"Stay," he said. "I will need witnesses who cannot be shouted down."
Grey Feather inclined his head. Rain Song's fingers rested on her rifle stock, not threatening, merely ready.
Outside, a hammer rang against a wagon tire. Kane's voice rose again, urging haste. The sun slid another notch toward the western rim.
Wesley Kane had grown up in a brick house in Baltimore where the carpets were thick and the debts were thicker. His father had been a shipping clerk who borrowed against cargoes that never quite arrived. When the war ended, the family name was a polite ruin. Wesley learned early that appearance was a kind of capital, and that a second chance often belonged to whoever seized it first.
He had joined the Army because the uniform made strangers salute, and because the West was said to be a place where a clever man could find fortunes that eastern banks had already claimed. At Fort Red Clay he found something better than fortune: a pattern. Supply wagons. Delayed payrolls. A captain who checked every ledger twice. And, beyond the northern scrub, men who paid in coin for powder and for silence.
Three weeks before the forged order, Kane had met a trader named Hollis in a canyon after dark. Hollis wore no flag. He spoke of buyers who needed rifles and flour and who did not care whose brand was on the crates. He spoke of a plan elegant in its cruelty: forge an evacuation order, empty the fort under color of authority, and divert the wagons to a rendezvous where Hollis's riders would "relieve" the column of its burden. The soldiers who resisted could be blamed on hostiles. The soldiers who lived could be left with a story that made Kane a hero who tried to save what he could.
"And the captain?" Hollis had asked, smiling with bad teeth.
"Hale is careful," Kane had said. "But careful men still follow paper when the seal looks true."
They had needed a real courier's pouch and a real seal. Hollis's men watched the Ellison road. On the morning of the day, they stopped a lone rider named Thomas Greaves—twenty-four, freckled, carrying sealed dispatches and a letter to his sister in his breast pocket. Greaves had fought them. One shot ended it. They took his pouch, his ring as a trophy Kane should never have kept, and left him in Crow Bone Wash for the sun and the ants.
Kane wrote the order in his own quarters with a hand that did not shake. He practiced Harland's signature until it lived in his wrist. He sent a hired man—one of Hollis's—through the gate at noon with a story and a sweaty horse. Then Kane began packing the wagons before the paper even arrived, because readiness would look like zeal, and zeal was the mask ambition wore in wartime.
He had not counted on Grey Feather. He had not counted on Hale's habit of tasting the air for lies.
Now, as the light went honey-thick over the fort, Kane felt the plan fray. Hale was taking too long. The Native riders had gone into the command hut. The powder crates still sat under Briggs's eye. Kane touched the ring in his pocket—Greaves's ring, warm from his own thigh—and told himself that hesitation was the only true failure.