“You didn't come over the pass just to drink our coffee, Henry,” Aiona said, setting a plate of cold soda bread on the table.
Cole’s leathery face sobered. He set the cup down on the rough wood, his pale eyes flicking from Aiona to Elias, who remained standing near the door, his back to the wall, his arms folded across his chest.
“Vance is at the stage crossing,” Cole said, getting straight to the meat of the matter. “He’s got nine men with him now. Two deserters from Fort Steele, a pair of horse thieves from the Basin, and five of the old gang.”
“We saw his signal on the gap yesterday,” Elias said.
“He’s not signaling for fun,” Cole said. “The territorial legislature passed the grazing act three weeks ago in Cheyenne. Any land not enclosed by a lawful fence by the first of December reverts to the public domain for winter range.”
Aiona went rigid. Her hand stopped halfway to the bread plate. “The first of December? That’s next Tuesday!”
“That’s why he’s sitting on the crossing,” Cole said grimly. “He knows the law better than the lawyers do. He doesn't have to burn you out, Aiona. He just has to keep you from closing that north boundary line until Tuesday noon. Once the deadline passes, his stock association can drive five hundred head of steers right across your bottomland, and there isn't a judge in the territory who’ll issue a trespass warrant.”
Elias leaned forward, his eyes narrowing into cold slits. “What constitutes a lawful fence under the new act?”
Cole reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a folded piece of paper stained with horse grease, and laid it on the table.
“Four strands of galvanized wire or three rails of split timber,” the marshal recited from memory. “Sunk on cedar or locust posts not less than eight feet apart, with corner cribs braced against cattle pressure. Height not less than four and a half feet from the sod.”
He looked up at Elias.
“You’ve got the south line tight, and your creek flood took care of the narrows,” Cole said. “How much of the north line is open?”
Elias didn't need to look at a map. The numbers were burned into the back of his mind like a brand.
“Six hundred yards,” he said. “From the sheep rock to the red bluff.”
“Can you close it by Tuesday?”
Elias looked at the window, where the frost was creeping across the glass in jagged, geometric leaves.
“The ground is frozen fourteen inches deep,” he said. “A spade won't touch it. We’d have to blast the post holes with black powder or build timber cribs on top of the rock.”
“And you have forty-eight hours,” Cole added, picking up his coffee cup again. “Because Vance has five wagons of wire and sixty head of trail stock waiting at the mouth of the canyon. On Tuesday morning at eight o’clock, he’s coming up that road with the county surveyor and eight rifles behind him.”
Aiona looked at the paper on the table, her face pale as the snow outside, but her chin lifted with that terrifying, unyielding frontier fury.
“We have sixty cedar logs in the lean-to,” she said, her voice dropping into a low, deadly register. “And we have four kegs of blasting powder in the root cellar.”
She looked at Elias.
“Can we build the cribs?” she asked.
Elias looked at her for three seconds. He saw the cold, clear flame behind her eyes—the same flame that had kept her alive when her mother died in the wagon and her father rotted in the hill behind the house.
A slow, wolfish grin broke across his scarred face—the first real smile he had worn since he rode out of Virginia.
“We’ll build them,” Elias Kane said. “And if Vance brings his surveyor, he better bring a gravedigger too.”
The black powder blew the first rock shelf at two o’clock in the afternoon.
The explosion was a dull, hollow whump that shook the frozen ground for two hundred yards around the sheep rock. A gout of black earth, shattered limestone, and pulverized gray ice erupted into the freezing air, raining down through the bare branches of the alders with a sound like iron scrap.
Before the smoke could clear, Elias was in the pit.
He wore only his heavy wool flannel shirt, his sleeves rolled to the elbow despite the ten-degree chill, his canvas trousers stiff with red mud and frozen slush. He swung a twelve-pound sledgehammer in short, vicious arcs, smashing the remaining limestone ledges into football-sized chunks that Nielli hauled out of the hole with an iron garden rake.
Behind them, Aiona was driving the team.
The big gray gelding and the old dun mare were hitched together with a heavy logging chain to a sledge made of two split spruce logs. She hauled the rock from the blasting pits to the post line, her boots slipping on the glazed snow, her voice cracking as she leaned into the traces with the horses.
“Hup, Dan! Move, boy!”
The horses strained against the leather collars, their iron shoes throwing clods of frozen sod against the cross-timbers.