Twenty-two months a widow, her flat gone to blackberry and the man at the station pasturing forty head on her hay because the fence is down in two places at the creek bank, and a stranger walks up the Dry Touchet road with a grubbing hoe and eleven dollars and tells her the whole of her business in eleven sentences. He clears the flat in twenty-two days. Then he asks for one thing: leave the bramble at the corner, and don't cut the hawthorn. Ask me in June, he says. In June there is a county road petition on the door of the store, a surveyed line running sixty-six feet wide through the middle of her newly turned ground, damages offered at one dollar, and a hearing room with nine men in it and a question that turns on where a section line actually runs. Because under the blackberry at the northeast corner of her flat is a bearing tree blazed in 1873, and under the foot of that tree is a stone that has never moved, and the man who cleared her pasture is the man who set the fence corner beside it in 1879 before he was sent off the place over a horse that turned out not to be stolen. Western historical romance, clean and slow-burn.