“Anything else, Eli?”
“Tell Mrs. Hale the wire is sent,” Elias said, turning toward the door. “And tell her to keep her mouth shut in town.”
Seven days passed in a haze of biting cold and grueling labor.
Elias spent those days cutting firewood until his shoulders burned, hauling split pine from the timberline down to the woodpile until he had stacked four cords beneath the kitchen lean-to. He cleaned out the spare bedroom at the back of the house—the room that had stood empty since his younger sister died of scarlet fever twenty years ago. He scrubbed the pine floor with lye water, aired out the feather mattress in the dry, freezing air, and repaired the iron latch on the interior door, filing down the catch until the bolt slid into the keeper with a crisp, solid thud.
Every morning, he checked the ridge above the eastern pasture. On Tuesday, he saw two riders sitting their horses against the skyline—Crowe’s hands, watching the cattle, waiting to see if Elias would start packing his wagons. Elias took his rifle, walked out to the middle of the corral in plain view, and levered a shell into the chamber. The riders watched him for five minutes through field glasses, then turned their mounts and trotted back toward the Crowe headquarters.
On Wednesday afternoon, Deputy Tom Bell rode out alone, his horse breathing heavy plumes of white vapor. He didn't dismount. He reached into his coat and handed Elias a yellow telegraph slip.
Elias unfolded it with stiff fingers.
WARD, BLACK CREEK RANCH, DRY HOLLOW.
OFFER ACCEPTED ON TERMS STATED. DEPARTING SANTA FE TUESDAY MORNING. ARRIVING DRY HOLLOW THURSDAY STAGE FOUR P.M.
CLARA REYES.
Bell looked down from his saddle, a faint, lopsided grin touching his weathered lips. “Looks like you’ve got company coming, Eli.”
“Looks like it,” Elias said, pocketing the slip.
“Crowe heard about the wire,” Bell added, his grin vanishing. “His lawyer was down at the courthouse shouting at Margaret for two hours, claiming an imported marriage is a fraudulent conveyance under territorial statutes. Margaret told him to read the law book again and threw him out of the office.”
“He won’t stop at lawyers, Tom.”
“No,” Bell said quietly, turning his horse back toward the road. “He won’t. Watch your fence line tonight, Elias.”
That night, Elias sat by the cast-iron stove, listening to the wind scour the roof shingles. He looked at the spare bedroom door, standing slightly ajar in the dark hallway. For four years, silence had been his only companion—a heavy, suffocating silence that made a man forget the sound of his own voice.
Tomorrow, that silence would end. Whether it brought salvation or ruin, he had cast the die.
The Thursday stagecoach from Cheyenne was forty minutes late, delayed by packed ice in the canyon road north of Chugwater.
Elias Ward stood on the plank sidewalk outside the Wells Fargo express office, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his sheepskin coat. A light, powdery snow was falling, swirling in miniature dervishes across the dirt street. Across the thoroughfare, leaning against the hitching rail outside Crowe’s feed store, two of Silas Crowe’s hired hands—a sullen Texan named Vance and a half-breed scout called Red—watched Elias with open contempt, passing a bottle of rye whiskey between them.
Elias ignored them. He kept his back to the wall, his eyes fixed on the southern bend of the road where the freight wagons came into town.
Around four-thirty, the rhythmic rumble of iron tires against frozen ground echoed through the valley, followed by the sharp crack of a driver’s whip and the lathered snorting of a six-horse team. The stage rounded the bend in a cloud of yellow dust and snow, the heavy red Concord coach swaying violently on its leather thoroughbraces before sliding to a halt in front of the station.
The driver kicked the iron brake down with a dry screech. “Dry Hollow! Twenty-minute stop for mail and water! Passengers for the northern line change horses!”
The door swung open. A traveling drummer with two brass-bound sample cases clambered down first, his teeth chattering as he cursed the Wyoming wind. A middle-aged woman in black bombazine followed, escorted toward the telegraph office by a man who looked like her brother.
Then Clara Reyes stepped onto the iron rung.
Elias did not move for five seconds; he simply observed.
She wore a dark wool travelling coat that had clearly been turned and resewn at the cuffs—neat, clean, but worn thin by years of winter. Her dark hair was plaited in two thick, disciplined braids coiled tightly against the back of her head beneath a simple gray bonnet. She carried no vanity case, no hatbox, no decorative parasol. In her right hand, she gripped the handle of a single scuffed brown leather bag, its brass buckles tarnished green with age.