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*quot;Did he do you on the saddle?*quot; Butch asked as I hit the bottom stair to the basement when I'd left Side Slade's office and gone down the stairs as the ranch's foreman had told me to do.

*quot;Yes,*quot; I answered, but I wasn't my most attentive to the question. This was what Slade must have meant about Butch testing me on the edges before I was let loose?and they weren't going to waste time in getting that vetting done. I half suspected, again, that Slade knew more about why I was there than he'd been owning up to and wanted me to be fully in the traces before Jason Jenks showed up?and maybe, though, he just didn't have a whole lot of love for cops. In any event, *quot;fully in the traces*quot; seemed quite an appropriate phrase at this point.

My attention first went to the room Butch called me into. This one was about thirty by forty feet and was rock walled?a true subterranean cavern hewn out of solid rock below the main ranch house. It was a fully outfitted S