Nielli was standing on top of the packed snowbank near the well, pointing with her mitten toward the eastern shoulder of the canyon.
“Look!” she cried. “Up by the dead cedar!”
Elias squinted against the intense, snow-blind light that reflected off the drifts.
A mile and a half away, where the red sandstone cliffs broke into a jagged shelf of rock known as the Spanish Gap, a thin, sharp pencil of blue-gray smoke was rising straight into the frozen air.
It was not the lazy, drifting haze of a prospector’s camp, nor was it the thick, soot-laden smoke of an oak fire. It was cedar smoke, fed with green needles and wet snow, pushed upward in sharp, rhythmic puffs that rose fifty feet before the upper air currents caught them and tore them into ribbons.
One. Two. Three.
The smoke stopped, cut off by a blanket or a piece of canvas held over the fire pit, then rose again in two long, trailing fingers that curled toward the south.
“A signal,” Elias muttered, his jaw tightening into iron.
“They’re not at the crossing,” Aiona said, coming up beside him, her face shadowed by the hood of her buffalo coat. “The crossing is four miles south of the gap. That fire is on the high bench, right above our spring.”
“They’re boxing the draw,” Elias said, his mind instantly laying out the military topography of the canyon. “Vance left three men at the gap before the storm hit. They rode the high rim while the snow was falling to keep from leaving tracks in the valley bottom. From that ledge, a man with a good glass can see every move we make between the cabin and the corral.”
“Why don’t they shoot?” Nielli asked, her teeth chattering beneath her woolen muffler.
“Range is too long,” Elias explained, his gray eyes fixed on the distant ridge. “Even with a Sharps buffalo gun, it’s eight hundred yards down through cross-drafts. They’re not there to snipe. They’re there to tell the main party when the drift is packed hard enough to carry horses.”
He turned around, surveying the homestead with a cold, professional eye.
The heavy snowfall had given them an illusion of safety, but it had also turned the cabin into a trap. If Vance brought six or eight men down through the timber on snowshoes or lead-horses while the drifts blocked the valley road, the homesteaders would be pinned against the rear rock wall of the canyon with no line of retreat. The springhouse would be cut off within ten minutes; the barn, thirty yards from the house, would be indefensible once the outlaws reached the dry creek bed.
“We need water,” Elias said, his tone instantly shifting into the clipped cadence of an officer issuing orders under fire. “Every vessel we have. Pails, tubs, the iron wash-boiler, the lard cans. If they get a fire-arrow onto the cedar shakes while the well is frozen, we’re done.”
“I’ll haul from the pump,” Nielli said, reaching for the two wooden pails.
“No,” Elias stopped her, his voice firm. “You stay on the porch. You keep the Winchester with you. If you see a flash of red or black in the timber along the rim, you put a round into the rocks five feet below it. Don't worry about hitting them; just let them know their perch isn't private.”
He looked at Aiona. “Get the axes. We’re going to the creek.”
“The creek?” she asked, startled. “You said the ice was dangerous.”
“It is,” Elias said, pulling his gloves tight over his fingers. “Which is why we’re going to cut the beaver dam.”
Aiona stared at him for a second, then a sudden, fierce comprehension flashed in her dark eyes. “The lower flat!”
“The lower flat,” Elias nodded. “If we break the breast of that dam, three feet of backwater will flood the willow bottom between here and the narrows. In this freeze, it’ll turn into a half-mile sheet of black ice covered in two inches of slush. A horse can’t walk on it, and a man on foot will break through the crust into eighteen inches of freezing mud. It closes their only avenue for a mounted rush.”
“It’ll drown the hay meadow,” she said quietly.
Elias met her gaze, unyielding. “Hay grows back in the spring, Aiona. Dead people don't.”
She did not argue. She dropped the pitchfork, turned toward the lean-to, and came back with two heavy double-bitted felling axes and a five-foot iron pry-bar.
“Let’s go,” she said.
The trek down to the creek bottom was brutal.
The snow in the draw had drifted four feet deep in the lee of the rose hips, and Elias had to break trail, using his broad shoulders and heavy boots to plow a furrow through the crust while Aiona followed in his tracks, carrying the iron bar. The mountain air burned their lungs like swallowed fire; every breath came out in a ragged gasp that froze into white crystals on their coat collars.