“They didn't smell fear today,” Elias said. He reached down, picked up the oilcloth satchel from between her boots, and set it on his knees. It was scuffed with mud, but the leather strings were intact. “And the books are safe.”
“For now,” Clara said, turning her head to look back toward the dark mouth of the canyon. “They aren't going to quit, Elias. A man who shoots at a woman in an open wagon isn't going to be stopped by an audit.”
“No,” Elias agreed, his jaw hardening into granite. “He’s going to be stopped by a rope, or a bullet. But first, we take these papers to Margaret.”
He took the reins from her numb hands, turned the team eastward across the sagebrush flats, and urged them toward Dry Hollow, while the first heavy flakes of the blizzard began to fall around them like silent gray ash.
By the time the buckboard rattled down the deserted Main Street of Dry Hollow, the storm had closed in, turning the town into a ghostly world of swirling white drifts and shuttered storefronts. The iron sign above Crowe’s feed store creaked mournfully in the gale, swinging like a pendulum.
Elias pulled the team behind the red-brick county courthouse, where a small lean-to offered meager shelter for the exhausted horses. He threw heavy wool blankets over the team’s steaming backs, grabbed the satchel, and guided Clara through the rear basement entrance.
The courthouse was warm, smelling of burning coal, wet wool, and old parchment.
Margaret Hale was sitting behind her high walnut counter, an oil lamp burning beside a stack of territorial deed registers. When the heavy door slammed shut and Elias led Clara into the room, Margaret sprang to her feet, her spectacles dropping to the end of her nose.
“Good God in heaven!” the clerk exclaimed, her eyes taking in their condition—Clara’s torn skirts, her bleeding knuckles, Elias’s soot-stained face and the rifle clutched in his hand. “What happened to you two?”
“Crowe’s regulators tried to take the books at the headgate,” Elias said, locking the heavy brass bolt on the interior door. “Vance and three others. They had rifles.”
Margaret went white as milk. “In broad daylight?”
“They don't care about daylight anymore,” Clara said, walking steadily to the counter and setting the satchel on the polished wood with a wet slap. “They cut the main canal, Margaret. They built a timber bulkhead and laid an underground culvert to steal the entire flow of the mountain fork. We saw the territorial survey stake with Silas Crowe’s name stamped on it.”
Margaret hurried around the counter, pulling two wooden armchairs near the iron stove. “Sit down, both of you. Tom! Tom Bell!”
A door to the inner sheriff’s office opened, and Deputy Tom Bell appeared, adjusting his gunbelt. When he saw Elias and Clara, his weathered face darkened with immediate understanding.
“Vance?” Bell asked tersely.
“His horse went down in the coulee,” Elias answered. “He’ll be limping, but he’s alive. The others backed off when we hit the box canyon.”
“They’re getting reckless,” Bell cursed, spitting into the coal bucket. “Crowe knows Judge Vance is due on the Friday afternoon express. If he doesn't have the deed signed over before the court convenes, his investors in Chicago are going to pull their capital from the irrigation trust.”
Clara didn't sit down. She untied the strings of the satchel, pulled out the ranch’s old ledgers, and laid them side by side with the handwritten livestock receipts she had extracted from the tobacco tin.
“Margaret,” Clara said, her voice dropping into the cool, authoritative tone of a professional accountant. “I need the county tax assessments for the Shoshone Ditch Company for sixty-seven, sixty-eight, and sixty-nine. And the recorded water transfers for the Black Creek district.”
Margaret didn't hesitate. She retrieved three heavy, canvas-bound volumes from the iron safe in the corner, hefting them onto the desk with a grunt.
For the next four hours, while the blizzard screamed against the courthouse windows, Clara worked with an intensity that silenced the room. She did not stop for tea; she barely paused to wipe the ink from her fingertips. Her pen raced across a fresh sheet of paper, cross-referencing ledger numbers, entry dates, and water diversion permits.
Elias stood by the window, peering through the frosted panes toward the street. Every few minutes, he checked the cylinder of his revolver, his ears tuned to the sound of hooves outside.
Around four o'clock, Clara suddenly stopped writing.
The nib of her pen remained pressed against the paper, spreading a tiny circle of dark ink. Her breath hitched.
“What is it?” Margaret asked, leaning over her shoulder.
“Look at these two signatures,” Clara whispered.