Cy didn't start the engine right away. He sat there and thought.
He thought about the county road. He'd driven it ten thousand times. It ran north from the cattle guard for nine miles, straight as a string across the flats.
Then it swung east, a long, slow loop around the base of Antelope Ridge, to get around the rocks. Then it dropped down into the Willow Creek canyon and crossed the creek on a narrow old one-lane bridge, built by the county in 1958, before it climbed out the other side and ran on to the highway.
The Willow Creek bridge was the only crossing for thirty miles in either direction. Willow Creek ran through a canyon of cut banks and boulders twelve feet deep. Nothing with wheels got across it anywhere else.
Not a pickup. Certainly not a loaded gooseneck with sixteen heifers in it.
They had to cross that bridge.
And they had to drive twenty-two miles of county road to get there.
Cy turned and looked out the side window, to the east, at the dark shoulder of Antelope Ridge against the stars.
His grandfather had cut a two-track straight over the top of that ridge in 1931, with a team of horses and a Fresno scraper, to get to the Willow Creek water. It was rough and steep, and it hadn't been graded in twenty years. It was six miles long.
"Tess," he said. "Put your seat belt on."
The two-track over Antelope Ridge was worse than he remembered.
It went straight up the side of the ridge in a series of rocky switchbacks, washed out in places, overgrown with sagebrush in others. Cy drove it with the headlights off, by the moon, in first gear, with both hands locked on the wheel. The old Ford bucked and banged and lurched.
Rocks scraped the oil pan. Sagebrush whipped the doors. At one point, the right front wheel dropped into a washout so deep that Tess screamed and grabbed the dashboard, and the pickup hung there for a long second before Cy gave it gas and it clawed its way out.
"Grandpa," Tess said, when she could breathe. "Have you driven this before?"
"Not since 1987," said Cy. "It was better then."
They topped the ridge.
Below them, to the north, Cy could see the red taillights of the rustlers' truck crawling along the county road around the base of the ridge. They were still a long way out on the loop. Seven or eight miles from the bridge.
Cy and Tess were three miles from it. Straight downhill.
They came down off the ridge in a cloud of dust and rolled out onto the county road at the bottom of the Willow Creek canyon a quarter mile from the bridge.
Cy drove onto the bridge. It was a narrow old thing, concrete and steel, barely wider than a pickup, with low guardrails on both sides and the creek running dark and loud over the rocks fifteen feet below.
He stopped in the exact middle of it. Then he cranked the wheel and backed and filled, three times, until the old Ford was sitting sideways across the bridge from rail to rail, with maybe a foot to spare on each end.
He turned off the engine. Then he turned on the headlights, and the hazard flashers, and the old spotlight bolted to the driver's door.
"Tess," he said. "Call the sheriff. Tell them exactly where we are. The Willow Creek bridge. Tell them we're parked across it, and they've got to come this way."
Tess's hands were shaking, but her voice wasn't. She called. The dispatcher said the deputy was twenty-five minutes out, and coming this way, and to stay in the truck with the doors locked.
"We will," Tess said.
Cy locked his door. He looked at his granddaughter in the glow of the dashboard.
"We're not going to fight anybody," he said quietly. "We're just going to sit here. That's all. A loaded trailer can't turn around on that road, and it can't cross the creek. All they can do is stop."
Eleven minutes later, headlights came over the rise on the canyon road.
The rustlers' pickup came down toward the bridge fast, with the long trailer swaying behind it, and then the driver saw the old red Ford parked sideways in his headlights with its flashers going. He hit the brakes. The truck and trailer skidded on the gravel and stopped fifty yards short of the bridge, with the heifers bawling and banging in the trailer.
For a long time, nothing happened.
Cy could see three men in the cab. He could see them arguing. Their pickup was facing a narrow road with deep ditches on both sides, with a forty-foot loaded trailer behind it.
There wasn't room to turn around. And backing a gooseneck trailer a mile uphill in the dark, around curves, was something Cy had seen only a handful of men in his life do well.
The driver's door opened. A man got out and stood in the road, shading his eyes against Cy's spotlight.
"Old man," he shouted. "Move that truck."
Cy rolled his window down two inches.
"No," he called back. "The Elko County sheriff's deputy is about ten minutes behind you. He knows exactly where you are. So does my granddaughter's phone." He paused. "Son, there's two ways out of this canyon. One's this bridge, and I'm sitting on it. The other's that creek, and you'll drown my heifers and probably yourselves." "I'd just sit tight, if I were you."
The man stood in the road for a long moment.
Then he looked down at the creek, at the dark water running loud over the boulders in the canyon bottom.
He got back in the truck. The engine shut off. The headlights went dark.
They gave up.
The deputy came over the rise nine minutes later, with his lights going. Behind him came a second patrol car, and then, as the sky started going gray in the east, the state brand inspector from Elko in a white pickup, with his coffee in one hand.
The three men were arrested without a fight. They'd been hauling stolen cattle to a sale barn in Idaho with forged papers for two years. The deputy said they'd hit seven ranches.
The brand inspector climbed up on the side of the trailer with a flashlight and looked in at the heifers. He came down and nodded at Cy.
"Lazy B Bar," he said. "Sixteen head. They're yours, Cy."
Sunrise came up pink and gold over the Ruby Mountains.
Cy and Tess stood leaning against the old red Ford, still parked crossways on the Willow Creek bridge, with a thermos of coffee the deputy had shared between them. Down the road, behind the sheriff's car, sixteen black baldy heifers were bawling in the stolen trailer, loud and indignant, ready to go home.
"Grandpa," Tess said, after a while. "That road over the ridge."
"What about it?"
"How'd you know it was still there?"
Cy took a long drink of coffee and looked up at the dark shoulder of Antelope Ridge, with the morning light just touching the top of it.
"Because my granddad built it," he said. "And Bannisters don't forget a road."