She turned the county transfer book toward Margaret and pointed with the dry end of her penholder. The entry was dated July 14, 1868—the year Elias’s father had fallen ill with the lung fever. It was a formal quitclaim deed, supposedly surrendering half of Black Creek’s upper water allocation to the Shoshone Ditch Company for the sum of one hundred dollars.
“That’s Thomas Ward’s signature,” Margaret said, squinting through her glasses. “I remember when the ditch company filed it. Silas Crowe brought it in himself.”
“No,” Clara said, her voice trembling with quiet indignation. “It is not Thomas Ward’s signature.”
She reached into the satchel and drew out the old family Bible Elias had brought from the ranch house, flipping to the inside cover where Thomas Ward had recorded the births, baptisms, and deaths of his family in a bold, irregular, left-leaning script.
She placed the Bible directly beside the county register.
“Thomas Ward formed his capital T with a double loop at the crossbar,” Clara said, tracing the ink with her fingertip. “He was left-handed, and the downstrokes on his W always carried a slight drag to the left. The signature in this county book was written by a right-handed man trying to imitate him. The pressure is even, the stroke is hesitant, and the loop on the T is single.”
Tom Bell leaned down, his eyes widening. “Christ on the cross.”
“It’s a forgery,” Margaret whispered, her hand going to her mouth.
“A crude one,” Clara said coldly. “Done by someone who had seen Thomas Ward’s signature on a bill of sale but didn't know the mechanics of his handwriting. And look who witnessed the document.”
Margaret leaned closer, reading the faded script: Witnessed: Samuel Pike, Foreman.
The room fell into an absolute, suffocating silence.
“Samuel Pike,” Elias said, his voice coming from deep within his chest, heavy with the weight of four years of stolen labor. “Crowe fired him three weeks ago when the winter began. Word in town was they had an argument over missing steer hides.”
“Pike didn't leave the territory,” Tom Bell said suddenly, straightening up. “Old Man Miller told me Pike was holed up in a trapper’s shack out near the west timberline, trying to keep out of Crowe’s way until the spring stages open up.”
Clara turned to Elias, her amber eyes burning with an intense, unyielding resolve.
“If Samuel Pike signed this document as a witness,” she said, “he knows who wrote Thomas Ward’s name. And if he was fired by Crowe, he has no reason to protect him anymore.”
“Pike won’t talk for free,” Elias said grimly. “He was Crowe’s dog for ten years.”
“He will talk if it keeps him out of the territorial penitentiary at Laramie,” Clara retorted, closing the county ledger with a sharp, decisive thud. “We need that man, Elias. We need him before Crowe realizes what we’ve found.”
Tom Bell looked out the window into the blinding squall. “A ride to the west timberline in this blizzard will kill a man.”
“Then we wait until dawn,” Elias said, his gaze meeting Clara’s. “And we go together.”
The blizzard broke at three in the morning, leaving three feet of pristine, unblemished snow blanketing the valley and an arctic temperature that froze the moisture inside the nostrils at the first breath. The world was so still it seemed as though every living creature in Wyoming had perished in the night.
Elias and Clara had spent the remaining hours in the warm basement of the courthouse, sleeping in fitful shifts on a horsehair sofa beside the records safe. By five o'clock, with the morning star blazing like a lantern in the violet sky, they were back in the buckboard, the wagon wheels fitted with iron runners that Elias had borrowed from the livery barn.
They drove north and west, skirting the edge of the foothills to avoid the main stage road.
As they approached the western boundary of Black Creek, Elias suddenly pulled back on the team.
“Look there,” he said, pointing with his whip.
The new cedar fence—the fence they had labored over three days ago, the posts they had set and braced with river stone—was destroyed.
It had not been knocked down by drifting snow or wild horses. The four-strand barbed wire had been severed cleanly with heavy iron pliers. The corner post, the one Clara had carefully braced with the lap-joint and oak trenail, had been hooked to a team of draft animals and dragged out of the frozen ground by sheer mechanical brute force. The wood was splintered, the iron wire tangled like a bird’s nest in the snow.
Beyond the gap, a wide, trampled swath of snow led west into the rough coulees of the public timber reserve.
“They drove the steers through,” Elias said, his voice dropping into a tone that was completely devoid of emotion—the flat, terrifying calm of a man who had reached the absolute end of his patience. “They waited until the storm cleared, cut the wire, and drove my thirty-four head into the hills to freeze or scatter.”