The four teamsters froze. One of them, a blacksmith named Calloway who had shod Daniel's mules for five years, lowered his pick-handle to the ground.
"Tom?" Calloway called out, his voice cracking with fear. "What are you talking about? Danner said you were shot by the road-agents!"
"Danner lied to you, Calloway!" Tom shouted, stepping down from the wall into the churchyard, his eyes blazing. "Danner murdered my father! He forged the land deeds to steal your water rights and sell them to the Northern Pacific! Look at him! Look at the blood on his hands!"
Danner stepped out from behind the bronze bell. His face was twisted with fury, his eyes wide and wild as a cornered wolf's.
"He's out of his mind!" Danner screamed at the teamsters. "The boy has the prairie fever! Shoot him! Shoot him, I say!"
None of the teamsters raised their weapons. They looked at young Tom—the boy they had watched grow from a terrified, silent orphan into their deputy—and then they looked at Danner, whose face was covered in blood and madness.
"You're done, Silas," Tom said, walking slowly down the path toward the bell. "Put down the iron."
Danner did not drop his gun. With the lightning speed of a seasoned gunfighter, he leveled his ivory-handled Colt directly at the boy's chest.
"I should have left you in the brush at Bitter Creek with your father," Danner hissed.
He pulled the trigger.
At the exact same instant, a roar like the collapse of a mountain tore from the smoke of the shattered church doorway.
Elias Ward burst through the burning ruins of the tamarack wall.
He had no weapon in his hands. His left arm hung limp at his side, his buffalo coat soaked in black blood, but his six-foot-six frame moved with the terrifying, unstoppable momentum of an avalanche.
He threw his massive body directly between Danner's pistol and the boy.
The Colt barked twice.
Both heavy .45-caliber slugs struck Elias squarely in the chest, the impact rocking his massive frame on his heels, but he did not fall. He didn't even cry out. He lunged across the remaining three paces, his enormous right hand clamping around Danner's throat like an iron vise.
The sheriff’s eyes bulged with terror. He fired a third shot point-blank into Elias's abdomen, but the giant's fingers only tightened, lifting Danner completely off his feet and slamming him down across the rim of the cracked bronze church bell.
CLANG.
The bell gave a dull, mournful ring that echoed across the entire valley.
Elias leaned his full, dying weight onto the sheriff's throat, his face inches from Danner's, his dark, bloodshot eyes burning into the lawman's soul.
"Thomas... forgives you, Silas," Elias whispered, his voice a thick, bloody gurgle in his throat. "But the territory... does not."
With one final, convulsive surge of strength, the giant drove the sheriff's head back against the stone base of the bell-post.
Danner went limp. The ivory-handled Colt slipped from his nerveless fingers, tumbling into the mud beside the bronze rim.
Elias stood motionless for two seconds, his chest heaving, three dark holes weeping red down the front of his coat.
Then, slowly, gracefully, like an ancient ponderosa pine whose roots had finally been severed by the river, the giant collapsed onto his side in the wet clover of the churchyard, his face turned toward the sky where the first pale rays of afternoon sunlight were finally breaking through the storm.
"Elias!" Tom screamed, throwing himself onto his knees beside his uncle.
Eleanor reached them a second later, dropping to her knees in the mud, her hands pressing against the giant's torn chest.
"Elias... stay with us," she pleaded, tears cutting through the grime on her cheeks. "The train is coming. We have medicine—"
Elias smiled. It was the first time Eleanor had ever seen him smile. It transformed his scarred, battered face into something gentle, peaceful, and young.
He reached up with two trembling, bloody fingers, touching the small pine horse that was still tucked into the bib of Eleanor's apron.
"Take... the children... west, Nell," he whispered, his dark eyes looking past her toward the snowy peaks of Black Tooth Ridge. "The land... belongs to them."
He let out one long, soft sigh that sounded like the wind dying down in the mountain timber.
His eyes remained open, but the deep, bottomless sorrow that had haunted them for twelve years was gone, replaced by an infinite, quiet stillness.
From inside the smoking ruins of the church, the thin, clear cry of a baby cut through the afternoon air.
Emma was crying.
And beside her, young Noah—Thomas Elias—lifted his small voice in answer, their cries rising together through the broken rafters into the wide, cold Wyoming sky.