"It means we're on top of something he wants finished before August," Stanton said. "Fire's a signature, Maren. A man who burns a barn has stopped caring who smells the smoke."
"Then tomorrow," she said, "when you're fit to sit a horse β and not one hour before β we follow it. I want to see where a man goes after he burns my barn. I believe the ground will tell us."
Chapter 10
The Canyon Cache
He was fit to sit a horse in four days, which was three days after he first insisted on it and exactly as long as Maren could hold him down with a combination of broth, bandages, and a refusal to saddle his roan that amounted to a small war. On the fifth morning they rode out together to the ruin of the west barn, and Stanton circled the blackened ground on foot, slowly, with his left arm held close, reading.
"He came from the north again," he said at last. "Through your door in the fence β no. Wait. Fresh cuts, this time, top strand only, quick work, a man in a hurry who knew we'd mended it stronger. He watered at the far trough. He left going west, though β not north." His head came up. "West is new. West is where he's from, maybe. Or where he keeps his things."
They followed the sign west for six miles, losing it on rock and finding it again in dust, Stanton reading the country the way she'd seen him read every piece of ground since the day they met β as if it were a letter addressed to him personally. The tracks led into the broken country where the Cerros shouldered down toward the desert, into a crack between two walls of red rock that widened, suddenly and secretly, into a box canyon no wider than a street, invisible from every trail Maren knew.
They left the horses at the mouth and went in on foot, and Maren understood, in the first ten steps, why the arsonist's employer had chosen it.
Crates. Rows of them, tarped and weighted against the wind, stacked in the shade of the north wall where the sun never reached. Stanton worked a lid up with his knife and they looked down at rifles β new rifles, repeating Winchesters, packed in straw, a dozen to the crate, and crates beyond counting on a widow's arithmetic: enough for fifty men, maybe more. Ammunition in tins. And at the back of the canyon, in a dugout hollow roofed with timbers, kegs of blasting powder, stenciled and businesslike, of a quantity to take the face off a hillside β or breach a dam, or drop a town's water tower, or persuade a whole valley at once.
Beside the crates, a canvas tent, a cold fire pit, bedrolls for four men, and a store of food and water barrels that said rotation: men came here in shifts, kept this place, kept it fed. This was not a hideout. It was a garrison, waiting for its war.
Maren stood in the shade of the north wall with the smell of gun oil and powder in her nose and felt the last of her disbelief go out of her like a tide. She had understood Sloan in her yard: a bully with a checkbook. She had understood him at the ravine: a murderer with patience. She understood him now in a way that rearranged the whole map β a man building an army in a canyon does not plan to buy a valley. He plans to take it, all at once, in a single season of fire and fear, and present the territory with the ashes as a settled fact.
"He can't mean to use all this on ranchers," she said. "Fifty rifles. Powder. Against farmers."
"He means to use it on whoever says no on the wrong morning," Stanton said. "And once he's used it once β once there's a night when twenty farms burn at once and the sheriff finds himself outnumbered by an army β he won't need to use it again. Fear does the rest. That's the economy of men like Sloan, Maren: the violence is an investment. You only have to make it once, publicly, and it pays out forever."
"And if nobody resists at all? If I sell in August like a sensible widow?"
"Then he never spends a dime of it and it stays here, and the next valley gets the same arithmetic." Stanton let the crate lid down with care, exactly as they'd found it, and memorized the layout with a professional's thoroughness. "We take nothing. We touch nothing twice. A man counts his rifles the way a banker counts money; one missing cartridge would tell him we've been here, and right now his not knowing is worth more than any gun in this canyon."
They rode home by a long way around, and Maren did not speak for the first two miles, and when she did, her voice was quiet and level and entirely done with being afraid in the old way.