The fire found the storehouse a little after midnight, in the deep hour when even the camp dogs slept, and it found it, as Kane's men had planned, from the leeward side, where the wind would comb the flames through the dry goods.
Silas woke to the smell before the sound. Not mesquite and cooking, but the hot, greasy reek of burning flour sacks, jerked beef, and kerosene some hand had poured to make certain the old building took. He came out of his blankets with his boots in his hand, his father's compass banging at his chest, and the sky behind the storehouse roof was the colour of a coal in a forge.
"Fire!" he shouted, hammering the iron triangle until the camp woke. "Buckets, every hand β buckets!"
There was almost nothing in the cistern. That was the obscenity of it, the thing Kane had counted on: a camp dying of thirst must fight fire with dust. But Saya had drilled them without knowing it, in all those weeks of rationing and carrying, and they came out of the dark in an order that would have shamed a garrison β women with hoarded washing water in jars, men with blankets, children ferrying gourds, elders beating at wind-borne sparks with green hides and wet sacking.
Silas set himself where the flames ate toward the roof beams, swinging a blanket soaked in the last of a laundry jar, shouting for the seed sacks first. "The seed corn β out the west door before the grain! A camp can hunger a month. It cannot hunger next year!"
It was Marta, coughing, her shawl over her mouth, who seized his sleeve. "Tomi. He has slept these three nights in the storehouse loft, because he says the sacks are mountains and he is a goat upon them. Silas Hart β the boy is in the loft."
The west door was already a doorway of fire.
Silas did not go through it. He went round to the low rear window where sacks were passed in at harvest, and through it as he had gone down the crevice to Joseph β stripped, sideways, exhaling to make himself smaller than his bones. Inside, smoke was a solid thing, black and low, and heat struck up through the floorboards like the breath of a furnace. "Tomi!" he called, and got a mouthful of ruin. "Tomi, boy β answer me!"
From the loft, thin and terrified, came the smallest sound in that roaring night. "Uncle Silas, the mountains are burning."
He found the ladder by touch, its rungs already hot. Tomi was at the loft's far end, backed against the gable with his wooden cup clutched to his chest, too frightened of the fiery floor between him and the ladder to cross it. Silas crawled along a beam, boards sighing beneath his knees, gathered the boy up one-armed as a man gathers a lamb, and got his face buried against his neck, away from the smoke. "Breathe my shirt, boy. Count my heartbeats. Out loud β I want to hear you counting."
Tomi counted, in a shaking whisper, all the way back. He had reached forty-one when the beam behind them gave with a scream of nails and the loft floor fell into fire where they had just been lying β forty-one heartbeats being, forever after, the measure of how close the thing had been.
They came out through the window into a rain of hands. Marta took the boy. Women took Silas, who could not at first stand for coughing, and poured their drinking water β their own, from their own jars β over his singed hair and blistered forearms without debate, while the camp beat the fire down to a sullen ruin, saving the dwellings and most of the seed corn, losing the winter flour, the dried meat, and every sack of meal but two.
Near dawn Taklish stood in the ashes. "Kane's work," he said. "No thief burns food he cannot carry. This was a message in Bragg's handwriting."
"Then we have his measure," Silas said hoarsely. "And he has ours. We are still here."
Many miles away, as dawn whitened Rillito Crossing, Saya stood in the telegraph station's doorway with Marta's testimony already humming south. She and Joseph had come down in darkness, leading their horses through rocks where Kane's men lost them, and the keeper, a one-eyed veteran named Pruitt, had set his key chattering before he even offered coffee.
"Marshal Elias Ward, Tucson," the message ran. "Forged deed used against Caldera camp. True boundary stone stands; testimony follows by rider. Camp fired by arson. Send law quickly. We hold."
Joseph, his leg rewrapped, stood in the yard with his rifle, watching the ridge-road. "Will he come, this Marshal Ward? Will paper bring him, truly?"
Saya watched the wire run south, carrying her people's history at the speed of lightning, and for the first time since the wash, she breathed all the way down.
"If he is the man Silas says he is," she answered, "he is already saddling his horse."
Chapter 21: The Last Ration