Too late.
“You put that in his head,” Clara said.
Julian’s laughter died.
Mason looked at Clara with a cold contempt, far more dangerous than his mockery.
“Girl, there are things you don’t understand.”
“Then explain them to me before I scream so loud they hear me all the way in Jericho.”
“No one is coming,” he said. “These mountains swallow screams.”
He was right.
Outside, the pines bowed under the snowfall. Further away lay the black ravines, deep as an animal’s maw, and the roads toward the valley were buried in ice. In these lands, a woman could disappear before dawn, and the town would just say the freeze took her.
But Clara had already lived her entire life disappeared.
And tonight, she wasn’t going to be a shadow anymore.
Mason gave a signal.
Bart stepped forward.
Clara pulled the trigger.
The gunshot shattered the night.
She didn’t hit Bart. The bullet struck a copper pot hanging behind him, ringing out like a funeral bell. The horses spooked. Bart fell backward into the snow, screaming as if he were already dead.
Julian ran.
Mason cursed.
Clara slammed the door shut and dropped the heavy wooden bar across it.
Elias looked at her, stunned.
She was stunned too.
Her legs, arms, and even her mouth were trembling. But she was still standing.
“We’re leaving,” she said, even though he couldn’t hear her.
She wrote quickly on the notepad:
“To town. Now.”
Elias shook his head.
He took the pencil.
“They’ll kill us on the road.”
Clara looked at the piece of copper. Then at the black thing in the water, still alive, still writhing.
“Then we won’t take the road.”
Elias stared at her for a long time. Then he pointed toward the rugged wilderness.
Clara understood.
The old Native trails.
Everyone in Jericho spoke of those trails as if they were witchcraft. Narrow paths where people moved light as deer, carrying sacks of corn, crossing jagged ridges that would make any normal man cross himself. Old roads that didn’t follow wagons or the orders of rich men.
Elias struggled to his feet.
Clara wrapped his head tightly with a clean cloth and hid the copper piece inside her bodice. Then she gathered biscuits, beans, a handful of dried cornmeal Elias kept in a canvas sack, and a thick blanket.
Before leaving, he pried open a loose floorboard under the bed.
He pulled out a small wooden box.
Inside were yellowed papers, an old photograph, and a piece of blue ribbon.
Clara saw a black-haired boy hugging a young woman. The woman had Elias’s eyes.
Written on the back of the photo was:
“For my son, owner of Pine Springs.”
Clara felt a punch to her soul.
Pine Springs wasn’t just any piece of land. It was the natural spring that flowed down the canyon, the only one that never dried up, even in the harshest summers. Elias’s ranch wasn’t valuable for the cows or the house.
It was valuable for the water.
And Mason knew it.
Elias tucked the papers into his shirt.
They slipped out through the back just as Mason kept shouting at the front door. The snow bit their faces. The dogs in the pen barked, but Elias gave them a hand signal and they went silent.
They walked among pines, low oaks, and frozen rocks. Clara sank deep with every step. Elias, though injured, moved like a man whose very bones knew the mountain. Every so often, he stopped and offered her his hand. At first, Clara didn’t take it.
Then she did.
