Caleb’s jaw tightened as the full horror of the conspiracy crystallized in his mind. “Vale couldn't buy the spring because it was locked in a trust. So he had to make the trustees disappear one by one.”
“Yes,” Clara said grimly. “He drove out the Mexican families with night riders. He starved out the Germans by cutting their surface ditches. Then my father disappeared into the canyon. And your father...”
“My father fenced it off,” Caleb finished, the agonizing pieces finally locking together. “He couldn't fight Vale alone. The county courts were bought, the territorial marshals were a hundred miles away, and he had a wife and a young boy to protect. He fenced off the spring to make Vale think he had conceded the ground. He hid the original trust deed in that cave, hoping that one day...”
“Hoping that you would be man enough to read it,” Clara said, looking straight into his soul.
From the southern road, the sound of an iron carriage wheel rattling against stone broke their reverie.
Caleb stood up, reaching for his Winchester with his bandaged hands. Through the cottonwoods, a black, enclosed doctor’s buggy came trotting toward the yard, followed by four mounted men with rifles resting across their saddles.
Caleb levered a cartridge into the chamber, ignoring the fiery pain in his palms. “Vale,” he muttered. “The bastard didn't even wait for his forty-eight hours.”
CHAPTER 7: THE KING OF RED HOLLOW
The carriage halted fifty paces from the porch, right at the edge of the blackened earth where the grass fire had died. The mounted guards fanned out into a semicircle, their Winchester carbines resting across their saddle horns in an open, insolent display of lethal force. They were not common drovers; these were hired range regulators from Lincoln County—hard-eyed men with flat, dead stares who had killed men for twenty dollars a month and trail rations.
The door of the black buggy swung open, and an elderly man stepped down into the dust with deliberate, measured elegance.
Gideon Vale did not look like a butcher. He wore an expensive three-piece suit of charcoal broadcloth, an immaculate white linen shirt with a silk cravat pinned by a pearl stickpin, and hand-tooled calfskin boots polished to a mirror shine. His silver hair was neatly trimmed beneath a wide-brimmed beaver hat, and he carried an ebony cane topped with a heavy silver wolf’s head. His skin was pale, sheltered from the desert sun by carriage curtains and bank vaults, but his eyes were the cold, pale blue of winter ice on a stagnant pond.
He surveyed the smoking ruins of the barn with an expression of polite, sorrowful regret.
“A terrible misfortune, Caleb,” Vale said, his voice cultured, resonant, and dripping with venomous sympathy. “A working rancher cannot afford such disasters in an arid country. A dry season, a sudden lightning strike, and thirty years of labor vanishes in smoke.”
“There wasn't any lightning today, Vale,” Caleb said, stepping forward until he stood ten paces from the old man. The Winchester remained leveled at Vale’s waistcoat. “Your dog, Jack Vance, brought the matches. And if you take one more step toward my porch, I’ll put a forty-four slug through that silk tie before your men can clear their scabbards.”
The four riders stiffened, their hands tightening on their rifles, but Vale simply raised his silver-topped cane, signaling them to hold. He smiled—a thin, bloodless stretching of the lips that did not touch his freezing eyes.
“You have your father’s temper, Caleb,” Vale remarked softly. “Nathaniel was always prone to dramatic gestures when he found himself backed into a corner. But temper does not pay taxes, nor does it rebuild timber frames. You have no barn. You have no hay for the winter. Your well water is turning to brine. In two days, the county sheriff will execute a tax sale on this property. You are a pauper standing on dry dirt, boy.”
“He is not standing alone,” Clara’s voice rang out.
She stepped out from the shadow of the cottonwood tree, walking to Caleb’s side. She had washed the ash from her face; her burnished copper skin glowed in the afternoon light, and her two raven braids fell straight over her shoulders. Around her neck, the silver medallion rested like a shield of polished sun.
Vale’s cold smile vanished the instant his eyes locked onto that silver disk.
For a fraction of a second, something resembling raw, naked terror flickered across the old man’s pale features. His hand tightened around the head of his cane until his knuckles turned as white as tallow.
“You,” Vale whispered, his voice losing its cultured polish. “The Whitaker girl.”
“Clara Whitaker,” she said, her voice striking the courtyard like a hammer on an anvil. “Daughter of Samuel Whitaker. True trustee of the Red Hollow Basin under the Sovereign Covenant of eighteen sixty-seven.”
One of the mounted gunmen leaned down toward Vale, his voice low and tense. “Mr. Vale, you want us to drop these two right here? We can bury ‘em in the burn and say the fire took ‘em.”
“Quiet, you fool!” Vale snapped, his eyes never leaving Clara’s face. He stepped closer, leaning heavily on his cane, his chest heaving with shallow breaths. “Samuel Whitaker died in Mexico eighteen years ago. He was a shiftless drunk who abandoned his claims and ran south to escape his debts.”
Clara reached into the fold of her cloak, pulled out the certified Community Covenant, and held it aloft. The heavy wax seal caught the sun.
“My father did not go to Mexico,” she declared, her words carrying across the yard to every mounted man. “He went into the limestone cavern beneath the northern ridge with Nathaniel Morgan. They sealed the underflow against you. They wrote your crimes into the stone with cold chisels. And before you murdered my father on the road to the land office, he placed the original title into the community trust.”