Caleb stripped off his smoking denim shirt, wrapped it securely around the mare’s eyes to blind her to the terror of the flames, and seized her halter. “Come on, girl! Up! Up on your feet!”
The mare stumbled upward, leaning heavily against Caleb’s shoulder. With Clara guarding their flank with the wet cloak, beating back falling embers that hissed against the damp wool, they led the trembling animal down the aisle. They burst into the blinding daylight just as the entire center span of the roof collapsed inward behind them with an apocalyptic roar, sending a geyser of sparks forty feet into the pale Texas sky.
Caleb fell to his knees in the red dirt of the yard, coughing violently, vomiting gray soot onto the ground. His chest heaved as if his ribs were cracked. Beside him, Clara collapsed onto her elbows, her face smeared black with charcoal, her hands scorched, but her dark eyes still burning with an unquenchable, primal fire.
Around them, the loose horses were trotting nervously along the perimeter fence, whinnying toward the hills, but all of them were alive. The stone walls of the barn remained standing—thick limestone quarried by Nathaniel Morgan that defied the flames even as the wooden roof was reduced to glowing embers. The fire in the pasture had burned itself out against the gravel bed of the dry creek wash, leaving behind a wide, black scar that smoked under the merciless sun.
For ten minutes, neither of them moved. The only sounds were the harsh rasp of their breathing and the dull pop of dying embers.
Finally, Clara sat up. She looked at Caleb’s hands. The skin of his palms was angry, white, and blistered. Without asking permission, she untied the canteen from her saddle, poured cool water over his burns, and pulled a clean linen petticoat hem from beneath her skirt, tearing it into strips with her teeth.
“You are a reckless man, Caleb Morgan,” she said softly, wrapping the linen around his blistering palms with gentle, practiced hands.
Caleb stared at her through reddened, tear-streaked eyes. “Those animals didn't choose to be locked in a burning shed because some town bastard wants my dirt.”
“No,” she agreed, tying off the bandage with a firm knot. “They did not. But dead men cannot protect living horses.”
She rose and walked to Barnaby, unstrapping the iron-bound cedar box that Caleb had carried out of the subterranean river cave. She brought it back and set it on the ground between them, right there in the dust beneath the smoking shadow of the ruined barn.
“It is time to open it,” she said.
Caleb’s fingers were too clumsy and swollen to manage the small brass clasp. Clara knelt, pulled a slender bone-handled folding knife from her pocket, and forced the latch. The lock gave way with a dry snap.
Inside, wrapped in oilcloth that smelled of pine pitch and beeswax, lay a bundle of papers, an old leather-bound field journal, and a daguerreotype portrait set in an embossed tin frame.
Clara picked up the photograph first.
Her breath caught in her throat. Two men stood side by side in the photograph, their arms resting across each other’s shoulders. One was young Nathaniel Morgan, broad-shouldered and stern-jawed, wearing the uniform of a Union frontier cavalry scout. The other was Samuel Whitaker, his lean face marked by deep, laughing lines around his eyes, wearing the buckskin leggings and broad hat of a surveyor. In the background behind them, faint but recognizable, was the towering limestone arch of the cavern they had stood in two hours before.
On the back of the metal plate, scratched into the lacquer with a needle, were the words:
Brothers in the dry land. We hold the spring for the children to come.
Caleb looked at his father’s face. For fifteen years, he had remembered Nathaniel Morgan as an unbending, silent tyrant who worked until his joints bled and spoke only of boundaries and labor. He had never seen his father smile like that—with the open, radiant joy of a man who believed he was building an empire of peace.
“They were not rivals,” Caleb whispered, his voice cracking with emotion. “All the talk in town... the rumors that my father ran your father off with a rifle...”
“A lie carefully planted in the saloons by Gideon Vale,” Clara said, unfolding the legal parchment that lay beneath the portrait. Her eyes raced across the faded ink, reading the dense surveyor’s terminology.
“What does it say?” Caleb asked, leaning closer.
“It is a Community Covenant,” Clara said, her voice rising with an awe that cut through the smell of ash. “Drafted in eighteen sixty-seven. Nathaniel Morgan and Samuel Whitaker did not patent the northern basin for themselves. They used their combined veteran land warrants to purchase the entire water corridor—sixteen thousand acres covering the underground river—and placed it into an irrevocable agricultural trust.”
She pointed to the signatures at the bottom. Alongside Nathaniel Morgan and Samuel Whitaker were the marks of twelve other original settlers: Mexican ranchers from the old grants, German farmers who had come out after the war, and three Apache headmen who had signed with their clan symbols.
“Under this deed,” Clara continued, her hand tracing the terms, “no single man can ever own the Blue Spring or the cavern underflow. The water is legally deeded to the soil itself, to be shared proportionally among every family living within the watershed. If any party attempts to sell or privatize the spring, the entire parcel reverts to the public domain under the stewardship of the surviving trustees.”
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...”