“You’ll move them somewhere else,” Elias replied, without raising his voice.
One of the riders behind Vance—a thin, raw-boned youth with a greasy wolfskin cap and an old Spencer carbine resting across his thighs—spat into the mud. “Who’s going to stop us, mister? You and that single-shot army piece?”
Elias didn't look at the boy. His eyes remained locked on Vance’s face, watching the muscle twitch beneath the scar.
“The wire will stop the cattle,” Elias said. “And this Springfield will stop whatever’s sitting in the saddles.”
A dead, murderous silence fell over the yard. The gray dusk seemed to thicken, the red rock of the canyon turning the color of dried blood against the pale, leaden sky.
Vance sat very still. His right hand, covered in a dirty buckskin mitten, rested on the horn of his saddle, six inches above the butt of a Colt revolver slung in a low cross-draw rig. He was calculating. Elias knew the math by heart: six against one, thirty yards of open dirt, but the man on the porch had the elevation, the timber wall behind him, and the look of a veteran who wouldn't blink when the first hammer fell.
“You’re throwing your life away for nothing, soldier,” Vance said, his voice dropping into a dangerous, confidential murmur. “I know who you are. Heard about a gray-eyed cavalryman trading horses down at the trading post. Elias Kane, ain't it? Late of the Third Virginia?”
Elias did not answer. The name sounded strange in his ears, like an old uniform that had rotted away in the ground.
“You don’t owe these women anything,” Vance continued, leaning closer, his eyes narrowing with a hunter’s instinct. “Take your gray horse, take fifty dollars in gold from my saddlebag right now, and ride south toward the railroad. Nobody will look for you. Nobody will remember you were even in this draw.”
Behind the shuttered window ten feet to Elias’s left, the oak wood was silent, but he could feel the pressure of the two women standing in the darkness behind the firing ports, their breath caught in their throats, waiting for the iron to strike.
Elias slowly lifted the Springfield, bringing the stock up against his shoulder with a smooth, unhurried motion that had the terrible grace of a machine. His thumb pulled the heavy hammer back two clicks.
Click-clack.
The sound was small, but in the dead silence of the canyon, it rang like an anvil strike. The barrel of the carbine settled, steady as a sighting stick, dead on the brass buckle of Vance’s sheepskin coat.
“The road south is open,” Elias said, his voice dropping an octave, cold and final as a spadeful of frozen earth falling on a pine box. “You’ve got two minutes to turn those horses around before I start punching holes in your leather.”
Vance’s horse took a backward step, sensing the sudden, murderous tension in the rider’s thighs. The outlaw leader’s face went white beneath the grime and the purple line of his scar. His hand twitched toward his cross-draw—
For a heartbeat, the whole world hung on a thread of cold steel.
Then, Vance’s jaw tightened. He let out a slow, hissing breath through his teeth, his hand relaxing against the saddle horn.
“You’re a fool, Kane,” Vance said, his voice shaking with a cold, contained fury. “A damn fool. You can’t watch this wire night and day. You have to sleep sometime.”
“I sleep light,” Elias said.
Vance stared at him for five long seconds, engraving the lines of Elias’s face into his memory. Then, with a vicious jerk of his bridle hand, he spun his mount around so hard the horse’s hocks slid in the freezing mud.
“Let’s go,” he barked at the riders behind him.
The six horses wheeled, their iron shoes throwing clods of wet earth against the new cedar posts of the fence, and trotted down the slope toward the creek, vanishing into the gray, gathering fog of the canyon.
Elias did not lower the carbine. He stood on the porch steps, the cold iron of the buttplate pressed firm against his shoulder, his breath rising in a straight, steady plume of white steam into the freezing dark.
Behind him, the heavy iron bar lifted from the door brackets with a sharp, ringing groan.
The door swung open two inches.
“Elias?” Aiona’s voice whispered from the darkness within, trembling with an emotion that was neither fear nor relief, but something much deeper, something that sounded like the beginning of an anchor taking hold in rocky ground.
Elias lowered the hammer of the Springfield to half-cock with his thumb. He turned toward the door, his boot heels loud against the pine planks of the porch.
“Aiona,” he called out softly, keeping his promise to the letter. “Aiona. It’s me.”
The iron bar dropped back into its oak brackets with a heavy, muffled clunk that vibrated through the floorboards.