You're shot, she said.
Grazed, Elias said through his teeth. "It bleeds like a river, but I'm standing. Keep throwing water. The barn can be saved if we keep the fire from the roof."
Mara nodded and went back to the buckets, and Elias went back to the blanket, beating at the flames with his good arm, blood running down his sleeve and mixing with the water on the ground, and the fire fought them, and they fought it back, bucket by bucket, blanket by blanket, until the flames at the hay store began to die down and the roof, which had caught in one corner, was beaten out by June standing on a ladder with a wet sack, her face black with smoke, her eyes bright and furious.
It was Walt Grady who ended it. He had stood all this time at the edge of the firelight, his torch still in his hand, unlit or lit and held low, watching the sisters fight for their barn and watching Elias bleed and keep working, and something in him broke. He dropped his torch to the ground and stamped it out, and he stepped forward into the light, and his voice, when it came, was loud and shaking and clear.
Enough! he shouted. "Enough of this! I won't burn a woman's barn for Kline! Kline ordered this! Kline ordered the fence broken, and the horses driven, and the creek dammed, and this fire tonight! He told us the sisters couldn't hold the valley, and he told us to make them leave! I won't do it anymore! I won't!"
Jeb Carver stared at him, his rifle half-raised, his face twisted with fury, and for a moment it seemed he would shoot Walt where he stood. Then he saw Mara with her rifle leveled at him from the cabin door, and June beside her with a bucket still in her hands and fire in her eyes, and Elias standing in the yard with blood on his shirt and his revolver in his good hand, steady as stone, and Deputy Cole came running down the trail with his own rifle shouting for everyone to hold, and Jeb lowered his rifle, spat into the dirt, and backed away into the dark, and his men went with him, melting into the night the way bad men always do when the light finds them.
The fire died down to embers. The barn stood, blackened on one side, but standing, and the horses stood in the far corral, blowing and trembling, but alive. Walt Grady stood in the yard with his hands empty, and he looked at Elias, and at Mara, and at June, and he said, very quietly, "I'm sorry. I'll tell the sheriff everything. Every word of it."
Elias, his shoulder bound and throbbing, looked at the barn, and at the sisters, and at the man who had just chosen truth over his master, and he thought that fire shows who everyone really is: it shows the arsonist, and it shows the ones who run with water, and it shows the man who drops his torch and tells the truth. He put his good arm around Mara, and Mara put her arm around June, and June put her hand on Elias's uninjured shoulder, gently, as if he were something precious and breakable, and the three of them stood in the smoke and the wet ash of their yard, alive, together, while the first gray light of dawn began to show over the eastern hills, and the valley, scorched but not taken, waited for the law to come.
Mara bound Elias's shoulder again, properly this time, with clean cloth and a tighter knot, while June held the lamp close and Walt Grady fetched water without being asked, his hands still shaking from what he had said aloud. The blood had slowed, but Elias's shirt was soaked through, and his face was gray under the smoke, and Mara made him sit on the cabin steps and drink water, and she scolded him, gently, for trying to stand again too soon. "You stay sitting," she said, "until Dr. Marsh or the sheriff says otherwise. You've done enough standing for one night." Elias obeyed, because he had learned, at last, that obeying Mara was not surrender but sense. June went to the horses in the far corral and checked each of them by lamplight, running her hands over their legs and flanks, talking to them until their trembling eased, and when she came back her face was streaked with ash and her eyes were clear. "They're all sound," she reported. "Frightened, but sound. The barn held. We held." Walt stood apart, watching them, a man who had crossed a line in the night and did not yet know where he stood on the other side of it. "I'll stay until Greer comes," he said. "I'll tell him everything, about the fence, and the horses, and the dam, and tonight. Kline told us you were stubborn women who'd fold if we pushed hard enough. He was wrong. You don't fold. You fight fire with water and you keep standing." Elias looked up at him, and nodded, once, the nod of one man to another who has finally told the truth. The embers in the yard hissed as the last buckets of water found them, and the smoke thinned, and the stars came back over the pines, and the household sat together on the cabin steps in the gray before dawn, wounded and weary and unbroken, waiting for the law, and for the morning, and for whatever came next.