"You have a brother, Tom. You have a sister." Eleanor lifted the baptismal certificate from the box, holding the heavy parchment toward him through the rain. "Their names are Thomas and Emma. Daniel Hayes gave them different names to keep Danner's regulators from cutting their throats in their cradles. But their names are written here, under the seal of the Post Chaplain at Fort Laramie."
Tom took half a step forward, his gun hand lowering two inches. "No... that's a forgery. Danner told me Elias was clever with an ink-pen. He told me—"
"Read it," Eleanor commanded. She didn't plead; she spoke with the absolute, unyielding authority of a mother who had looked death in the face and refused to step aside. "Read your father's handwriting, Tom. You know how he made his capital T’s. You have his journal in your room at the boarding house, don't you? You know the surveyor's mark he put on every ledger he ever signed."
The boy stared at the paper. His chest heaved beneath his black coat. Slowly, as if pulled by an invisible chain, he reached out with his left hand, his fingers trembling violently as he took the edge of the parchment.
His eyes scanned the lines.
He saw his father's name: Thomas Vale, Deputy U.S. Marshal.
He saw his mother's name: Clara Vale.
And he saw the date: March 28, 1876.
"The wooden horse," Eleanor said, her voice dropping into a low, steady murmur. "The sheriff held it up on the courthouse steps this morning. He said it belonged to Daniel Hayes. But Daniel had three broken fingers, Tom. He couldn't hold a whittling blade."
She reached into her apron pocket and pulled out the small pine carving that had been left on her porch five nights ago.
She held it up so the gray light struck the belly of the toy.
"Your father carved three of them while he was sitting in the stockade at Laramie," Eleanor said. "He carved one for you. One for the babies Clara was carrying. And one for his brother Elias."
She pointed to the mark cut into the pine.
"That's not Daniel's mark, Tom. Look at the open triangle. That's the boundary mark of the Vale homestead on the north fork. Your father cut it there so you would know your own blood when the time came."
Tom dropped the certificate.
The paper fluttered down into the wet clay of the grave. The boy looked at the small wooden horse in Eleanor's hand, his breath coming in jagged, choking gasps. His face contorted into an expression of such pure, unadulterated agony that Eleanor thought he might drop to his knees and weep.
"He told me..." Tom whispered, his voice cracking into a dry, broken sob. "Danner told me Elias shot him from the brush. He told me my father called my name before he died..."
"Your father died with three bullets through his spine, Tom," a voice boomed from the chapel doorway.
Both Eleanor and Tom turned.
Standing on the threshold of the church, leaning heavily against the tamarack doorframe with Daniel's ten-gauge shotgun leveled across his forearm, was Elias Ward.
He had dragged himself two miles through the freezing mud from the logging flume. His coat was covered in black shale and dead pine needles. His face was gray as ash, and a trail of dark, clotted blood followed his dragging left boot across the churchyard weeds.
Behind him, framed in the dark interior of the chapel, stood old Mae Jensen, holding the wooden crate where the two infants lay wrapped in the wolf robe.
"Elias..." Tom whispered, his revolver drifting toward the giant, but his hand had lost all its strength. The barrel wavered, pointing toward the grass.
"You look just like him, Tommy," Elias said, his voice trembling with a love that twelve years of hunting and hatred had not been able to extinguish. "You've got his jaw. You've got his stubborn chin. And you've got that same damn habit of tapping your belt when you're trying to figure out if a man is telling you the truth."
Elias lowered the shotgun until the twin muzzles pointed into the dirt.
"I didn't kill your father, boy," the giant whispered, tears carving clean lines through the grime on his face. "I loved him. I held his head in the creek water while he choked on his own blood. And the last thing Thomas said to me was: Find Tommy. Don't let Danner make a butcher out of my boy."
Tom Vale’s knees gave way.
The Colt Army revolver slipped from his numb fingers, falling with a dull splash into the muddy grave of Daniel Hayes. The boy dropped to his knees in the clay, burying his face in his hands, his whole body shaking with violent, wrenching sobs that sounded like the weeping of a child who had finally realized he was lost in the dark.