Near full dark Caleb walked the yard once more, compass in his pocket, and looked east toward Ojo Azul, where a chief with a bound shoulder kept his own watch, then north, where no light showed yet on the Paloma road.
"Do you think he will truly come at dawn?" Tess asked from the porch, her voice low.
"He will come when he comes," Caleb said. "Tonight, dawn β it is the same promise. But whatever hour he picks, he will find this house awake, and its people unwilling to be bought, and that is a thing his money has never been able to purchase in this valley."
They took their places in the darkened house and waited.
Chapter 16
: Midnight Fire
They did not sleep that night, though Tess pretended to for nearly an hour, sitting upright in the kitchen chair with her father's Winchester across her knees and her eyes closed. Caleb knew the pretense because every time Flint shifted in the corral or a board creaked in the cooling house, her fingers tightened on the rifle's forestock. He sat by the front window with the curtains drawn to a slit, his father's compass in his pocket and the bribery letters locked again in the desk's secret place, and watched the yard go from dusk-blue to true dark.
He had done what could be done. The water barrels stood full by the porch and the back door. Buckets of sand waited beside them, Tess's notion, because sand did not run out the way well water could. The horses β Dulcie, Pet, and Rooster, home again and still skittish from their days in the company corral β were loose in the home pasture instead of shut in the barn, where a locked door could turn a fire into a slaughter.
"You think he'll come himself?" Tess asked, sometime past eleven, giving up the pretense entirely.
"No," Caleb said. "Men like Voss send weather, not visits. He'll want to be able to say he was asleep in Paloma."
"That's a comfort," she said. "I'd hate to burn his barn some night and find he'd been rude enough to watch."
It was meant to make him smile, and it did, briefly. But his mind kept circling the same track it had worn since Voss rode away at sundown: the letters in the desk, the ultimatum refused, the long dark hours between midnight and dawn in which a company that had already run off his horses and put a bullet past a judge's head would feel free to do its real work.
The smell reached him before the light did. Kerosene has a smell like nothing else on a ranch β sharp, chemical, wrong among the honest smells of hay and horse and woodsmoke β and it came through the slit in the curtain on the night breeze a half-second before the barn's east wall bloomed orange.
"Tess." He was already moving. "Barn."
She was out of the chair with the rifle up before the word finished. Caleb took the porch door wide and saw them in the first flare of light: three men at the barn, one with a torch still in his hand, two more leading out toward the outbuildings with cans swinging at their sides. A fifth shape, maybe a sixth, stood by the corral gate holding horses. The fire climbed the barn wall with a sound like tearing canvas, found the dry hayloft, and the whole roof seemed to sigh and take light at once.
Caleb fired from the porch, not at a man but at the ground before the two with the cans, close enough to throw dirt on their boots. They scattered toward the granary. Tess fired from the doorway behind him, and her shot struck the torch from the first man's hand β or struck his hand; in the firelight he could not tell, and the man ran howling for the corral with the torch spinning down into the dust, where it died.
"House first!" Tess shouted, because the wind was doing arithmetic neither of them liked. Sparks from the barn roof were lifting in a slow orange spiral and settling on the kitchen roof, on the woodshed, on the dry grass between the buildings. "The barn's gone, Caleb. Save what can be saved!"
She was right. The barn his father had raised beam by beam, the barn where Samuel Wren had died β he turned away from it and ran for the water barrels.
What followed was not a battle so much as two fights braided into one, each stealing hands from the other. Caleb hauled buckets to Tess, who stood on the porch roof with a wet blanket, beating out sparks where they landed and calling directions down like a general half her size. Once a shot came back at him out of the dark beyond the corral and cut the air close enough that he heard it pass, and he understood, with a clarity that felt almost calm, that they were losing. There were too many fires and too many men and only two pairs of hands, and the attackers had the whole night to be patient in.
The granary caught despite everything β a corner first, then the door. Tess slid down from the roof with the blanket smoking in her hands. Her face was streaked with soot and fury.