studied the same land grants and had an opposing view. They determined that when Ezra set his fence, he created a boundary that was well inside the property he owned. Whether it had occurred because Ezra did not know how to properly read a map or because of his need for expediency did not matter. It had no bearing on the result. The law did not recognize ignorance as an excuse and looked on expediency as proof of greed. In effect, Ezra had turned over acres of grazing land, and Obie’s subsequent use of it year after year made it Pancake land in the eyes of the law, if not in Ezra’s.
    By Willa’s reckoning, it was two years ago in August that Ezra Barber died. She did not precisely regret that she had not visited Big Bar for the viewing and burial, but it would have made it more settled in her mind that he was dead. Perhaps if the dispute had died with him, it would be different, but Ezra made sure it lived on in Malcolm, and Malcolm stoked the fires in Eli.
    These days it was about the water. She had the source for this area of land, and they did not. She had seen evidence that someone was trying to divert the flow from the mountain lake, but she had no proof that the Barbers were responsible. Several years before Ezra died, after two unusually warm winters were followed by drought and the lake receded, Willa proposed temporarily sharing access to the water. She did this over Happy’s strenuous objections and his prediction that her grandfather would rise from his grave to throttle her.
    It did not come to that because Ezra turned down her offer. The old man was convinced that she must have poisoned the lake and meant to kill off the herd that grazed in his southwest pasture. Malcolm finally convinced him otherwise, but thenhe balked again, demanding to know why
he
should share what rightfully belonged to him. That put them at an impasse but apparently saved her from a throttling.
    Willa had been satisfied with the outcome because there was no Christian charity in her heart when she made the offer, no nobility of reason. She did it because she needed to prove that she was better. Better than the Barbers. Better than she had hoped she could be. Just better.
    Willa shivered, as much from the cold as the tenor of her thinking, but she stayed where she was until Eli and his father disappeared into a knot of limber pine, and waited another ten minutes to be certain they would not show themselves elsewhere.
    When they did not, she mounted Felicity again and took her down the slope by an alternate route. She reconnected with the wider trail Israel McKenna’s tormentors had taken before they tied him up and followed it until she couldn’t. If the men had come from Big Bar, she was not going to be able to prove it. It looked as if Malcolm and Eli had tramped around and through the same area, although she had no way of knowing if they were trying to hide evidence or uncover it.
    Reluctantly she halted her search, but since she was out, and the lake was not a hard ride for Felicity,