I will tell it all, Sheriff, Walt said. "Kline told us to burn the barn. He told us to make them afraid enough to leave. He said the valley was his by right and the sisters could not hold it, and that if the law ever came, we were to say it was an accident, a lantern knocked over. It was not an accident. I carried a torch. Jeb fired the hay. I dropped mine when I could not stand it anymore."
He said it plainly, without dressing it up, and his voice shook only once, when he said the word torch. Greer listened the way he always did, with his whole attention and without interrupting, and when Walt finished, Greer took out a small notebook and wrote it down in his slow, careful hand.
That is a statement, Greer said, "and it will stand."
What about Kline? Mara asked.
Greer looked east, toward the trail that led over the hills to the Bar K Ranch, six miles away.
He is gone from the ranch, Greer said. "My deputy rode there at first light, before I came here, and the house was empty and the corrals half-cleared. He has fled east. He will try for Dry Fork, I think, and the rail. He will try to sell what he stole and be gone before anyone can lay a hand on him."
Then he will not get far, Elias said. His shoulder throbbed, and he was suddenly tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. "A man running east with stolen horses leaves sign a child could follow."
Greer looked at Elias, and then at the bandage, and then at Mara, and something passed between the sheriff and Mara that Elias understood without being told: Elias was not riding anywhere that day.
I will follow him, Greer said. "That is my work. Yours is here."
After the sheriff rode out with Carver, the yard went quiet again — not the waiting quiet of the night before, but the quiet of aftermath, with work in it.
Walt Grady did not leave with them. He sat on the woodpile, his hat in his hands, and June brought him water and bread without a word. "I am sorry," he said to Mara. "It is a start," she said. "You told the truth when it cost you something. That counts here."
Elias stood in the yard as the sun climbed higher and burned the last of the smoke off the valley. The pines stood dark and steady above the cabin. Willow Creek ran cold and clear past the garden, untouched by the fire. The fence at the valley's mouth stood broken where the men had come through, and beyond it the grass stretched green and unburned toward the hills.
He thought of the night, of lying on his pallet between the sisters with his rifle within reach, of Mara taking his hand in the dark and not letting go until morning, and he thought of how far he had come from the man who left every town before dawn. He had stayed. He had bled in this yard. And the yard, for all its ash, was still theirs.
Mara took his good hand, her palm callused and warm. "Come inside," she said. "Let me bind that shoulder before you fall down in my yard and embarrass us both." Elias let her lead him in, and behind them the barn smoldered gently in the morning light.
The fever came on the second night, quiet and then all at once, the way a creek rises in a storm.
Elias had spent the day sitting in a chair by the cabin door with his shoulder bound tight, watching June and Mara clear the barn and sort what could be saved from what could not, and he had hated every minute of sitting still. He had tried to lift a bucket with his good arm and Mara had taken it from him without a word. He had tried to hold a plank steady while June nailed it, and his hand had shaken, and June had pretended not to notice, which was worse than noticing. By evening his skin was hot to the touch and his eyes were too bright, and when Mara pressed the back of her hand to his forehead she did not say anything at all, which told Elias more than any scolding would have.
You are going to bed, she said, "and you are going to stay there."
I am not an invalid, Elias said, but his voice sounded thin even to himself.
You are a man with a bullet graze that has gone angry, Mara said. "That is close enough."
June made broth, and the smell of it filled the cabin, rich and plain, and Elias drank it sitting up in Mara's bed because Mara had insisted and because he was too tired to argue about whose bed it was. The lamp burned low. Outside, the night was cold, and the first true chill of autumn pressed against the shutters. Inside, the fire crackled, and the sisters moved around him in the small, practiced ways of people who had nursed their father through his last winter and knew what to do with a fever: cool cloths, water in small sips, broth, quiet, and no fuss.
He dreamed that night of the river. It was the old dream, the one he had carried for ten years, of the rope going taut and then slack in his hands, of the water closing over Thomas's head, of his brother's voice saying, Let go. But this time the dream changed at the end. This time, when he woke with a start, sweating and breathing hard, Mara was there, not in the river but in the chair beside the bed, her hand on his good arm, her dark hair loose around her shoulders, and she said his name in a low, steady voice until the river let him go.