Vance spat blood onto the rock, his eyes wild. “You think you’re smart, Morgan? You think this cave saves your dirt? While you were playing mountain goat up here, Vale’s boys were already riding into your home pasture. Look out the mouth of this cave! Look at the sky!”
A cold fist clamped around Caleb’s heart. He motioned for Clara to keep the rifle on Vance while he scrambled back to the cavern entrance.
He stepped out into the blinding afternoon sun and looked south toward the Morgan valley.
A massive, greasy pillar of black smoke was billowing into the pale blue sky from the cottonwood grove four miles away. The ranch house was burning.
“My God,” Caleb whispered. “The homestead.”
Clara appeared beside him, her face set in lines of grim, terrible resolve. She did not weep. She did not curse. She reached into her boot, pulled out a rawhide pigging string, and stepped back into the cavern. Two minutes later, both gunmen were bound hand and foot, tied back-to-back to a massive limestone stalagmite with their own gun belts and wire.
“They will not die here,” she said calmly as she walked back into the sunlight. “The water is near, and someone will find them in two days. But your home will be ash in an hour if we do not ride.”
They leaped onto Barnaby and the buckskin mare, spurring the horses down the rocky arroyo with reckless, breakneck speed. Shingle and shale sprayed from beneath their iron hooves as the horses navigated the treacherous descent, leaping over fallen logs and tearing through mesquite thickets.
As they cleared the mouth of the canyon and broke onto the open prairie, the horror became fully visible.
The dry prairie grass of the north pasture had been set ablaze, creating a sweeping wall of orange fire that crackled and roared like a freight train, pushed south by the rising afternoon wind. But it was not the house that was burning—the arsonists had struck the stone barn. The dried prairie hay stored in the upper loft was fully engulfed, shooting flames thirty feet into the air and showering the corrals with burning embers.
And from inside the inferno came the terrified, frantic screams of horses trapped in their stalls.
“The mares!” Caleb shouted over the roar of the wind, his eyes wild with terror. “The broodmares are in the lower pens!”
He didn't wait for Clara. He kicked Barnaby into a flat-out run, racing straight toward the blazing yard.
Heat washed over him like a furnace door swinging wide. The cedar shingles of the barn roof were collapsing inward in showers of sparks. Caleb swung off Barnaby’s back before the stallion had fully stopped, hit the dirt in a roll, and lunged toward the heavy timber double doors of the barn.
The oak wood was blistering, smoking with resin. He grabbed the iron latch with his bare hands, ignoring the searing pain as the metal burned his palms, and threw his entire weight against the timber.
The doors groaned and swung wide.
A wall of thick, choking black smoke rolled over him, blinding him and searing his lungs. Inside, three horses were kicking frantically against their stall gates, their eyes rolling white with madness.
Caleb pulled his bandana over his face, lowered his head, and charged straight into the burning heart of the Morgan Ranch.
The interior of the barn was a roaring furnace of yellow flame and blinding, suffocating pine smoke. High above, the loft joists were already groaning under the weight of several tons of burning prairie hay, raining down cascades of red cinders that sizzled as they hit Caleb’s wool coat. The heat was an invisible wall, searing his eyebrows and making every breath feel like inhaling crushed glass.
“Barnaby, out!” Caleb roared, slapping the stallion’s rump toward the open yard before lunging down the center breezeway.
In the second stall, a three-year-old sorrel filly was throwing herself violently against the oak slats, her neck lathered in white, terrified foam. Her screams were piercing, shrill, and unearthly. Caleb reached the iron drop-latch, but the heat had expanded the metal pin inside its sleeve. He cursed, planted his boot against the frame, and heaved with his entire body. The pin snapped free with a dull crack. The gate flew open, and the filly bolted past him, knocking him against the opposite wall before tearing through the entrance into the dusty yard.
Above him, a main rafter surrendered to the fire. A massive timber, wrapped in tongues of orange flame, snapped like a rifle shot and came crashing down across the aisle, showering Caleb in embers and cutting off his retreat.
Through the curtain of smoke, a figure moved.
Clara came through the fire. She had soaked her wool traveling cloak in the water trough outside and draped it over her head and shoulders like a cowl. In her hand, she carried a heavy iron hay fork. Without speaking a word, she drove the tines beneath the burning crossbeam, levering the blazing wood upward just enough for Caleb to roll underneath.
“The chestnut mare!” she shouted, her voice cutting sharp through the thunder of the flames. “The back stall! The door is jammed from the outside!”
Caleb scrambled to his feet. His hands were blistered raw, skin peeling from his palms where he had touched the door latch, but adrenaline drowned out the agony. They fought their way to the rear box stall where his mother’s favorite mare—a gentle, aging chestnut that had carried her through her final illness—was collapsed on her knees, coughing convulsively from the smoke.
The oak door was held fast by a warped cedar post that had fallen across the runner. Clara set the hay fork against it, using her shoulder as a fulcrum, while Caleb drove his shoulder into the wood. With a desperate heave, bone and timber strained together. The obstruction splintered. The stall door gave way.