"And if Duncan asks where you have been?" Sam said.
"Tell him you have been counting cattle," Rosalind said. "It will be true enough to pass."
Sam rode out into the dark, and Ana stayed, because the school slate was still on the table, and because she had not yet shown Rosalind the plan for the schoolhouse, and because, if she was honest with herself, she did not want to ride home in the dark with Duncan Pryce somewhere between the ranch and the town. Rosalind made up a bed for her in the small room off the kitchen, the way she might have made it for a guest, and Ana lay down fully dressed, listening to the house settle, and to the wind in the cottonwoods, and to the far-off lowing of cattle that did not know anything at all about ledgers.
She woke to the smell of smoke.
At first she thought she was dreaming, because the smell came with a sound she had heard only in stories: a low, hungry roar, like wind through a chimney, and then shouting, and then the bell from the barn. She was on her feet before she knew she was awake, her dress still on, her shoes unlaced, and she ran to the kitchen door and threw it open, and the night outside was orange.
The hay barn was on fire.
It had started at the far end, where the hay was stacked highest and driest, and the flames were already eating up the side of the building in great, tearing sheets. Men were running from the bunkhouse with buckets, and Sam — Sam must have ridden back in the dark, or never left at all, she did not know — was shouting orders, and Rosalind was already out in the yard in her nightdress with a coat thrown over it, pointing, directing, her voice cutting through the noise the way it cut through everything.
"The horses first!" Rosalind shouted. "Get the horses out of the near barn before the wind turns! Ana — the well! Work the pump!"
Ana did not think. She ran to the well, and she took the pump handle in both hands, and she pumped until her arms screamed, while a line formed behind her, men and boys passing buckets hand to hand, water slopping over their boots, the line bending and reforming as the wind shifted. She had never fought a fire. She had only ever taught children to read about them, in books where the fire was always put out by the last page. This fire did not read books. It climbed the barn wall, it found the dry hay, it threw sparks into the air like a celebration, and for a terrible minute Ana was certain it would take the whole ranch — the barns, the house, the study with the iron box, and the tally books inside it.
Then she remembered the copies. The copies were at the depot, with Edith Marlow, who knew how to keep a thing safe. And the originals were in the iron box, and the iron box was in a stone-walled study, and the fire, for all its hunger, was eating hay, not stone. The thought steadied her hands on the pump, and she pumped, and the line held, and slowly, bucket by bucket, the men beat the flames back from the near barn, and from the fence, and from the house itself.
It was Sam who found the can. He found it in the grass behind the hay barn, after the roof had fallen in with a roar and a shower of sparks that made everyone step back, a tin can, still smelling of kerosene, with a rag stuffed in its mouth. He picked it up with a cloth, the way a man picks up something that might still bite, and he carried it to Rosalind, and he laid it on the ground between them, and the men who had been fighting the fire gathered around in a circle, their faces black with smoke, their shirts wet through, and looked at it.
"That is not an accident," Sam said. "Hay does not stack itself in a can."