From the road beyond the churchyard gate, the sharp, rapid drum of iron horseshoes against the frozen gravel shattered the silence.
Danner had arrived.
The iron gate of the cemetery clattered open with the screech of rusted pintles, striking the fieldstone wall hard enough to chip the mortar.
Through the curtain of falling sleet rode Sheriff Silas Danner, flanked by Deputy Ross and three stock-grower regulators in stiff canvas slickers. Their lever-action Winchesters rested across their saddle cantles, thumbed to half-cock. Steam rose in thick, white puffs from the nostrils of their mounts, mingling with the gray breath of the men who had ridden hard from the south ford.
Danner reined in his buckskin gelding forty paces from the fresh mound of Daniel Hayes's grave. His eyes did not immediately seek out the giant in the church doorway; they fell first on young Thomas Vale Jr., who knelt in the mud with his Colt revolver submerged in the clay.
"Get on your feet, Tom," Danner commanded, his tone calm, devoid of haste or anger. It was the voice of a ranch master correcting an inattentive hand. "Pick up your weapon."
Young Tom did not move. His hands remained clutched against his temples, his fingers tangled in wet hair. The baptismal certificate lay face-down in the puddle beside his knees, its red wax seal gleaming like a pool of fresh arterial blood.
"Deputy Vale," Danner repeated, his eyes narrowing slightly as he took in the open green iron dispatch box on the sod. "Stand aside."
From the shadow of the tamarack chapel door, Elias Ward shifted his weight. Every movement cost him an audible, ragged intake of breath, but the massive black barrels of the ten-gauge shotgun remained leveled squarely at Danner's breastbone.
"He's not your deputy anymore, Silas," Elias called out. His voice was thick with fever, but it carried the weight of a stone falling into deep water. "He knows what you put in the creek at Bitter Creek. He knows whose name is on the land patent."
Danner did not flinch before the twin black bores of the scattergun. He adjusted his gloves, pulling the cuffs tight over his wrists. "Elias. You look worse than you did at the territorial penitentiary. I told the district judge ten years ago that you had too much bulk and too little wit to survive three seasons in the high timber."
"And I told Thomas you were a thief," Elias answered. "He didn't believe me until you put three balls through his back."
"Thomas was an obstruction to the development of this territory," Danner said, his voice flat, conversational, as if they were discussing the price of beef cattle on the Laramie platform. "Men who cling to paper patents while the locomotive is laying iron across the continent are fools. They get ground under the drive wheels. Daniel Hayes understood that. That was why Daniel ran like a whipped cur to Missouri."
"Daniel didn't run to save his skin," Eleanor's voice rang out from the graveside. She stood straight, her canvas drover's coat dripping water, the short-handled spade held upright in her hand like a staff. "He left to keep these children alive until they were old enough to claim what you murdered their parents for."
Danner's cold gray gaze shifted to Eleanor. A slow, thin smile crept beneath his blond mustache. "Mrs. Hayes. You have performed admirably. Truly. A widow with two nursing infants, managing eighty acres of dry gravel while half the valley went bankrupt. But you have confused sentiment with legality. A forged scrap of paper from an army chaplain carries no standing against a deed registered with the Territorial Land Commission and countersigned by the Governor."
He turned his head slightly toward Deputy Ross. "Collect the box, Ross. And shoot the giant if he raises those hammers."
Ross swung his leg over his saddle, his boots splashing into the mire.
"Don't touch that iron," young Tom's voice cracked like a pistol shot.
The boy stood up. He did not retrieve his fallen revolver. He stood in front of Eleanor and the open grave, his coat plastered to his ribs, his face deathly pale, his eyes fixed on the man who had raised him for ten years.
"Tom," Danner said softly, warningly. "Step to the rear."
"Is it true?" the boy asked, his voice shaking with a terrifying, brittle tremor. "Did my father carry the real ledger on the stage? Did you kill him?"
Danner sighed—a long, weary exhalation that misted into the sleet. He leaned forward over the saddle horn, looking down at the young man with an expression that resembled genuine, pitying regret.
"Your father was a sentimental man, Tommy. Just like you. He believed the world could be governed by lines drawn with a compass and an ink-bottle. When the railroad company offered twenty thousand dollars for the right-of-way, he wanted to give half of it to dirt-farmers who couldn't read their own deeds. I couldn't allow that. It would have ruined this county before it was born."