So they built a scaffold of fence rails against the cabin wall, and Nils went up on it with a cold chisel and a hammer, and Tukweyit stood below to take the stones as he passed them down, and Ketti laid each one out on the grass in the order it came, on an old wagon sheet, so they could see what they had. The top courses were rough field stone and creek cobble, ordinary rock from Nils's own plowing that he had used to fill out the stack, and those went in a pile by the woodshed. The gray ledge stones began a little above the roof line.
"There," Tukweyit said, when the first one came down. He took it in both hands and turned it over and looked at it a long time and then set it on the wagon sheet without saying anything else.
It was slow work. The mortar Nils had made that autumn was better than the first time, lime from the kiln at Grangeville and sand from the creek, and it had set hard. Every stone had to be chiseled loose around its edges and then worked free a little at a time. By noon they had taken down eleven gray stones and his arms were shaking from holding the hammer over his head. By evening they had taken down twenty-six, and the chimney ended in a jagged stump a little below the eaves, and the wagon sheet was covered in flat gray slabs and rounded dark cobbles laid out in rows like loaves.
They had stopped once in the middle of the afternoon, when Ketti called out from the yard and they looked up to see three riders coming down the Cottonwood road at a trot. Nils knew two of them before they were close enough to see faces, from the way they sat their horses. One was Wardell Brisbin, round and careful on a gray mule. One was Coker, who had lost the cousin on the Salmon, on a sorrel with a blaze. The third was a younger man Nils did not know, with a carbine across his saddlebow.
Nils climbed down off the scaffold. Tukweyit set the stone he was holding on the wagon sheet, carefully, and straightened, and did not move otherwise.
"Go in the house, Ketti," Nils said.
"No," Ketti said, and did not.
The riders stopped at the edge of the yard. Coker looked at Tukweyit, and at the gray horse and the bay mare and the spotted colt grazing on their pickets behind the cabin, and at the half-dismantled chimney, and his face did a number of things one after another and settled on none of them.