Clara looked at the splintered post. For the first time since she had arrived in Wyoming, a look of profound, aching sorrow crossed her features. She reached out and touched the broken wood where her father’s notch had held until the timber tore itself apart.
“It wasn't enough to steal the water,” she murmured, her voice tight with grief. “They had to break the work itself.”
“Cattle tracks are fresh,” Elias said, stepping down from the wagon onto the packed snow. He knelt, examining the deep, churned trail. “They aren't two hours ahead. With this snow, thirty head of cattle can’t move faster than two miles an hour.”
He reached into the back of the wagon, pulled out his snowshoes, and tossed a second pair—shorter, willow-framed webs designed for women—onto the bench beside Clara.
“We can’t take the wagon into the coulee,” he said. “Too many fallen logs under the drift. If you stay with the horses, you can follow the ridge road to the line shack.”
Clara tied the snowshoe thongs around her boots without a word. She stood up on the runners, pulled her wool scarf over her nose and mouth, and picked up a heavy, brass-bound lever-action carbine from beneath the buffalo robe.
“I told you once, Elias Ward,” she said through the wool, her voice muffled but resolute. “We do not separate. If your cattle are dying in those hills, they are my cattle too.”
Elias stared at her through the freezing air. A strange, unnameable emotion tightened his throat—something far deeper than gratitude, something fierce and protective and entirely new.
“Then keep your weapon primed,” he said. “And watch the brush.”
They set out on foot, their snowshoes making a rhythmic, sifting sound against the powder.
The trail led deep into the cedar breaks, climbing steadily toward the base of the granite cliffs where the wind had carved huge, overhanging cornices of snow. The silence was absolute, broken only by the cracking of frozen pine limbs under the weight of the ice.
After two miles of grueling climbing, they crested a steep hogback ridge and looked down into a sheltered draw choked with scrub oak.
There, huddling against the rock face to escape the wind, were Elias’s steers. The beasts were rimed with frost, their breath rising in a common cloud of white steam, but they were alive.
And standing beside a small, smoky fire built beneath an overhanging boulder was a solitary man.
He was wearing a tattered buffalo-hide coat and an old beaver hat with the earflaps tied down. An empty horse stood picketed to a cedar bush nearby, its head hanging low. As Elias and Clara broke through the perimeter of the draw, the man heard the crunch of their snowshoes and spun around, reaching frantically for a rusted Springfield rifle leaning against the stone.
“Don't touch it!” Elias barked, raising the Winchester to his eye.
The man froze, his hands trembling violently in the cold. He looked up, his face gaunt, gray-bearded, and hollowed out by days of hunger and terror.
“Ward?” the man croaked, his voice cracking with dry panic. “Don't shoot, Eli! For God’s sake, don't shoot!”
Elias lowered the carbine slightly, his eyes narrowing in shock.
“Samuel Pike?”
“It’s me,” the former foreman whispered, sinking back against the cold granite of the cliff as if his legs could no longer support his weight. “I’m done, Eli. I’m cold, I’m starving, and I’m done.”
Clara stepped forward, her carbine held ready at her hip, her sharp gaze sweeping the draw for other tracks. “Is he alone?”
“He’s alone,” Elias said, walking slowly toward the smoky fire. “What are my cattle doing in this canyon, Pike?”
Pike bowed his head, a ragged cough rattling through his chest. “Vance cut the wire at midnight. He paid two half-breeds twenty dollars to run your herd up here so Crowe could claim they died in the blizzard. I followed them... I was trying to turn the steers back toward the creek before they froze.”
Elias stopped five feet from the shivering man. “Why would you help me, Samuel? You helped Crowe steal my water for two years.”
Pike looked up, his watery, bloodshot eyes meeting Elias’s with desperate sincerity.
“Because Crowe tried to kill me, Eli,” the old foreman rasped, pulling open his ragged coat to reveal a stained, blood-soaked bandage wrapped crudely around his left ribs. “Three nights ago at the ranch house. I told him I wouldn't testify to the ditch transfer at the hearing. I told him the Ward boy was broke enough without me sending him to the poorhouse on a lie. He pulled a derringer from his waistcoat and shot me through the lung.”
Clara gasped, dropping to her knees beside the old man, her natural instinct for nursing instantly overtaking her suspicion. She pulled away the greasy bandage, examining the black, swollen wound with an expert eye.