There was no discussion about it. The frontier had stripped away the delicate shame of the eastern cities as easily as the winter wind stripped the yellow leaves from the cottonwoods.
Nielli slept against the spruce wall, her small feet tucked between Elias’s calves for warmth, while Aiona lay along his left side, her head resting on his shoulder, her arm thrown across his chest as if she had slept there for twenty years. In the dark hours before dawn, when the frost crept two feet up the inside of the door logs, Elias would wake to find her breath warm against his throat, her fingers curled tight into the fabric of his flannel shirt.
He did not pull away. The terrifying novelty of her touch had softened into a deep, heavy gravity that seemed to anchor him to the floorboards. When she stirred in her sleep, murmuring half-formed words about seed corn and broken traces, his arm would tighten around her shoulders by instinct, holding her against the draft until her breathing leveled out again.
On the morning of the sixth day, the silence was broken by the sound of a bell.
It was not a church bell—there was no steeple within sixty miles—but the high, clear ting-ting of an iron mule bell, carrying down through the thin mountain air from the northern ridge.
Elias was at the firing port within three seconds, the Springfield carbine resting cold against his cheek.
Through the two-inch aperture, he saw a solitary rider descending the snow-choked trail from the upper pass. The horse was a massive, roman-nosed draft cross, its shaggy legs picking their way through the four-foot drifts with the slow, ponderous certainty of an ox. The rider was bundled in a mountain man’s coat of wolf skins, a long capote hood pulled over his ears, with an iron-rimmed pack saddle trailing behind on a lead line.
“Aiona,” Elias called, his eye never leaving the iron sights. “Look here.”
Aiona came to the second port, the ten-gauge shotgun held loosely in her hands. She squinted through the hole, then let out a long, whistling breath through her teeth.
“Henry,” she said, her voice dropping with immense relief. “It’s Henry Cole.”
“The marshal?” Elias asked, not lowering the carbine.
“He rides that big roan cross,” she said. “He’s the only man in the territory stupid enough to cross the pass after November.”
Elias stepped to the door, lifted the heavy oak bar, and pushed the timber wide.
The cold air rushed in like a wall of water, but Elias ignored it. He stood on the porch, his hand resting light on his hip, watching the rider plow through the last drift near the chicken coop.
The horse stopped ten feet from the porch rail, its massive chest heaving, white icicles hanging six inches from its nostrils. The rider pushed back the wolfskin hood, revealing a weathered, leathery face framed by an enormous beard that was frozen solid into a mass of gray wire. A pair of sharp, pale blue eyes looked out from beneath bushy, frost-crusted brows, taking in Elias, the carbine, the reinforced shutters, and the newly set fence line in a single, comprehensive sweep.
“You’re standing on the wrong side of the door for a man with three warrants out of the Dakotas, Kane,” the marshal rumbled, his voice like river gravel rolling in a tin bucket.
Elias did not flinch. “Those warrants were quashed in sixty-eight, Cole. Judge Carter signed the paper in Laramie.”
“I know he did,” Cole said, swinging a massive leg over the cantle and dropping into the snow with a heavy crunch. “I was the man who carried the paper from the railhead. Though if I’d known you were going to turn into a carpenter, I might have let the sheriff in Deadwood have you.”
He turned, spat a stream of black tobacco juice into the virgin snow, and looked toward the cabin door as Aiona stepped onto the porch.
“Morning, Aiona,” the old lawman said, touching the frost-stiffened brim of his hat. “Saw your beaver pond from the ridge. Looked like somebody blew the bottom out with twenty pounds of blasting powder.”
“Elias used an iron bar,” she said, stepping down to take the lead line of the pack mule. “Come inside, Henry, before your whiskers snap off in the wind.”
The marshal stamped his boots on the porch planks, sending chunks of gray ice flying, and ducked his six-foot-two frame through the low doorway.
The cabin seemed to shrink around him. He shed his wolfskin coat with a series of groans and curses, revealing a worn broadcloth coat with a tarnished silver star pinned over the pocket, and two heavy Colt revolvers carried in open-top civilian holsters.
Nielli immediately set a tin mug of boiling coffee into his gloved hands. The old man took it, closed his eyes, and inhaled the steam with an expression that approached religious ecstasy.
“God bless women who know how to roast chicory,” he muttered. He took a long, scalding gulp, then sank his bulk onto the heavy pine bench by the hearth.