The valley was a crucible of gray mist and lingering embers. By four in the morning, the wind off the Black Ridge usually carried the sharp, sweet scent of wet pine and damp river silt, but today it tasted only of scorched cedar and copper.
Clara Miller stood near the edge of the pump-house porch, her fingers wrapped around the iron handle of an oak bucket until her knuckles turned the color of dry bone. Beneath her boots, the earth was warm. Not the gentle warmth of an August afternoon, but the unnatural, feverish heat of a barn that had burned to its stone foundation only three hours prior.
She was nineteen years old, tall and narrow-shouldered, wearing a canvas work coat that had belonged to her elder brother before the fever took him three winters ago. Her dark brown hair was pinned back haphazardly with copper wire, stray wisps stuck to her sweat-streaked forehead. She had never worn silk. She had never been to a social in the township of Oakhaven without grease under her fingernails or yellow clay caked on her skirt hems.
And, as the older women at the dry-goods store whispered when they thought she was out of earshot down the flour aisle, Clara Miller had never been kissed.
To Clara, such things belonged to another world—a world where roofs didn’t leak during the November thaws, where cows didn’t bloat on sweet clover, and where men didn’t look at a stretch of creek-bottom land with the hungry, rheumy eyes of wolves calculating the thickness of a lamb’s wool.
"Clara."
Her father’s voice was a dry, rasping rattle from inside the cabin.
She set the bucket down—the water sloshing against the cedar staves with a heavy, flat sound—and stepped over the scorched threshold. The cabin had survived the blaze only because her father had spent two hours on the wood-shingle roof with a wet wool blanket while the dry wind whipped sparks across the yard like a swarm of gold hornets.
Abner Miller sat in his high-backed rocker by the cold hearth. His hands, thick and scarred from forty years of clearing limestone and felling white oak, lay palms-up on his knees. They were blistered dark across the knuckles, the skin peeling in ragged ribbons. His beard, once as red as a fox’s tail, was streaked with gray soot and ash.
"Did you check the lower fence?" Abner asked. His voice barely rose above the hiss of the dying lamp wick.
"The wire’s cut, Pa," Clara said quietly. She knelt beside his chair, dipping a clean rag into a basin of sweet oil and lard, gently dabbing at the raw skin of his wrist. "Clean cut. Not snapped by a falling limb. Someone brought cold chisels to the post line while the barn was taking light."
Abner closed his eyes. A muscle in his jaw twitched once, hard, like a wire drawn tight under a winch. "It’s Vance."
"We don't know that for sure," she murmured, though her own stomach tightened into a hard knot at the name.
"It’s Silas Vance," the old man repeated, opening his eyes. They were milky at the edges now, cloudy with the cataracts that had been creeping over his vision for the last two years, but behind the glaze burned an old, stubborn coal of fury. "He’s been waiting for the timber on the north ridge to dry out. He wants the water rights to Roaring Creek so he can run his timber flumes down to the railhead at Blackwood. He knows I won't sell while there's breath in my lungs."
"We have the deed, Pa. Signed by the land office in Saint Louis."
Abner let out a sound that was half-cough, half-bitter laugh. "A piece of paper don't stop a bullet, girl. Nor does it stop ten gallons of kerosene poured under a hayloft at midnight. Vance doesn't want the deed. He wants us dead or run off so he can claim the land as abandoned under the township improvement act."
Clara remained silent. She squeezed the cloth, letting a drop of golden oil run over her father's burned knuckles. She knew he was right. Silas Vance owned the saloon in Oakhaven, he owned the lumber mill, and he paid the salary of the deputy who sat on the porch of the livery stable all day chewing tobacco and looking the other way when Vance’s riders came through town with rifles slung across their saddles.
Outside, a horse screamed.
It was not the high, frightened whinny of a farm mare smelling smoke. It was a sharp, iron-shod stallion’s cry—savage, demanding, and close.
Clara froze. Her hand hovered an inch above her father’s wrist.
"Clara," Abner whispered, his body going rigid in the rocker. "Get the double-barrel from behind the door."
She didn't move toward the door. Through the small glass pane of the front window, she saw it: a thick, grey wall of smoke rolling down from the burning orchard, clinging to the ground like cotton wool. And out of that white shroud, moving at a slow, deliberate walk, came a horse.
It was a stallion, coal-black save for a single streak of white down its nose, its coat slick with sweat and grease. On its back sat a man clad in a heavy featherweight oilskin coat, stained dark around the hem by trail dust and old rain. His broad-brimmed hat was pulled low, casting his face into total shadow, but beneath the brim, the pale grey light of the approaching dawn caught the dull glint of a brass-framed Henry rifle laid flat across his pommel.