"Mercer! We know the horse! We know the bags! Come out and talk like a Christian and nobody burns!"
Dane crouched beside her behind the barrel, reloading with hands that did not hurry, and June got her own rifle down from the peg inside the door with a crawl she would have been ashamed of in any less instructive moment. Her hands were steady. Her heart was a fistfight. She settled beside him in the angle of the porch and the cabin wall where two fields of fire overlapped and said, "Now you talk. Fast, Mr. Mercer, and all of it."
"His name is Silas Vane," Dane said. "He runs whiskey and rifles and anything else that pays across the border line, and half the lawmen between here and the Saskatchewan are bought and in his pocket — not the law's pocket, his. I rode for him. Two years, when I was young and starving and thought a full belly was the same as a clean one. I drove wagons. I never—" A shot cracked into the cabin logs above them; he flinched from the splinters, not the sound. "I never killed for him. But I knew the routes, the caches, the names. And when I finally understood what I was part of—" He fired once, deliberate, and a man in the trees yelped. "I stole his ledger."
"His what?"
"His book. Every name, every payment, every route, every judge and deputy and customs man on his string, written down in his own clerk's hand because Vane can't abide trusting memory. I took it out of his strongbox at the border camp and I ran. That book hangs Silas Vane and half the territory's law with him — if it reaches hands clean enough to use it. I was taking it to the federal deputy at Sage Crossing." His jaw worked. "And I stopped here. I stopped here, June, like a fool boy homesick for a house that was never mine, and I led them straight to your door."
"How?" Her voice was very level. A bullet ticked off the iron stove through the cabin wall and they both ignored it with the ease of long practice — his, and hers newly minted. "How did they find you, if you're such a ghost?"
"The fire." He grimaced. "It wasn't lightning. Vane's men set the grass burning north of the Crown Hills to smoke out anyone traveling — a net. Proffitt found my sign, or a trapper talked. It doesn't matter now. What matters—" He turned his head and looked at her full, for one suspended second, while the siege breathed around them. "What matters is you. When they stop shooting to talk, I go out. The book goes out with me. You are a widow who took in a stranger for a week and knew nothing. You say it plain and you live, do you hear me? You live, June."
"I hear a man rehearsing my lines for me," June said, "and I don't care for the play."
""You think this is courage? This is the debt. I brought it here—"
"You brought a debt," June said, "and debts get paid, not died under. Listen to me." She shifted so she could see the yard and the cellar mouth in one glance, the way her father had taught her to sit a room. "There's a tunnel out of the spring cellar — dug in the war years, comes out at the river below the ford. I was forbidden it as a child, which means I explored it to the last inch by the time I was ten. If they rush us, we don't die picturesque on this porch. We go down through my own house and out under their feet, and we take your book with us." She chambered the thought like a round. "So. No more rehearsing my surrender, Mr. Mercer. Plan like a man who expects us both to be alive at supper.""
"You brought wood-splitting and a cleared flue and seven days here. They brought rifles." She chambered a round with a sound like a full stop. "My father had a saying for guests and another for vermin, Mr. Mercer, and I've decided which party is which. Now. They'll rush the porch or they'll parley. Which would a man like Vane do?"
He stared at her — at the rifle settled into her shoulder as natural as a yoke, at her father's daughter entirely — and something like awe moved through the fear in his face.
"He'll parley," Dane said slowly. "He wants the book whole and me breathing, to ask questions of. He'll talk until dark if it serves him." He shifted to cover the yard's south approach. "And June — when he talks, he'll aim his words at you. It's his way. Whatever he says about your father, about your mother—" The volley began again, and his last words were nearly lost in it. "Remember who raised you. Hold on to that. Hold on to it with both hands."
Chapter 10