Mara nodded slowly. She understood, as Elias had known she would, because she was a practical woman and practical women know the value of a paper kept. "Then we keep it," she said. "And we ride for Sheriff Greer."
They did not wait. Elias saddled Ranger and rode south to Cedar Hollow at a pace that ate the fourteen miles in good time, the paper folded carefully inside his coat, away from sweat and dust. The wagon road ran through dry hills and stands of pine, and the morning light turned the dust gold, and Elias thought, as he rode, about how different this ride was from every ride he had taken in ten years. He was not running away. He was riding toward help, and then riding back, and the difference felt like a new country opening inside him.
Sheriff Amos Greer was at his office, a slow-moving man with a fair face and eyes that missed very little. He read the paper twice, holding it up to the light, and then he laid it flat on his desk and tapped it with one finger.
This is Kline's work, or his men's, he said. "I know his hand, and I know Jeb Carver's, and this has Carver's hurry in it. I'll keep it. It's evidence, and I'll swear to where it came from and when." He looked up at Elias. "You did right not to tear it down. Most folks would have burned it in anger and lost the proof."
What will you do? Elias asked.
I'll post a deputy at the trail, Greer said. "Cole knows the ground, and he'll watch the mouth of the valley, day and night, in shifts. And I'll ride out myself tomorrow and speak to Kline, face to face, and tell him that the law is watching his ranch now, and that if a fire starts in that valley, I will come looking for the man who lit it, and I will not stop at the hired hands." He stood, and he was taller than his slow manner suggested. "You tell the sisters to hold their ground. They are not alone in this anymore. The county is not Kline's to hand out."
Elias rode home with the sheriff's words warm in his chest, and when he told Mara and June what Greer had said, Mara let out a breath she seemed to have been holding since the morning, and June said, "A deputy at the trail. Well. Let Kline try to sneak past that."
That evening, Deputy Cole arrived with his bedroll and his rifle, and he set up his camp where the trail narrowed between the rocky hills, where any man coming into the valley would have to pass him. He was young and earnest, and he took his post seriously, walking the trail at dusk with his rifle over his shoulder, and Mara sent him down bread and stew, because a man on watch should not go hungry. Elias walked the trail down to Cole's camp himself, to see the ground with his own eyes, and he showed the deputy where the path bent behind the rocks, where a rider could be heard long before he was seen, and where the best listening place was after dark, when sound carries up the valley like water finding its level. Cole listened carefully, and asked plain questions, and Elias liked him for it: a young man who knows he does not know everything is a safer watchman than an old man who thinks he does. "If anyone comes," Elias said, "don't try to stop them alone. Fire a shot to wake us, and fall back to the cabin. Your job is to warn, not to die." Cole nodded, and his face was solemn in the fading light, and Elias clapped him on the shoulder and walked back up the trail, thinking about how the valley had changed. Weeks ago, when he first rode in, the mouth of the valley had been an open wound, a broken fence and a banging gate, and anyone could have walked in. Now there was a deputy at the narrows, and a sheriff in Cedar Hollow holding a threatening paper in a drawer, and a household that had learned to stand together. Kline, in trying to frighten them into leaving, had instead given them the very thing that would hold him to account. A threat, written down, is a confession that does not know it is one. And the law, slow as it was, was now awake, and watching, and the valley, for the first time in weeks, felt less like a place under siege and more like a place defended.
Before dark, Mara took the paper's twin — for Elias had copied it out in his own careful hand before riding to town, so they would remember every word — and she folded it into the accounts book, between the pages for seed and nails, where it would keep until it was needed again. "There," she said, closing the book. "Let it sit there with the rest of the accounts. Kline owes us more than he knows, and one day the county will collect." June, who had been listening from the doorway, said, "I hope the sheriff tells Kline to his face that a deputy is watching his road. I hope it spoils his supper." Mara almost smiled. "It will spoil more than his supper, if Greer does his job. Men like Kline count on people being too frightened or too tired to write things down. We wrote it down." Elias walked the fence line one more time before dark, checking every post, and the evening air smelled of pine and cooling dust, and Ranger nickered softly from the corral when Elias passed, and the valley settled into night with a watchman at its mouth and a lamp burning in its cabin, and that, Elias thought, was what holding ground looked like: not a battle, but a lamp, and a man on a trail, and a paper kept safe in a book.