HE FIXED THEIR FENCE, BUT HIS ONE CONDITION CHANGED EVERYTHING

“A man who talks that much about what he’s going to do is usually trying to convince himself as much as the fellow he’s talking to,” Elias said without looking up from the steel. “Vance is used to settlers who pack their wagons and sell out for twenty dollars the first time a rider shows an iron hip. He didn't expect a line of posts, and he didn't expect a rifle that could reach out past his carbines.”

“He has ten men down at the crossing,” Aiona said from the washbasin. She wrung out a piece of homespun linen with sharp, twisting strokes of her red hands. “Nielli’s right about one thing, Elias. You’re one man. You can’t stand on that porch for three months with your carbine cocked.”

Elias paused, the rag held motionless against the blue receiver.

He knew she was right. Frontier defense was a matter of mathematics and endurance. A single man could hold off an army for an hour, or three days if he had water and stone walls. But eventually, the body demanded its debt. The eyelids grew heavy; the reflexes dulled; the mind began to mistake the shadow of a juniper bush for a crouching rifleman. And when the snow drifted four feet deep across the passes, cutting off the southern trail to the settlements, a single fire in the night would draw every hungry wolf within twenty miles.

“We don’t need three months,” Elias said, his voice dropping into that quiet, gravelly certainty that had carried his company through the Wilderness. “We need two weeks. Marshal Cole’s circuit brings him up through the Sweetwater before the heavy freeze. If Vance hasn't run you off by the time Cole reaches the stage station, he’ll have to pull his stock back to the lower basin or risk getting caught between the snow and the law.”

Aiona dried her hands on her apron and walked over to the fire. She stood looking down at him, her silhouette dark against the red glow of the coals.

“And what happens tonight?” she asked softly.

Elias looked up. “Tonight, I sit by the window.”

“No,” Aiona said. Her voice was quiet, but it had the sudden, absolute hardness of a timber wedge driven into an oak log.

Elias frowned. “Aiona—”

“You spent seven hours in the sleet setting posts, and you stood on that porch in the freezing wind until your knuckles turned gray,” she said, her dark eyes looking down into his with a steady, uncompromising clarity. “If you sit on that stool by the shutter all night, you’ll be shaking so hard with ague by sunrise that you won't be able to chamber a round. You’re sleeping.”

“A man can’t watch a perimeter from under a blanket,” he replied, a trace of his old, stubborn irritation surfacing.

“The perimeter is closed,” she countered. “The wire is tight. The horses are in the barn, and the dogs down at the creek will raise hell if a strange mount comes within a mile of the ford. Nielli and I took turns watching the road for two months before you rode up that draw, Elias Kane. We didn't forget how to listen to the night just because you put an iron bar on our door.”

She turned toward the back of the cabin, where the large wooden bed platform was built directly into the spruce logs of the corner.

It was a wide, rustic frame constructed of split cedar poles and laced with dried rawhide thongs, supporting a thick tick stuffed with mountain hay, dried sweetgrass, and sheep’s fleece. Over the top lay two heavy woolen trade blankets and a large buffalo robe, its brown fur thick and shaggy against the cold. It was the only real bed in the cabin; Nielli usually slept on a smaller pallet beside it, while Elias had kept his solitary station on the bare pine floorboards across the room, near his saddle and the cold draft of the front door.

Aiona walked to the bed, reached down, and folded the heavy buffalo robe back toward the center.

“Nielli,” she said, her voice completely even, stripped of any hesitation or false modesty. “Bring your pillow over.”

The girl blinked, looking from her sister to Elias, then scrambled to her feet, gathering her small feather pillow and her patchwork quilt without a word of protest. She laid them against the wall side of the wide frame, where the corner timbers met in a solid, draft-free angle.

Aiona looked back at Elias.

“We have one room,” she said, her dark eyes meeting his through the smoky gloom. “We have three cords of split pine, two sacks of flour, and one man who knows how to shoot. If Vance’s men come tonight, they won’t come through the windows; they’ll try to slip up to the logs and put a torch to the eaves. If you’re over there by the front door, half-frozen and stiff, you’re no good to us.”

She stepped to the opposite side of the bed, near the room’s open interior.

“You sleep here,” she said, pointing to the center of the hay tick, between the wall where the girl lay and the outside edge. “Between the two of us. Where the heat is.”