Eleanor looked up from the page. Her face was pale in the lamp-light, her gray eyes dark with comprehension.
"Your father knew," she said.
"He knew Gideon was coming for him," Nathan murmured. His voice had no anger in it now; it was colder than the frost creeping up the lower edge of the windowpane. "And three weeks later, my father's horse supposedly lost its footing on an ice ledge along the east ridge. Threw him thirty feet into the boulder wash. Broke his neck."
"Did you see the ground?" Eleanor asked gently.
"I was seventeen," Nathan said, staring at the scarred table. "The snow had fallen four inches over the trail by the time we found him. Silas Rourke was the first man to ride up to the house with the news. He had tears in his eyes. He put his arm around my shoulder and told me that whatever debts my father owed his store, he wouldn't press me for them until I was of age. He played the grieving friend, just like his father did in that photograph."
Nathan picked up the tintype, his thumb rubbing over the likeness of his fatherâs face.
"For fifteen years," he whispered, "I thought it was bad luck. I thought this country just took him, the way it takes cattle and crops. But Gideon bought up the territorial notes. And when Gideon died, Silas took over the paper. They've been waiting fifteen years for this ranch to go under, so they could claim the north pasture without ever having to prove they had the mineral title."
"They don't have it," Eleanor said, tapping the letters. "That's why someone broke into your tack room two hours ago. Silas knows the five-year grace period on the latest note expires at noon today. He knew your father hid the paper somewhere on this property, and he wanted it burned before you figured out what it was worth."
"And without it?" Nathan asked, looking at her directly. "Suppose Silas rides up here at twelve o'clock with the sheriff. Suppose he hands me the foreclosure papers for twenty thousand dollars. If I show him this map, what does it do?"
Eleanor shook her head. Her mind, sharp and trained on the cold logic of territorial land statutes, saw the trap clearly.
"The map proves there is coal," she explained, leaning forward. "It proves commercial value. But under the Mining Act of 1872, an unsurveyed mineral deposit on territorial land belongs to the holder of the valid federal claim certificate. Without that certificate, the mineral rights are legally tied to the surface deed. If Silas forecloses on the surface deed to settle your debt, the coal goes with the dirt. He will own four million tons of fuel, and the railway will pay him a hundred thousand dollars before the spring thaw."
Nathan rose from the table. He was a tall man, but in the dim, shadow-strewn room he looked immense, his silhouette blotting out the light from the hearth. He walked to the window and wiped a circle of frost from the glass with his knuckles.
Outside, the first faint hint of blue was beginning to dilute the blackness over the eastern rimrock.
"Then we have eight hours," Nathan said.
"Eight hours to find a piece of paper that your father hid twelve years ago," Eleanor said, her voice dropping. "In a valley sixty miles long, on a ranch with five thousand acres of timber and rock."
"He didn't hide it on the mountain," Nathan said, turning back from the glass. "My father was an old soldier. He wouldn't bury an official federal certificate in the dirt where moisture could rot it, or in a tree trunk where fire could take it. He hid it in a building. Somewhere dry. Somewhere that had been standing before the territory was organized, and somewhere that would still be standing when I was old enough to understand what it meant."
"The barn?" Eleanor suggested. "The tack room was torn upâwhoever broke in thought it was there."
"They tore up the floorboards because of the letter Henry found," Nathan said, shaking his head. "If my father wrote that the paper wasn't in the tack room, it wasn't there. He wasn't a liar."
Suddenly, the door from the kitchen creaked open.
Eleanor turned, expecting to see Martha with more wood for the stove.
Instead, it was five-year-old Samuel. He was dragging Davidâs buffalo robe behind him like an oversized cloak, his eyes heavy with sleep, his small bare feet pink against the dark pine floorboards. In his right hand, clutched tight against his flannel chest, was the little wooden pine horse Nathan had left in that very first basket of provisions.
"Mama," Samuel mumbled, rubbing his nose with his sleeve. "My horse won't stop rattling."
Eleanor stood up immediately, crossing the room to lift her younger son into her arms. The child was warm from the bed, his hair standing on end like dry grass.