The two horses had been in the pasture, which was the only fortunate thing. When it was over, they stood in the snow and looked at what remained. Clara's face was streaked with ash, and her hands were red from the cold water. She was shaking, not from cold, Callum understood, but from the particular exhaustion that comes after sustained desperate effort.
He found her coat where she had dropped it coming out of the cabin and put it around her shoulders. She didn't thank him right away. She was staring at the ruined wall with an expression that had moved past upset into something colder and more purposeful. "She did this," Clara said. It was not a question.
Callum said nothing for a moment. "Then I'll ride into Boise City at first light."
"And say what? We have no proof."
"We find proof."
He looked at the scorched beam where the fire had started, not at the stove connection, not at the lamp line, but at the base of the exterior wall, where the snow around it had the unmistakable mineral stink of kerosene. Clara followed his gaze. She looked at him. "Who would she have sent?"
"There's a man named Roy Burl who runs errands for the Hatch operation. He's been in trouble with the sheriff twice." He said it quietly, already thinking three moves ahead, the way a man thinks when he has been pushed past patience into plan.
Clara pulled the coat tighter. She looked at him with an expression he hadn't seen from her before, not gratitude, not dependence, but something closer to partnership. "I'll ride with you," she said, "at first light."
Sheriff Thomas Ridley was a methodical man. He did not move quickly, but he moved surely. When Callum laid out what he had, the kerosene pattern in the snow, the direction of the tracks, and a canteen with an embossed H that he'd found 20 yards from the barn, Ridley listened without interrupting and then pulled on his coat without a word. Roy Burl was found at the Continental Saloon on Broad Street at 9:00 in the morning, which told its own story. He was not a man who responded well to pressure, and the sheriff was thorough.
By noon, Burl had given a statement. Dorothea Hatch had paid him $40 to torch the hay barn and leave enough damage to convince Callum that staying on the land was more trouble than it was worth.
It took 2 days for the news to move through Boise City, but in a town of fewer than 300 souls in the winter of 1882, two days was more than enough. People talked. Some were surprised. Most, Callum suspected, were not. Dorothea had made enemies in the territory with the same efficiency she applied to everything else.
The Boise River Cattle Association, sensing which way the wind was blowing, quietly withdrew their support of her water claim, which had, as Callum suspected, been a fiction from the beginning. Clara had gone to the land office herself the morning after the sheriff's visit and requested a copy of every recorded deed and water right associated with their property. She spread them across the table that evening with the methodical calm of someone conducting an autopsy, found three discrepancies in Dorothea's claimed boundary, and wrote them up in a letter to the territorial land commissioner in a hand so precise and argued so well that Callum read it twice.
"Where did you learn to write like that?" he asked.