Chapter 13 - The Parley at Dawn
The sky over the eastern ridge turned the color of bruised slate before the next movement came from the pines.
The cold had deepened until the snow screamed like dry glass under the boots of the remaining men.
Three horses lay dead or dying in the lower brush, caught by Elias's steady, rhythmic fire every time they shifted in the moon-shadows.
A white cloth, tied to the tip of a cavalry saber, rose above the rim of the creek-bed forty rods down the slope.
"Boone!" Silas Vance's voice was cracked with the freezing wind, all the oily swagger stripped away by eight hours of lying belly-down in five-foot drifts.
"Hold your fire! The Judge has a truce!"
Elias stepped back from the loop, his face blackened by powder smoke, his eyes bloodshot and rimmed with frost.
He looked at Cora, who had climbed up from the cellar, her wool skirts coated in white stone dust, her hands black with charcoal from reloading the hot carbine.
"A truce from a Vance is a knife between the shoulder blades," Elias said, spitting a mouthful of bitter lead-dust onto the hearth.
"Let him talk," Cora said, her breath forming small clouds in the room.
"We have three cartridges left for the Sharps and twelve for the carbines. If he wants to talk, it gives the teamsters time to reach the upper trail from the syndicate camp."
Elias nodded once, grim and calculating.
He opened the heavy iron latch of the door by two inches, leaving the drop-chain secured.
"Show your face, Silas," Elias called out, his voice echoing off the frozen ledge like stone striking stone.
"Come into the open without that carbine or I'll split your belly from here to the timber line."
The deputy stepped out from behind a granite boulder, his hands held high above his head.
He looked half-frozen; his beaver coat was torn at the elbow, his cheeks were blistered white with frostnip, and his teeth clattered so hard they sounded like dice in a leather cup.
Behind him, riding a heavy gray mare with a buffalo robe pulled up to his silver whiskers, came Judge Thaddeus Vance himself.
The old man did not look like a magistrate now; he looked like a broken vulture whose nest had been kicked apart.
He stopped the gray twenty paces from the porch, his cold eyes searching the shuttered windows with a mixture of hatred and sick realization.
"Where is the Miller woman?" the Judge demanded, his thin voice trembling against the morning draft.
Cora stepped onto the porch behind Elias, her bulk filling the doorway, the Springfield held across her forearm in the ready position of a seasoned soldier.
"My name is Boone, Judge," she said, her voice carrying across the silent clearing with the clear, ringing authority of a church bell.
"You brought five men up here to burn an American homestead. Two of them are dead in the drift, and the other three have left you to freeze."
The Judge’s hands shook on the reins.
"The territorial marshal has been notified by wire, woman! You harbored a fugitive from probate and used military-grade weapons against county officers!"
"The territorial marshal is sitting at the mining exchange in South Pass, Thaddeus," Cora replied, taking one heavy, deliberate step onto the frosted planks of the stoop.
"Because while Elias was mending the chairs yesterday, I sent a telegram of my own from the freight office with the Syndicate courier."
The Judge went entirely still, the blood draining from his nose until it looked like carved bone.
"What telegram?" he hissed.
"A full statement of the timber land filings for the last five years," Cora said, her eyes pinning the old man like a beetle on a corkboard.
"Including the duplicate receipts your clerk stamped for the estate of Bartholomew Miller before he died in Omaha. You didn't just try to steal this ridge from Elias; you tried to hide my uncle’s probate from the federal land commissioner so you could sell the railroad timber to the Union Pacific under your sister’s name."
The Judge’s mouth worked uselessly, his eyes darting to Silas, who had lowered his hands, looking at his uncle with sudden, terrified confusion.
"She's lying, Silas," the Judge croaked, but the lie had no marrow in it; it was dry as a dead leaf.
"The Syndicate lawyer arrived at the Sweetwater ford at dawn with twelve mounted guards," Elias added, stepping forward beside his wife, his massive hand coming down with a slow, deliberate weight upon her shoulder.
"They're clearing your broken wagon out of the ditch right now, Vance. And they have a federal warrant for the arrest of the county probate judge for mail fraud and grand larceny."
A long, terrible whistle sounded from the pass below—the low, brass horn of the Syndicate freight wagon, loud, brazen, and backed by twenty teams of mules.
May you like
Silas Vance dropped the cavalry saber into the snow with a dull thud.
He turned without looking at his uncle, grabbed his foundered horse by the cheek-strap, and began to run down the trail through the red mud of the melting drifts, abandoning the old man to the high mountain alone.
