A mile outside Dry Hollow, where the ranch track joined the government stage road, a solitary horseman sat motionless beneath a dead cottonwood.
Elias checked the team, his thumb sliding over the rifle hammer.
The rider pushed back his hat. A battered tin star gleamed against the shearling collar of his coat.
“Put that damn gun down, Elias,” Deputy Tom Bell called out, spurring his mount forward through the knee-deep powder. His face was gray with fatigue, his mustache rimed with icicles. “I’ve been sitting here since seven. Heard shooting out your way before dawn.”
“Crowe’s men tried to burn the barn,” Elias said as the deputy pulled alongside the runner. “They took some lead for their trouble. Pike is in the back.”
Bell leaned over his saddle horn, whistling through his teeth as he saw the former foreman buried under the robes. “Pike? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Silas has two affidavits sworn out with Judge Vance claiming you murdered Samuel Pike three nights ago and hid his body in the lime sink.”
Clara leaned forward, her amber eyes flashing. “Then Mr. Crowe is about to be very disappointed by the corpse’s testimony.”
Bell looked at Clara—at the dark wool dress, the regal posture on the rough wooden bench, and the raw purple scab across her cheek. A slow, respectful grin broke through his gray whiskers.
“Mrs. Ward,” Bell said, touching his hat brim with a gloved finger. “The whole town’s packed into the second floor of the Odd Fellows hall. Crowe brought three wagonloads of merchants and squatters from the south valley to bid on the water parcels. Court opens in twenty minutes.”
“Is Judge Vance sitting alone?” Elias asked.
“Circuit Judge Vance and two territorial commissioners,” Bell replied, turning his horse to escort the sled. “Crowe bought the judge his breakfast at the hotel, but Margaret’s been in the records room since midnight with an armed guard. She locked the land transfers in the iron safe and sat on the door with a double-barreled ten-gauge.”
“Good for Margaret,” Clara said grimly.
They entered Dry Hollow from the southern road. The town had dug itself out from the blizzard; paths had been shoveled through four feet of snow along the boardwalks, and a crowd of men in mackinaws and beaver caps were gathered outside the livery and the Elkhorn Saloon.
As the sled slid to a halt in front of the two-story brick courthouse, the street went abruptly silent.
The chatter of teamsters, the ring of the blacksmith’s hammer, the barking of sled dogs—all of it died away. Men stepped off the wooden sidewalks into the trampled snow to stare. They saw Elias Ward, the solitary, broken rancher who was supposed to be ruined; they saw the dark-haired woman sitting beside him like an empress; and they saw Deputy Bell haul a living, breathing Samuel Pike out from under the buffalo robes.
Across the street, standing under the painted sign of S. CROWE & CO. – DRY GOODS & TIMBER, stood Silas Crowe himself.
Crowe was fifty years old, thick-chested, wearing a tailored charcoal coat with an otter-fur collar and a high beaver top hat. A heavy gold watch chain looped across his embroidered waistcoat. Beside him stood his attorney, an oily, pale-faced man from Cheyenne named Thaddeus Crane, clutching an embossed leather briefcase.
Crowe did not move. He did not blink. His cold, pale blue eyes watched Elias step down from the sled. Then his gaze drifted to the bed of the wagon, where Samuel Pike was being eased onto his feet.
For a fraction of a second, the mask of absolute, imperial confidence slipped from Crowe’s face. His jaw slackened, and his hand tightened around the silver knob of his malacca walking stick until the knuckles turned white.
Elias met Crowe’s gaze across forty feet of frozen mud. He did not shout; he did not draw his weapon. He merely held the cattleman’s eyes for five long, freezing seconds, then reached up, took Clara’s gloved hand, and helped her down onto the boardwalk.
“Keep your chin high,” Elias whispered to her.
“My chin has never been anywhere else, Mr. Ward,” she answered softly, her fingers tightening around his arm.
Together, flanked by Tom Bell and supporting Samuel Pike between them, they climbed the wide wooden steps into the hall of judgment.
The second-floor courtroom was suffocatingly hot, smelling of damp wool, coal gas, spittoons, and decades of stale legal argument. Four potbellied stoves glowed cherry-red in the corners, fighting the chill that seeped through the tall, frosted windows.
Every bench was filled. Half the county had crammed into the gallery—ranchers in sheepskins from the Medicine Bow, storekeepers smelling of vinegar and calico, rail workers from the siding, and a dozen tight-jawed cattlemen aligned with the Crowe syndicate.