Free This Calder Sky by Janet Dailey

thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle of a sailing ship. He’d spent the whole time trying to put it together, only to discover it was two hundred pieces shy when he’d finally counted them. He was a tenacious man; once he had his mind set on something, he wouldn’t let go of it. He still had those eight hundred pieces of that puzzle in a box, figuring that someday he’d find the rest of them and finish that picture.
    He turned his horse upstream. When he’d been looking for Chase earlier, he’d only stopped to make a cursory search of the riverbend where the girl had been swimming—and that had been from the opposite bank. Nate decided that a closer inspection might provide him with a few more puzzle pieces.
    Following the tracks of two shod horses, he went down the cut in the bank leading to the gravel bar. At the edge of it, he stopped his horse to study the ground. There were horse droppings by the fallen log, which meant one of the horses had probably been tied there. Grass was cropped by a couple of cottonwoods, which meant a second horse had time to graze.
    He walked his horse halfway to the blackened fire ring. Branches were poked in the ground around it. About the only reason for them that Nate could come up with had to be to hang clothes on to dry. Studying the man-made indentations on the ground beside the fire and the scuffled gravel, Nate read the story that was written there. Nate took his hat off and put it back on, all in one gesture that indicated his unease at the knowledge.
    â€œSometimes I get too curious, horse, and find out things that are none of my business.” He laid the left rein along the horse’s neck to turn it, then checked the swing halfway around when he noticed a partiallyuncoiled lariat nearly hidden by gravel a horse’s hooves had kicked over it.
    A good, supple rope was a vital tool of the cowboy, not to be left lying around for the elements to stiffen it. Stepping down, Nate finished rewinding it and tied it to his saddle. He remounted quickly and headed for the gully climbing to the top of the bank, detained long enough from his duties by his obsessive curiosity.
    The ranch road running from the east gate was part of an interconnecting web of roads that crisscrossed the vast Triple C range. Some of the roads, like this one, were little more than two parallel ruts worn into the earth by truck tires. The more heavily traveled roads were hard and smooth as cement.
    Avoiding the uneven ground of the rutted track, Chase ran his horse on the grassy verge next to it. For five miles, he galloped the blood bay, then slowed it to a trot for two to let it blow, and urged it into a ground-eating lope for the next five. After walking it for a mile, he covered the last six miles to the ranch headquarters at a hard gallop, the lathered horse laboring at the end.
    The headquarters of the Triple C resembled a town in miniature. The cluster of structures included the usual ranch buildings of barns, sheds, and a bunkhouse, plus a small warehouse store stocked with all sorts of essential supplies, ranging from hardware and vehicle parts to utility clothing and foodstuffs. The store was also where the mail was collected or distributed, and outside there were gasoline pumps for ranch vehicles. Another building was a first-aid center and semi-dispensary, as well as a kind of animal hospital. A welding shop doubled as a blacksmithy. In addition, there were a half-dozen small homes where the married hands lived, those who weren’t camp men living on oneof the distant sections. On the northeast side of the collection of buildings, a long grass strip served as a private landing field for the ranch planes hangared in the accompanying metal shed and for those of invited guests.
    The massive two-story main house dominated the entry enclave—it was appropriately referred to as “The Homestead” by the cowboys. Its front entrance faced the south, a wide porch running its