He gave his horse, Chaco, an affectionate pat on the neck, hung back the canteen, and touched the horse’s flanks with his heels. Chaco moved forward easily, starting down the trail to the upper reaches of Nick’s Creek. Watts had packed all he needed for a quiet day of fishing: his bamboo fly rod in an aluminum tube, a box of flies and nymphs, creel, knife, compass, lunch, flask of whiskey, and his grandfather’s old pair of Colt Peacemakers, snugged into holsters almost as ancient.

He rode lazily down the trail, through shade and sun, past stands of ponderosas and glades of wildflowers, lulled by the gentle rocking of the saddle. On the shoulder of Oso Peak, the trees gave way to a broad meadow. Three mule deer grazed at the meadow’s far side: a buck and two does. They were startled by his sudden appearance and bolted. He paused to watch them bound away.

Crossing the meadow, he glimpsed, far away to his left, a puff of smoke in the foothills, on a mesa extending from the base of the mountains. He stopped his horse again, took out his binoculars, and gave it a closer look. A fire at this time of year, when everything was bone dry, would be disastrous. But the glasses revealed it wasn’t smoke at all, but irregular clouds of sand-colored dust raised by some sort of activity on the mesa. It was coming from a location he knew well, an abandoned mining camp named High Lonesome, one of the most isolated and unspoiled ghost towns in the Southwest.

Clouds of dust. What did they mean? Someone was up to something. And given the size of the clouds, it probably wasn’t good.

Watts paused, thinking. To his right the trail would lead him to Nick’s Creek and a peaceful day of fishing in a burbling stream, its deep pools and hollows flashing with cutthroat trout. To his left was a trail that would take him to High Lonesome and a day, perhaps, of aggravation and trouble.

Son of a bitch. Watts gently reined his horse to the left.

The land dropped away steeply, the trail switchbacking down the flanks of Gold Ridge. As the elevation decreased, the ponderosas gave way to juniper. As he rounded the side of the ridge, the ghost town came into view, a scattering of old adobe and stone buildings on the tongue of a mesa. He paused to once again glass the scene. And sure enough, it was as he suspected: a relic hunter. He could see the man shoveling sand from the basement of one of the ruined houses, a pickup truck parked nearby.

Watts felt his blood quicken. He knew High Lonesome well, from the time his dad first took him there camping as a kid. The ghost town, remote and little known, had largely escaped the casual looting and destruction that had stripped most of the deserted mining towns in the state. There had been the occasional vandalism, for sure, mostly drunk teenagers from Socorro out for a weekend of fun in the mountains, but nothing on a large scale. The place wasn’t even listed in any of the guidebooks to the ghost towns of New Mexico. It was just too hard to get to.

But here was some son of a bitch vandalizing the place.

He reined his horse off the trail and rode down through the pi?on trees. He didn’t want the relic hunter spotting him and taking off before he had a chance to collar the guy. While this was all Bureau of Land Management land and thus not his jurisdiction, he was the elected sheriff of Socorro County and he still had the right to arrest the bastard and turn him over to the BLM police.

After a while the slope leveled out. Moving his horse at an easy walk, he emerged into the open behind the town. The looter was at the far end, now out of sight because of the intervening buildings. Watts rode on through, keeping cover between him and the digger. A steady wind muttered through the ruins, and a tumbleweed came rolling by, just like in all the Westerns ever made.

As he approached, he got a good view of the pickup truck. He recognized the old Ford as belonging to Pick Rivers.

Pick Rivers. This was a head-scratcher, and no mistake. Rivers had once been a cocky little shit, fond of meth and known to sell relics to get it. But he’d cleaned up his act about two years ago—after a brief stint in the pen had scared him straight—and he hadn’t been in any kind of trouble since.

As he reached the far end of town, Watts brought Chaco to a halt behind a building, dismounted, unlooped his lead rope, and tied the horse to a wooden post. He gave him another pat on the neck and a murmur of affection. He hesitated, then lifted the holsters from the saddle horn, removed the guns and checked them, reholstered, and buckled them around his waist. Just in case. Rivers was one of those dudes who was into open carry, and Watts knew he liked to go around with an S&W .357 L-frame strapped to his hip.

As Watts walked around the corner, he could see the building Rivers was digging in. It stood off by itself, a two-story adobe structure, the top floor mostly collapsed. The man was in the basement, heaving shovelfuls of sand out a broken window frame. And he was working hard, too. Watts wondered what he had found.

He approached cautiously, his hand resting on the butt of the revolver on his left hip. Rivers had obviously uncovered something, because he was now bending down and digging more cautiously. And as Watts watched, the man dropped to his knees and started using his hands to sweep away dirt and sand. He was so engrossed in what he was doing, and the basement so full of dust, he had no idea Watts was approaching from behind.

The sheriff moved to where he had a good view of Rivers through the cellar entrance, laboring away. Then he called out: “Rivers!”

The figure froze, his back to Watts.

“It’s Sheriff Watts. Come out, hands in view. Now.”

The man remained motionless.