Elias threw his weight against the fifty-gallon oak water barrel. With a massive heave of his shoulders, he overturned it. A torrent of ice-cold water surged across the pine floorboards, hissing furiously as it drowned the burning rugs and extinguished the fire crawling up the baseboards.
Together, choking and coughing, they dragged the smoldering blankets out through the front door and hurled them into the snow.
Outside, the great barn gave a terrifying, shuddering groan.
The central roof ridge—timbers that Thomas Ward had notched with an adze thirty years before—collapsed inward in an explosion of white-hot embers and billowing black smoke. The horses had already broken through the rear corrals and were galloping safely across the western pasture, their silhouettes dark against the snowfields.
The house was saved. The walls were scorched and black, the floorboards drowned in soot and water, but the heavy spruce logs had held.
Silas Crowe lay face down in the snow five yards from the porch, groaning as the blood from his shoulder froze into crimson crystals on his coat.
Deputy Tom Bell and three armed riders from town came thundering into the yard on lathered mounts, sliding their horses to a halt beside the corral. Bell vaulted from the saddle, his Colt drawn, and dropped his knee into the center of Crowe’s back, snapping a pair of heavy iron shackles around the cattleman’s wrists with a clean, brutal click.
“Silas Crowe,” Bell panted, his chest heaving with spent breath. “You’re under arrest for arson, forgery, and high crimes against the territory.”
Crowe didn't answer. He laid his cheek against the frozen snow, his teeth chattering in the cold, the empire of the valley broken forever beneath his boots.
By nightfall, the town men had gone.
They had carried Silas Crowe away in the back of a freight wagon, guarded by four deputies with shotguns, bound for the territorial jail in Laramie to await the federal grand jury. They had offered to leave two men behind to help Elias clear the smoking ruins of the barn, but Elias had quietly, firmly declined.
A rancher did not let strangers clean the graveyard of his labor.
The fire in the barn had burned down to a mound of glowing, cherry-red embers that hissed whenever the wind blew a dusting of snow across the foundation. The stone walls stood intact, blackened and scarred, but the roof and the heavy stalls were gone.
Inside the house, the smell of charred wood and wet ash was heavy, but the cast-iron kitchen stove was roaring with dry pine splits, throwing a circle of bright, steady heat into the room.
Clara sat at the table, her head resting on her folded arms, her dark hair hanging in tangled, soot-stained wisps around her neck. Her woolen dress was ruined—the hem scorched, the sleeves torn at the elbows. Her hands, resting on the scrubbed pine, were blistered and raw from carrying water buckets and wielding the wet blanket.
Elias walked into the kitchen carrying an armload of dry birch splits. He stacked them by the hearth, removed his sheepskin coat, and poured two cups of hot water from the kettle into the tin mugs, dropping a generous measure of medicinal brandy into each.
He set one mug before Clara.
She lifted her head slowly. Her face was gray with exhaustion, the skin around her amber eyes bruised and shadowed, but the stubborn, unyielding light within them remained completely undimmed.
“The steers are in the lower meadow,” Elias said softly, sitting across from her. “The hay in the stackyard wasn't touched by the fire. They have enough feed to last until April.”
Clara took the mug between her blistered hands, breathing in the steam. “And the water?”
“Margaret sent a telegram to the territorial governor before we left town,” he answered. “The diversion cut is declared illegal. Tomorrow, the county road crew brings dynamite to blow Crowe’s bulkhead out of the upper fork. The creek will be running by sundown.”
Clara nodded slowly. She took a sip of the warm brandy, letting her eyes drift toward the scorched wall of the parlor where the pine was blackened to charcoal.
“We won,” she whispered. It sounded less like a triumph and more like a wonder.
“You won it,” Elias said. His voice was thick, coming from a depth of gratitude that had no words in the English tongue. “If you hadn't found those numbers in the book... if you hadn't stood up to Vance and Crane... I’d be sleeping in the livery barn tonight with thirty dollars in my pocket.”
Clara looked at him across the table.
“I didn't do it for thirty dollars, Elias.”
“I know,” he said.
He reached into his waistcoat pocket, drew out a small, flat paper envelope, and laid it gently on the table between them.
Clara looked down at it. She did not touch it.