And from down in the frozen narrows, carrying through the dead, still air of the canyon, came the dull, heavy clatter of iron wagon tires striking the boulders of the ford.
The wagon came around the bend of the red bluffs like a hearse rolling through a graveyard.
It was a heavy, high-sided Studebaker freight wagon, its oak sideboards streaked with gray alkali dust and salted ice. Four massive draft mules, their nostrils crusted with icicles, hauled the rig through the snow-choked ruts, their iron shoes throwing up clods of frozen gravel. Behind the wagon rode eight men, their sheepskin collars turned up against their ears, their Winchesters carried across their pommels in heavy pommel boots.
At their head rode Vance.
He had bound his swollen jaw with a strip of red flannel beneath his wide-brimmed hat, the white line of his scar standing out against his inflamed skin like a streak of lye. His eyes were small, bloodshot, and rimmed with yellow rheum, darting with a feral, manic intensity over the white meadow.
Beside him rode a small, frail man in a black broadcloth city overcoat that looked laughably inadequate for the territory. The man was shivering violently, his knees drawn up toward his horse's withers, clutching a brass surveyor’s transit in his lap as though it were an infant.
Elias did not wait on the porch.
He stood forty yards out in the snow, ten paces behind the newly strung wire of the north line. He wore his faded cavalry overcoat, the cape buttoned across his throat, his hands resting naturally on the short barrel of the Springfield carbine that hung horizontally across his hips.
To his right, thirty feet away, Marshal Henry Cole sat on the frozen tongue of an overturned buckboard, his heavy double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun lying across his knees like a dead log, an unlit cigar clamped between his yellow teeth.
Aiona and Nielli stood behind the center crib. They did not hide behind the firing slits this time. Aiona held her father's long double-barrel shotgun, the hammers resting at full cock, her wool shawl pinned across her breast with an iron nail. Nielli leaned her Winchester across the top log of the rock crib, her small, freckled cheek pressed against the walnut stock, her eye locked dead on the lead mule’s forehead.
The freight wagon creaked to a halt thirty paces short of the wire.
The steam from the twelve horses and mules rose into the leaden sky, forming a thick, sulfurous fog that smelled of wet horse dung and cold iron.
Vance reined his mount forward three steps. His horse stepped into the fresh drag marks of the logging sledge, snorted at the scent of the warm lard on the wire, and backed away, tossing its head against the curb bit.
The outlaw leader’s eyes traveled down the line of the fence.
He saw the stone-filled cedar cribs, massive and immovable as natural outcrops. He saw the four strands of heavy galvanized wire stretched tight as fiddle strings, running clear to the vertical face of the red bluff. And he saw the iron staples driven two inches deep into solid heartwood, their heads gleaming beneath the grease.
His good hand tightened on his reins until the leather groaned.
"You've been busy, Kane," Vance rasped, his voice whistling through his damaged teeth.
"You're late," Elias said.
The small man in the black city coat scrambled off his horse, his boots slipping in the frozen ruts. He pulled a brass-bound surveyor’s chain and a leather-bound folio from beneath his coat, his teeth chattering so loudly they could be heard across the thirty yards of snow.
"I... I am the deputy territorial surveyor for the County of Sweetwater," the little man squeaked, waving a sheet of blue legal parchment toward the sky. "Under Section Four of the Territorial Enclosure Act, I am authorized to enter upon any unsurveyed lands of the public domain to establish the winter grazing corridors for the District Stock Association!"
"Keep your boots where they are, mister," Marshal Cole rumbled from his buckboard.
The surveyor froze, one foot lifted in the air, his eyes widening as he recognized the enormous figure wrapped in wolfskins. "M-Marshal Cole? What are you doing out here? The court issued the grazing directive in Laramie last Friday!"
"The court issued a directive on open range, Thaddeus," Cole said, not moving a muscle, his cigar rolling from one corner of his mouth to the other. "This ain't open range. This is the patented homestead of the late Thomas Vance Miller, transferred by recorded deed to his lawful heir, Aiona Miller."
Vance gave a short, vicious bark of laughter that ended in a wet cough. "Patented? The patent only covers the bottom eighty! The north four hundred is unperfected school land! Under the new statute, if it isn't bounded by a lawful four-strand enclosure by noon on December first, the claim lapses!"
Vance leaned forward, his quirt pointing at the surveyor’s watch. "It’s ten minutes past twelve, Cole! The line wasn't filed! We have three hundred head of steers coming up through the narrows right now to drop onto this water!"
"Look at the wire, Vance," Elias said.