Chapter 3 - The Gold in the Grease-Jar
The silence that followed was different from the silence of before.
It was no longer the cautious tread of strangers, but the heavy, calculating quiet of two soldiers sharing a trench under artillery fire.
Cora did not sleep in the bed that night.
She sat by the table, wrapped in her brother’s old wool coat, watching the frost form geometric crystals on the window glass.
She thought of her brother, Arthur, sitting in his warm parlor in Omaha, counting the coins he’d saved by ridding himself of the sister who took up too much room on the horse cart.
He had known about the Vance family; he had known the Boone name had blood on it.
A sturdy woman for a hard life.
That had been the text.
She wasn't a wife; she was an insurance policy against eviction.
At dawn, Elias was down from the loft, moving with the quiet efficiency of a cat despite his great size.
He brought in three armloads of split tamarack, the heavy wood that burned slow and left a bed of iron-hot coals.
He set his tin coffee pot on the iron and looked at her where she sat at the table.
"You didn't sleep," he observed.
"I've slept enough in thirty-two years," she replied, her eyes dry and rimmed with red.
"If the Judge is coming on the first, we need sixty dollars in gold dust. That was what Vance said."
"Eighty," Elias corrected.
"The back taxes run two years. Vance added the court fee for the probate."
"Do you have it?"
Elias did not answer immediately.
He knelt by the hearth, reaching behind a loose stone in the chimney throat, his fingers digging into the soot.
He brought out a small, heavy pigskin pouch, blackened by smoke.
He tossed it onto the table between them.
It landed with a dull, heavy thud.
Cora pulled the drawstrings open and tipped the contents into her palm.
There were three small Spanish silver dollars, four trade tokens from the Hudson’s Bay Company, and a pinch of dull, flour-fine placer gold that wouldn't have balanced an ounce weight on a grocer's scale.
"Thirty-two dollars," Elias said, his jaw tightening.
"I had four beaver pelts in the lower cache, but the wolverine got into the timber-box before the snow hit. The pelt buyer in settlement won't pay five cents for chewed fur."
"Then we lose the cabin," Cora said.
"They'll have to shoot me on the porch," Elias said simply.
"And then where do I go?" Cora asked, her voice rising, the anger finally cracking through her customary stoicism.
"Back to the depot? Back to Omaha so Arthur can tell the cousins that the fat girl couldn't even keep a mountain hermit from getting himself hung?"
Elias blinked, taken aback by the venom in her voice.
"You could take the wagon," he said quietly.
"Sell the team. The horses are good stock. Percheron crosses. They'd fetch two hundred dollars in Cheyenne."
"I didn't travel a thousand miles on a cattle car to run away from a town full of half-witted shopkeepers," Cora hissed, standing up.
She was nearly as tall as he was, her broad chest rising with a fierce, stubborn vitality that seemed to fill the low-ceilinged room.
"You have tallow?" she asked abruptly.
"What?"
"Tallow. Animal fat. The bear grease from the cellar. How much do you have?"
"Two barrels," Elias said, his brow knotting in confusion.
"From the fall hunt. I use it for the harness, the traps, and the axle trees."
"And lye? Do you have wood ash and water?"
"The hopper behind the smokehouse is full of hickory and oak ash from the curing fires."
Cora tied her hair back with a piece of twine, her eyes bright and dangerous.
"My grandmother ran the soapworks for the Union Army hospital at Cairo," she said, rolling up her sleeves with deliberate, methodical movements.
"The miners in the camps down at South Pass haven't smelled clean tallow since the creek froze. They buy that lime-soap from the company store that peels the skin off their thumbs."
"Soap?" Elias looked at her as if she had lost her wits.
"You think we're going to pay Thaddeus Vance eighty dollars with bars of soap?"
"Hard-milled tallow soap with wintergreen oil," Cora snapped, walking to the pantry and hauling up the cellar trapdoor with one arm.
"The miners pay fifty cents a brick if it floats and doesn't rot their wool shirts. We have three weeks until the first of the month. How many pounds of fat can we render before the pass closes?"
Elias stared at her, the confusion on his scarred face slowly giving way to something else—an astonishment that looked remarkably like respect.
"I've got three hundred pounds of rendered bear and deer fat in the stone crocks," he said, his voice dropping an octave.
"And the wintergreen grows thick along the south rock-face under the drifts."
"Then get your snowshoes on, Mr. Boone," Cora ordered, pointing toward the door with a wooden lard paddle.
"You're going to dig green leaves out of the snow, and I'm going to boil the fat until this ridge smells like a Sunday school."
For the first time since she had arrived at the frozen outpost, Elias Boone did not look like a demon.
He looked like a man who had suddenly been given a shovel to dig his way out of an open grave.
May you like
He reached for his coat, his scarred mouth twitching into what might have been a genuine grin beneath the dark thicket of his beard.
"Yes, ma'am," he said, and walked out into the cold with a stride that shook the rafters.
