“Miss Bellamy,” he said. “I buried what I could find of your sister.”
Mara swayed.
Elias moved close, ready to catch her if she fell.
The reverend’s voice broke.
“I wanted to speak sooner. Slade had men watching the church. But things are moving now. Mrs. Wren has agreed to testify that Vale’s men came in with blood on their cuffs the morning after the wagon party vanished. Dr. Lark has records of bullet wounds. Three miners will swear they saw Peter Harrow’s papers in Vale’s office after Vale claimed no survivors existed.”
“And Judge Barrow?” Elias asked.
“Gone to Red Mesa for a circuit hearing. Conveniently.”
“Or warned.”
Finch nodded. “Maybe both. A federal deputy marshal is due in Briar Hollow in nine days. Oren got a telegram through under a false name.”
Elias frowned. “But?”
“There is always a but,” the reverend said. “Slade knows something is wrong. He searched Mrs. Wren’s store yesterday. He doubled the reward on Miss Bellamy. And he told men at the saloon that whoever shelters her will hang beside her.”
Mara’s face hardened.
“Then I should leave before I bring that rope here.”
Elias looked at her.
“No.”
“You do not decide that for me.”
“You are right,” he said. “I decide whether I let Victor Slade scare me off my own floor. The answer is no.”
Reverend Finch watched them both, and for the first time, something like hope touched his weary face.
“There is one more thing,” he said. “If Miss Bellamy can stand in church on Sunday after next and give her account before the federal deputy, Vale’s hold may finally crack. But until then, she must stay alive.”
Mara took Lottie’s prayer book with shaking hands.
Inside the cover, in her sister’s round handwriting, was one sentence:
If fear is the price of truth, pay it once and be done.
Mara closed the book against her heart.
“I will stand,” she said.
That promise nearly killed them.
Marshal Slade came five nights before the hearing.
He did not come alone.
Elias woke not to hoofbeats, but to the absence of ordinary sounds.
No wind.
No creak of branches.
The horses in the lean-to were too quiet.
Then one snorted, frightened.
Elias rolled from his blankets with his revolver already in hand.
Mara sat up. “What is it?”
“Company.”
The first bullet punched through the shutter and buried itself in the opposite wall.
Elias shoved Mara to the floor as the cabin exploded with noise.
Men shouted outside.
Glass broke.
Another shot knocked a tin cup from the shelf.
Elias crawled to the side window, kicked open the lower shutter, and fired at a shadow near the woodpile.
The shadow screamed and fell.
“Back door,” he told Mara.
“There are men there too.”
“I know. But the cellar hatch is under the flour sacks.”
They had prepared for this.
Fear, when respected, becomes foresight.
Elias dragged the sacks aside, lifted a trapdoor he had cut weeks earlier, and helped Mara into the shallow root cellar. A narrow crawlspace led under the back wall and out behind a thicket of frozen willow.
Oren had called it coward’s architecture.
Elias had called it living.
“You go to the stream,” he whispered. “Follow it north to the split.”
“I am not leaving you.”
“You are carrying the ledger.”
“So are you.”
He thrust the tin box into her hands.
“Jonah died for what is inside that box. You think I will let my pride be what wastes him?”
The front door shook under a blow.
Mara grabbed his shirt and kissed him.
It was not gentle.
It was terrified, angry, and alive.
When she pulled back, Elias looked at her as if the whole world had changed shape.
“Do not you dare die,” she whispered.
“That was my line.”
Another blow hit the door.
Mara vanished into the darkness beneath the floor.
Elias dropped the hatch, kicked the flour sacks back over it, and turned as the door burst inward.
Marshal Slade stood in the opening with snow blowing around him and a shotgun in his hands.
“Evening, Rook.”
“You are late for coffee.”
Slade smiled.
“Where is she?”
“Who?”
The marshal sighed like a patient schoolmaster and gestured.
Two men rushed Elias.
He shot one in the shoulder, but the other slammed him with a rifle butt. The room tilted. Elias swung and felt bone crack beneath his fist, then took a boot to the ribs.
By the time his vision cleared, Slade had the shotgun under his chin.
“You mountain men always think silence makes you strong,” Slade said. “But silence just means no one hears you beg.”
Elias spat blood onto the floor.
“You practice that in a mirror?”
Slade’s smile vanished.
He struck Elias across the face with the shotgun barrel.
They tore the cabin apart.
They found bloody bandages. Women’s clothes. Extra dishes. And the empty place on the shelf where the tin box had been.
With every discovery, Slade’s rage grew quieter.
Quiet rage was always the dangerous kind.
“She was here,” he said.
Elias said nothing.
Slade crouched before him.
“I could burn this cabin with you in it and tell Briar Hollow the fugitive murdered you.”
“You could.”
“But I need her more than I need you dead.”
“That is a flattering distinction.”