He did not draw his sidearm. He stepped over the wire, planted his heavy boot squarely on the small of Vance’s back, driving the man’s face down into the frozen horse dung of the ruts, and pressed the cold steel muzzle of the Springfield carbine against the base of the outlaw's skull.
"Don't move," Elias whispered, his voice steady as granite. "Don't even twitch that scar."
Behind them, Marshal Cole walked forward, his shotgun leveled at the eight men on the horses.
"Drop the gunbelts into the wagon bed, boys," the old marshal said, his tone conversational and cold. "Every last one of them. Do it slow, with two fingers, or I'll blow that team of mules straight into the middle of next week."
One by one, the heavy leather belts dropped into the oak box with dull, leather-and-iron thuds.
The war for the canyon was over.
The iron shackles rattled with a cold, hollow sound in the small cabin.
Vance sat on the three-legged milking stool by the woodbox, his hands cuffed behind his back with heavy, hand-forged steel irons that Marshal Cole had taken from his pack saddle. His sheepskin coat had been stripped away, revealing a greasy woolen shirt torn at the shoulder where he had struck the frozen road. A dark, swollen knot had formed over his left temple where Nielli's horse-fall had driven his head against an iron wagon tire, the dried blood crusting in the white furrows of his old scar.
The seven hired hands and the deputy surveyor had been disarmed, stripped of their saddles, and locked inside the timber barn under the guard of Marshal Cole’s two deputies who had ridden up from the creek trail an hour after the arrest. The outlaws were sitting in the dry hay, huddled around a lantern, chewing dried venison and waiting for the sunrise that would see them marched south toward the territorial jail in Rawlins.
Inside the cabin, the hearth fire roared, casting long, dancing red shadows across the cedar logs.
Aiona stood at the pine table, carefully cleaning the grease from the surveyor's blue parchment with a scrap of dry linen. Her face was pale, the lines of exhaustion etched deep around her eyes, but her hands were steady, their movements calm and deliberate.
Elias stood by the dry sink, unbuttoning his blood-stiffened canvas coat. The bandage on his wrist had soaked through with a dark, plum-colored circle where the barbed wire had torn his flesh, but the pepper had done its work; the bleeding had stopped, leaving only a fierce, throbbing heat that radiated up his forearm.
Nielli was sitting on the edge of the cedar bedstead, her small hands wrapped around a tin mug of warm broth, staring at the floor. She had not spoken a word since she pulled the trigger that brought Vance’s horse down in the drift. Her rifle lay across the blankets beside her, clean and unloaded, its brass receiver catching the red light of the coals.
Marshal Cole leaned his massive shoulders against the heavy chimney breast, an iron poker in his hand, idly shifting the glowing birch knots.
"The circuit judge sits in Green River next month, Vance," Cole said, his voice flat and devoid of malice. "Judge William Henry. You remember William, don't you? He's the one who sentenced your brother to seven years at hard labor in the territorial quarry for that payroll job at Fort Bridger."
Vance did not raise his head. He stared down at his scuffed boots, his lips pulled back over his teeth in a silent, hateful sneer.
"Henry won't hang me for a horse-killing," the outlaw muttered, his words slurring through his broken jaw. "And he won't hang me for a survey dispute. My cousin sits on the territorial cattle commission in Cheyenne. He'll have a writ of habeas corpus out of the capital before you can get these irons off my wrists."
"Your cousin was arrested three days ago in Laramie, Arthur," Cole said quietly.
Vance's head snapped up. His bloodshot eyes locked onto the old lawman's face, searching for a lie, searching for a crack in the granite wall of the marshal's expression. He found none.
"The grand jury brought down seven indictments for land fraud and bribery of the territorial registry," Cole continued, turning the poker in the embers. "Seems your cousin had thirty-five forged patents registered in the names of dead miners from the Cariboo rush. Thomas Vance Miller’s name was on three of them."
Aiona stopped wiping the paper. She looked up, her dark eyes flashing with a sudden, terrible light.
"He tried to steal my father's name?" she whispered.
"He did steal it, Aiona," Cole said, turning toward her with a gentle, heavy sorrow in his eyes. "He filed a deed of sale dated two weeks after your father died of the fever. Claimed Thomas sold the whole four hundred acres of this bottomland for two hundred dollars in gold and twenty head of Mexican steers. That’s what Vance was carrying in that saddlebag: a forged deed from a dead man."
Vance spat onto the floorboards. The saliva was pink with blood.