HE FIXED THEIR FENCE, BUT HIS ONE CONDITION CHANGED EVERYTHING

“A man who doesn't look back doesn't need to sleep with his revolver where his hand can fall on it,” she said, her gaze resting on the holstered Colt on the chair. “You ride a horse that’s worth three hundred dollars in gold, but your saddle is held together with rawhide wraps. You don’t drink, you don’t go into town for tobacco, and you look at an open pasture like you’re waiting for artillery to open up on the tree line.”

Elias set his spoon down with a soft click against the wood. The quiet inside him deepened, that cold, hollow space that usually kept the rest of the world at arm’s length.

“A man learns what he learns,” he said.

“I know what men look like when they’ve lost their people,” Aiona continued, her voice remarkably soft, stripped of any judgment. “My father had that same gray look around his eyes after my mother died on the Oregon trail. He looked like he was walking through a house where all the lamps had been put out, just waiting for the roof to fall in so he wouldn't have to keep the floor swept.”

Elias felt something tighten in his chest, a sudden, suffocating pressure that made the warm air of the cabin feel thin.

“Your father stayed,” he said.

“He stayed because he had Nielli and me,” she said. “He had something that needed him to stand between them and the winter. You don’t have anything out on that trail, Elias. Just gravel and dust.”

He wanted to tell her she was wrong. He wanted to tell her that out on the trail, a man was answerable only to the sunrise and his own conscience. Out there, if you failed, you were the only one who didn't wake up in the morning. You didn't have to watch twelve-year-old boys choke on their own blood while their mothers screamed five hundred miles away. You didn't have to look at women with calloused hands trying to hold onto a quarter-section of dirt with an empty ten-gauge shotgun.

He looked down at his bowl. The venison was tender, cooked down with dried carrots and wild thyme. It was the best thing he had tasted in five years.

“Vance won’t come tomorrow,” he said, deliberately shifting the ground beneath them. “Scouts will take half a day to ride back to the crossing. He’ll gather his hands, talk them into thinking there’s an easy mark up here, and come up the draw when the wind shifts to the east.”

Aiona watched him for a long moment, seeing the wall he had thrown up between them, as clearly as if he had laid another row of cedar posts across the table. But she didn't push. She simply picked up her bread and dipped it into the broth.

“How long do we have?” she asked.

“Two days,” Elias said. “Maybe three if the rain turns to sleet in the pass.”

“What do we do?” Nielli asked, her eyes round as tin plates.

Elias looked at the heavy timber shutters covering the south windows, then at the sturdy oak door with its two iron drop-brackets.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “we cut firing slits in the shutters. And we bring the extra ammunition up from the cellar.”

The sleet came with the third dawn, ticking against the cabin logs like dry rice thrown against a wall.

It was not a heavy storm, but a mean, driving squall that blew out of the northwest, riming the tall pines in silver and turning the dead grass into a slick, treacherous mat. Elias spent the morning in the lean-to with an auger and a drawknife, working by the dim, gray light that filtered through the doorway.

He took the thick oak shutters down one by one. Using the two-inch auger, he bored two clean holes through each slab of wood at chest height, angling the bores outward so a rifleman inside could cover a forty-degree arc of the yard without exposing more than the bridge of his nose to incoming fire. He smoothed the edges with the drawknife, the sweet, tannic smell of white oak curling off the blade in long ribbons.

Nielli sat on an overturned nail keg near his elbow, wiping each brass cartridge from his armorer’s roll with a dry rag to remove the green verdigris that grew on the metal in damp weather.

“These bullets are heavy,” she said, balancing a .45-70 government round on her palm. “Much heavier than father’s squirrel gun.”

“That’s forty grains of powder behind four hundred grains of lead,” Elias told her, not breaking the rhythm of his shavings. “It’ll go through an elk at two hundred yards. It’ll go through a pine post if you hit it square.”

“Will it kill a man?”

Elias stopped the drawknife. The wood shavings hung from the edge of the blade, trembling in the draft. He looked down at the girl’s small, serious face, her pale skin chapped red by the cold wind.

“That’s what it was made for, Nielli,” he said softly. “It wasn't made for elk.”

She looked down at the cartridge in her hand, her thumb tracing the rim where the copper primer was set into the brass. “Did you use these in the war?”